Understanding the Future of the Role of Citizens in Cities

A conversation on NIUA TV’s podcast (Season 3, Episode 12).

NIUA TV podcast on the future of the role of citizens in cities — on samaaj, bazaar, sarkaar, electoral participation, and citizen engagement.

Transcript

This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.

Speaker 1: Citizens create networks of trust and in a sense all the problem solving has to be local. You can create national, you can create national, sub-national, regional infrastructure but the ultimate application of the infrastructure to a local problem has to be driven by local proximate citizens. Hi, I’m Gautam Chauhan and I am the CEO of the Rohini Millikanth Entity Foundation.

You are listening to the Understanding the Future podcast.

Speaker 2: Hello everyone, I’m Puneet Gandhi, Senior Associate with the Climate Center for Cities at the National Institute of Urban Affairs and welcome to the Season 3 of Understanding the Future podcast. I have been working and studying in the field of sustainability and climate change for more than 8 years and I have realized that I have a lot of questions on how we can build cities in India that are more climate focused. With Understanding the Future podcast, I interact with experts, entrepreneurs and government officials to understand what it takes to bring all the different solutions to the ground as well as how can systemic changes be developed on ground.

We will further anchor all the topics being discussed with different skill sets required. This will help us understand the future of cities and future of work in Indian context. If you are tuning in for the first time, do check out our previous episodes.

Also, don’t forget to check out the Climate Practitioners India Network, a members-led solutions-oriented platform for climate practitioners across India and join it through the show note. Hope you enjoy the podcast.

Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Season 3 of Understanding the Future. I am your host Puneet Gandhi, Senior Associate with the Climate Center for Cities and today we have with us Gautam Goyal. He is the CEO of Rohini Millikanth Philanthropy Foundation and today he will help us understand the topic of role of citizens in cities.

Welcome to the show. Thank you Puneet. It’s a real pleasure being here.

I followed your work and the work of NIUA with great interest with a focus on cities and citizens and I’m really excited to be in conversation with you. Yeah, I am also pretty excited about this topic because I think till now we have always engaged with everyone from the lines of what can government do, what can industries do, where we stakehold at it. But this is I think after one topic which we did on how citizens can help in policy development.

This is one topic I feel is very important from the citizen’s perspective that what are citizens, what is the role of citizens in urban context. I think that’s the first question that we can pick up to even understand what are we trying to unfold over there. Yeah, no that’s a great question.

I think from our own perspective we’ve kind of identified the perspective of a citizen as being distinct and different from that of being a consumer or of being a subject. In particular, we see that there are multiple pathways in which a citizen’s identity expresses itself and four of them that come to mind are around volunteering, that citizens volunteer leading to moving up the engagement ladder, that empowered citizens and communities make claims such as the RTE, the right to food. And second, thirdly around co-creation, citizens tend to co-create.

We see a huge diversity of organizations that work in citizen-led ways of local problem solving and co-creation. And the fourth one of course, which I think is our most obvious identity is really around the electoral participation. And I think electoral participation has been the defining identity but we think there’s a lot more and a lot more facets of citizenship which are worth articulating.

In particular, the role of citizens as actors of civic engagement. So yeah, so that’s how we see a citizen as being distinct from a consumer or a market or a subject of the state. That’s quite interesting because I think every time whenever we come down to the topic of citizens, it’s always more on the lines of electoral participation, which kind of takes away all other things and you have to come on it.

So, I think empowering citizens is one of the most defining things that anyone can do. But what are the different sectors that are required to be empowered for citizens to be empowered? Because I’m guessing we directly can’t just empower them.

Good question and I think it’s also worth talking a little bit about the fact that the landscape of civic engagement and active citizenship is tricky and complex. It’s not black or white. I think active and engaged citizens are a dynamic group.

Geographically, it is ubiquitous. It’s not just around basic civility, it can be in complex problems that are solving. It is non-binary.

