Re-Thinking Venice has amazed many people, including those who created it, with its ability to mobilize individuals and develop proposals in an open and pluralistic manner. In today’s politics, these two functions increasingly tend to be outsourced to new players or internalized within party circles. Questioning why this has happened can help us to reflect on the present and future of politics in a country where there is a widening gap between the political class and voters.
When addressing the crisis in politics, we often find ourselves discussing a lack of vision and leadership. Both are considered the product of a competent leader’s skill. Competence, in turn, is understood as the ability to apply rapid solutions to complex problems. National technical governments and the growing presence of technocrats in local governments reflect a vision of politics that sees it as the outcome of organizational processes that produce effective and efficient leaders and solutions for local governance. The technical-organizational dimension is thus gaining increasing weight in politics.
But what happens when the organizations responsible for carrying out these functions fall into crisis, and as a result are no longer able to guarantee the breadth and depth of these processes?
The solutions and leaders remain, but the processes for “building” both are weakened and become partial, in the sense of “partisan”. Those with the most “voice” (in the English sense of the word, meaning the power to influence as well as to speak) impose their solutions, and leaders no longer have to respect the constraints that in the past required consideration of other voices, often those of the weakest individuals and social groups with the least capacity to influence political processes. Thus, a vicious spiral is triggered: as those with the least power are excluded from political processes, they distance themselves out of distrust, and this further weakens the constraints on decision-makers, who end up answering exclusively to those with the most influence and constructing political agendas based on general sentiment and partisan interests.
Regions and localities implement and manifest these processes in different ways, but they all share the same confinement within increasingly limited circles. Decisions are made by a select few and then shared with their communities, who lack the tools to contribute to their reformulation and accordingly have no choice but to ratify the decisions. People come to see priorities, visions, and leaders as the expression of a political class perceived to be distant and self-referential, fueling the spiral of political alienation.
As long as this process took place within certain limits, it could even be perceived as an advantage by the political class, which was thus freed from the need to mediate with their communities about its decisions. Once a certain threshold was crossed, however, this phenomenon profoundly undermined the very legitimacy of political organizations and narrowed their room for maneuvering. In a context where participation has been reduced to a minimum, the possibility of changing the balance of power no longer depends on the ability to bring in new interlocutors and their support, but rather on the ability to mobilize one’s own electorate, encouraging a process of radicalization of positions and a growing dependence on national and international trends.
Re-Thinking Venice represents, first and foremost, an attempt to break this cycle and rebuild spaces where it is possible to present, mediate, and reconcile many diverse points of view and interests. The creation of forums for discussion (roundtables, workshops, seminars, assemblies, and book presentations open to the public) and synthesis (the web platform, insights, and books, all easily accessible) has fostered a mobilization of people with vastly different experiences and skills. This itself is an unexpected outcome of the process, which originally began as a research project: it has brought back into politics people who had distanced themselves from it or had never previously engaged with it