Sometimes it doesn’t even require a direct interface with government. And active citizenship and civic engagement exists as part of a, how to say, a multi-directional and multi-stakeholder fluid universe. So, in that sense, it’s not necessarily the easiest to classify and put into a box.

But I think in terms of enabling it and creating pathways for implementation, we have this framework that we came up with a research partner of ours. It’s around creating awareness, facilitating connection, building capacity, and driving action. That’s where we come from and that’s what we believe the role of the enabling systems around creating active and engaged citizens are.

Just to reiterate, it’s creating awareness, facilitating connection, building capacity, and driving awareness. That’s solid. I think these words, while they are just one word, but when we put them across together, they’re pretty solid in taking it from making sure that the empowerment can take place.

If you can maybe give examples of the kind of funds that you’ve given out to the different organizations and how they are helping us do it, maybe it will also help our audience understand it in a better context of how will they be exactly empowered. Yes. So, in the creating awareness space, organizations that work over here work along one of three dimensions, either as knowledge creators, as amplifiers of knowledge, or as disseminators.

So, for example, in the knowledge creator space, there are amazing organizations like PUCAR that are very grounded and approximate and create evidence and frameworks for the space. There are amplifier organizations such as GUNJ. They are grassroot organizations.

They amplify citizen voices on the ground and they help surface and amplify very local grassroots issues, as well as providing a platform to locally solve. And last one, there are organizations like that work on the dissemination table, amazing organizations like HAARP Darshak that provide information on government schemes, public aid issues, and in particular where government engagement already exists. It’s the connection and navigating of the systems and processes that these organizations help.

The organizations that work in the dissemination space tend to work as implementers as well. So, that’s really around the creating awareness part of the creative work. Well, the second one was around facilitating connection.

I’m happy to go into that and the other ones around building capacity and driving action. Absolutely, I’ll be happy to know more about those as well. So, I think in the facilitating connection, the biggest one that we have seen is mostly organizations that help facilitate the citizen-government interface, right?

Whether it’s Janagirah and Praja, whether it’s HAARP Darshak, whether it’s citizen, it’s an amazing organization that has been working to expand the ambit and diversity of participants, engaging with pre-legislated public consultation. So, a lot of organizations work in the citizen-government space, but I really think that the true difference between traditional work on engagement and civic engagement work in particular is around organizations that facilitate citizen-citizen engagement. And there are a range of organizations, usually very local to a geography, at best a city, that facilitate spaces for citizens to come together to locally problem-solve, to brainstorm, there’s a wide range of it.

Some organizations, for example, like Janagirah, work with the citizen-government, but also the citizen-citizen level. So, that’s the facilitating connection. The third one was around building capacity.

And I think, in particular, this is one that we’re very familiar with, you and I. So, whether it’s the leadership development, there are so many organizations working on leadership development in this space, but the important one is also around organizations building capacity for good governance. There’s you, I mean, you know E-gov and Digit and Urban Stack.

So, there’s all of that in the capacity, and capacity on both sides, right? Capacity on the side of civic actors to engage, but also capacity on the government side to be able to create those interfaces for engagement at the level of technology, but also at the level of intent. And the last one is really…

Sorry. No, sorry. Go ahead.

Sorry. Yeah. And I was saying the last one is really around driving action.

So, everyone from E-gov, who are now doing more work on the citizen engagement side, organizations like Citus that engage with the government, but also creating a wide network of citizen and civic actors to respond to public consultations. That’s the last one, the actual problem solving bit. So, you create the awareness, you facilitate the connection, you create capacity on both sides, and then drive action through a civic engagement framework.

So, that’s broadly our understanding. That’s pretty interesting to see as well that now India, being one of the big ones over here, has quite a lot of such organizations coming up and facilitating so many different actions. Now, but in India, generally, when we’ve looked at the role of citizens, and especially from the government perspective, it’s more of a beneficiary, or directly, whenever we are talking about any kind of budgets or anything like that, what are citizens getting out of it?

How can we make sure that they’re not just the beneficiaries, but they are the participating people who develop those, at least not from the country perspective, but if they are coming down from the city perspective? How can that be defined as, for the citizens? Great question.

I think perhaps it’s worth going back a little bit in time before we come to the Shahzain. In Bangalore, for example, you know, Bangalore is a city that hundreds of years ago, the erstwhile rulers built a network of tanks and lakes and connected them by canals, with the recognition that Bangalore was on a plateau, and we didn’t have natural water sources. Therefore, we need to create these facilities.

But the amazing thing was that these facilities were treated as common pool resources and managed by communities. So, in a sense, community engagement and civic engagement isn’t new in India. If you go to Rajasthan and look at how traditional communities manage their water, none of these are new, these are not government driven, these have been managed by communities and have at some level, both endured and proven the tragedy of the commons argument wrong.

I mean, Eleanor Ostrom’s work on the management of common pool resources is very much around civic governance, community ownership, it all exists. So, to that extent, none of these ideas are particularly new in India, because we have managed our water, our forests, through proximate community and community driven models for a very, very long time. Some of the challenges we see now is the disengagement of citizens and communities with their surroundings.

So, to go back, you know, just to re-articulate your question through that framework, that they’re not just beneficiaries, but are participants, I think if we want to build resilient cities, if we want to build policies and solutions, which are anchored in resilience and are relevant and meaningful to local communities, we need to include citizens as co-creators, not just passive consumers. Ultimately, citizens are the ones who, you know, are closest to a problem and would perhaps have the best articulation of the cultural and historical context in which each local problem evolves. Citizens create networks of trust, and in a sense, all the problem solving has to be local.

You can create national, sub-national, regional infrastructure, but the ultimate application of the infrastructure to a local problem has to be driven by local proximate citizens. So, to the question, I think the case is really one driven by proximity and resilience. Because if resilience is driven by proximate networks of trust being enabled to solve local problems, the only way to do that is through citizen and civic engagement.

So, how do, I’m making the case of why we should do it. I think we talked a little bit about how we should do it as well through the four-led framework. But to me, you know, just given the fact that all of our challenges today, whether it’s climate change, natural disasters, you know, public health challenges, there’s no single way to respond to them but to create local networks of trust and civic actors who are willing to work at local level, leveraging public infrastructure.

So, yeah, I don’t actually know another way that this will happen. We live in a moment in time where technology allows for rapid dissemination of information and mobilization. Individual acts of charity in this country are the highest today.

These are actually 10 million people gave it up in 2016. During the pandemic, we’ve witnessed volunteering. So, to bring all of this latent energy of the citizens of India together to build more resilient and robust urban settlements means that we will have to look at citizens as not just beneficiaries but co-creators of our local governance and local problems also.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I’d like to come to co-creation as well. But before we do that, I think one of the things that we did mention was about the management of things, especially across length and width of India, I guess, as well, because that has been there always.

But do you think that what is the challenge that has now come and maybe one of the challenges that I can foresee over here is the increasing population as well as the migration, making the cities bigger and the amplification of challenges just happen there much more. But what are some of the other challenges do you see because of this happening? Good question.

And I think there are, how to say, global headwinds we’re all working with, right? I think there’s a dichotomy in terms of the levels of trust that Samaj, Sarkar and Bajan have with each other, not just in India, but globally. I mean, the level of distrust with big technology platform players, the level of distrust between markets and market interest and community interest.

There’s so many different kinds of breakdowns of trust between the large institutions on which our society rests. There’s also the headwinds that we face of reducing the diversity of our societies into binaries. So it’s very hard to create local problems when we see things in black and white alone and not in the shades of grey that they all occur in.

And the third one, which definitely has positive but also downsides, is this shifting sands of technology, right? The technology is amplifying some bits, it’s re-targeting certain bits, it’s removing friction in some places. So there’s a lot of opportunity, but it’s very unstable ground to build on.

So there are several headwinds that are challenging to navigate, but I have no doubt that we will and find new ways to land this work in ways that are meaningful to all participants. Absolutely. I think we as a country will also have to find this, especially when we are such a young country with so many young people everywhere with so much of energy out there.

And I think this is the age where co-creation can be at its best because everyone’s dreaming up with ideas. Everyone has enough potential in India as well to build up whatever new kind of systems, technologies, processes that we need to build up. So when we are talking about co-creation with citizens, what are the different things that at least the government or an administration body can think of for co-creation?

What other things can be done? How can they be done? Great question.

And it’s something that we spent some time thinking about. So I think firstly, we must acknowledge the fact that the structural framework for governing modern India is in many ways based on the tenets of open government, transparency, participation, etc. These are definitely drivers.

Just to rewind a little again, and I’m sorry, I like looking back to look forward. India has had a rich legacy of open, local, and participatory government. The roots of democratic decentralization can be traced back to the ancient India when republics existed, which were essentially areas, I think, without kings.

So for example, the Bajin confederate confederacy in Vaishali around 600 BC in the times of the Buddha, there have been many recurring evidence of self-contained and self-governed village republics in India. I think Sir Charles Metcalfe, who was one of the acting governor general in India in 1830 wrote that these village communities are little republics having nearly everything they want within themselves and are almost independent of the foreign nations. So to that extent, you know, it’s a reiteration of things that are both ancient and modern in India.

And the key frameworks and interventions that the government can use to drive public participation and civic engagement in India is really locally centralized governance, both around participation and accountability. Open data for sure, open data for information, open APIs and SDKs to build on top of public digital infrastructure. Governance is one way in which it’s expressed.

But also I think, you know, other new and innovative tools that have been used in the past and are still valid and valuable, such as participatory budgeting communities, scorecards, social audits, citizen trackers, none of these are new, but there’s an opportunity to bring it all together in a bundle that will allow greater and more vibrant and diverse civic engagement. Absolutely. But do you think that’s become more of a challenge because of the increasing population and the managing it at the city level?

It’s a good question, but I do believe that this is perhaps something that technology can help with. In general, what we’ve struggled with is if you want to do something to get into diversity, you have to do it with very small scale. But if you want to do something at great scale, you have to reduce diversity.

But what technology allows us to do is to build diversity at scale. Indeed, that diversity at scale is the solution to most of our problems and not the challenge. So yeah, I’m not for a moment to say that our challenges are not large, but I do believe that in dealing with our large challenges at scale, we don’t have to reduce that diversity.

We can use technology as a way to embrace and amplify the diversity of actors and agencies within movements. Can you maybe give an example of such a technology that could help us with the diversity in the place as well? Just take language barriers in India.

We have a constitutionally mandated list of 26 languages, and that is just one list. I mean, the number of languages in India is limited. And now, over the last few years, there’s been so much work that’s been done on automating language.

There’s work with the new AI centre that part of our foundation funded at IIT Madras on making languages interoperable using machine learning and language schools. There’s so many of these pieces that will essentially make it easier to cater to the diversity of our country without reducing the uniqueness of the language. So yeah, I mean, there are many cases in which technology will allow us to cater to diversity without self-optimizing on scale.

I think this is definitely one of those cases. I do agree. And I think a lot of the push has also been given in learning languages like CIO and making sure that there’s more and more multilingual software also coming into the industry.

That’s just talking to Dr. Chintan about the same in three episodes back. And I do absolutely agree that it’s a pretty interesting space. And when you’re talking about now, from the citizen’s perspective, we have seen that, okay, what are things that they are not just beneficial, but they also give it back.

When we are now talking about the urban local bodies or administration in place, we have already mentioned at the places that in government and open data can help in developing such kind of frameworks. But are there any kind of specific frameworks that have been developed, which are currently being used? How are they being used to make sure that citizens can be facilitated to co-create or get empowered or can help in volunteering in government, bringing it back so that there is a better chance of, that citizen engagement happens?

Fair question. And I think it’s important to acknowledge the fact that there are structural challenges around deep and sustained civic participation and engagement. On the side of the citizen’s abilities and willingness, there’s a limited willingness to participate in local problem solving.

Some people might see it as difficult, but not necessary. Where they do want to engage, there’s a lack of understanding on how to engage. When you’re willing to engage, there’s a difficulty in relating actions to outcomes.

And even when you’re willing to take that risk, there’s a perceived ambivalence and challenges of trust failure. To acknowledge on the Sarkar side as well, there are definitely government capacities limited. And the thing that Sarkar has to do is to balance efficiency with consensus building and ultimately progress is needed as well.

So this is not to state that everything is easy. There are trade-offs as with anything. There’s a calculus, a rubric within which these decisions are made.

But I think in talking about them, then we can think differently about Sarkar. So yeah, for us to acknowledge the fact that there are several steps that have been taken on the side of Sarkar, whether it’s work on opening up data sets, opening up APIs, opening up public infrastructure on the side of citizen and civic actors in encouraging participation, encouraging and supporting engagement, in building the long-term muscle for counseling actions outcomes. So it exists, but it’s a constant process.

I mean, resilient ecosystems aren’t built in a day. They take a while to mature. But once they mature, the bridge to a resilient ecosystem is that they’re self-generating and self-creating.

Absolutely, absolutely. Resilience is at the core of it, for sure, because when we look at it as a newcomer from the climate center and for us, resilience is more on the lines of how we deal with the disaster. I completely agree with you.

I mean, I think that’s the part that we should talk more about, that an engaged Samaj, one that participates in highly civic actions, builds their local networks of trust and co-creates local problems and governance, is a good thing. A high civic level of civic engagement leads to a better society for all of us. I mean, there’s enough research that finds that active citizens enjoy better mental and physical health and higher levels of confidence and optimism, that networks of trust and horizontal connection created by engaging as an engaged and active Samaj enable the development of, how to say, anticipatory, absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities that drive resilience for our urban communities and for communities everywhere. And that active citizenship improves governance, builds bridges of trust between Samaj Sarkar and Bazaar.

Absolutely, absolutely. I agree with that as well. And coming to the end of part of Bazaar, I think Bazaar is something that’s very important, especially from the city’s perspective, because somewhere that’s the focal point where everyone’s trying to come here, whether it’s the Samaj or Sarkar, they’re building upon it as well.

Now, somewhere it’s also still talked about that maybe more decentralization of Bazaar especially will help us in making sure that the resources are utilised in the most optimal fashion. What is your take on it? Can that be optimised on its own way or we will have to go with wherever the Bazaar does for most of the time?

No, so I think, you know, the Bazaar has a self-interest in maintaining an equitable balance with Sarkar and Samaj. Ultimately, a resilient society is also in some sense, quote-unquote, profitable. If societies are resilient, they have the ability to persevere, even in the case of challenges as opposed to collapsing.

So, Bazaar does have an interest in it as well. And I think it’s important to remember that all of us are citizens, whether we are CEOs of Bazaar or leaders in the Sarkar, we ultimately all go home and we are members of the Samaj. So, we are all citizens first, so there’s no taking that away.

So, I do believe Bazaar is definitely responsive. And also remember that there are many other influencing factors to the Bazaar. There are changes in values held by employees, including upholding Bazaar players to be good corporate citizens.

Customers are expecting more of market actors, right? They expect them to be good corporate citizens as well. Younger consumers and citizens expect corporate citizens to have very high, how to say, long-term value creation norms.

There’s a simple bottom line, ESG, there’s all of this coming into space. So, I do believe that Bazaar is very, very well aligned with this as well. A, because those are the forces that are influencing them.

So, B, because and I would love for the listeners of this podcast to take this away. Irrespective of the fact we were during the day, when we go home, we are all citizens, we are all members of Samaj and there’s no denying that. Absolutely, absolutely.

I do agree over there and I think that is where somewhere, I think I would also like to bring in the question that we always do is, now this is a complex space in itself. It’s bringing citizens in the center of everything. So, what are the different skillsets required over here to be able to make sure that volunteering to empowering and co-creation will facilitate to a better electoral participation?

You know, I might actually think that it’s the other way around. I think in India that electoral participation is not too bad at all, right? But we really want people to show up between elections as well and I think that’s the real muscle that we need to build.

Elections are important, they give rise to our collective preferences, they hold parties to account and those are really, really important things. But there’s work to be done between those five years as well and that work is really of us scaling that public space of local problem solving and doing that will definitely drive better electoral participation as well. So, in a sense, it’s a cycle.

I think we don’t do too badly in electoral participation but I think we need to recognize the work that needs to be done between electoral cycles. Doing the work, local problem solving and collective co-creation will lead us to be more engaged with our cities which will hopefully drive us to demand greater accountability from everyone and show up more and more in the electoral side as well. Yeah, absolutely.

The in-between work, I think is one of the most important assets that everyone can and everyone also wants to see that because until and unless that is there, now the younger generation is more keen on what’s coming back to us with the whole country. So, if someone wants to work in this field, from the future of work perspective, what are the different kinds of skill sets that someone should have to be able to lead this kind of city movement or empowerment? I think there are, if there was one, it can be multiple.

Yeah, if there was one in particular, I think it’s for people to recognize that we can only sustainably resolve our challenges if we go on problem solving for our communities. That’s the big mental shift that needs to happen but once that happens, I think everyone has a role to play. Whether you write code, whether you can design, all of that is the work that’s required to bring communities together.

If there’s a muscle, a societal muscle we need to build, it’s the muscle of facilitation. I think we often talk about co-creation, community problem solving but don’t often recognize that not everybody wants the same thing. So, facilitating diverse groups of people to resolve local problems is not necessarily the easiest piece of work.

It can be very high friction and building a societal muscle to facilitate, to create dialogic methods whereby we can not just work on our public positions but also on our shared interests so that we can build towards beautiful shared futures at the level of individuals, at the level of communities, at the level of cities and at the level of the nation-state are vital. So, perhaps the best answer is it’s a new kind of leadership. So, technical skills will always be important.

Absolutely. Yeah and anything you think that we are missing out on in this whole conversation because I think I’m sure we have covered quite a lot of it but I’m not sure if we are missing out on any parts that you would like to add. No, I have to say that your questions were really, really holistic.

They covered the entire art of the work that we’ve been talking about. I do believe that there’s a point on culture as well but whether civic engagement and policy development can facilitate this work at city level while including its cultural context and I think for me the important point to hold over there is that the culture is held by the citizens, it’s diverse and that the only way we can maintain it is by putting communities and citizens at the center of this. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think the cultural aspect we can’t forget and I think that’s really important especially when we have a diverse country like India that will be at its core always to ensure that better adoption of anything can take place. But yeah, thank you so much. It was an absolute fun talking to you and understand this in so much of insight and so much of compact format.

Thank you so much for your time and the knowledge that you have shared. It was really helpful to me. Puneet, thank you so much for your time and thank you for the questions.

It’s not often that we get to learn a little bit about our work critically and see where it lands. This was a great conversation.

Speaker 2: Thank you for tuning into the Do subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform and follow us on all social media channels. For more details about the Climate Center for Cities and registration on Climate Practitioners India Network, click on the link in the show notes. The episode is conceptualized and produced by Puneet Gandhi.

A big thank you to the whole team at CQ and NIU for supporting the development of the podcast. Stay tuned for the next episode.

---

Originally published by NIUA TV on 19 September 2022. View on YouTube →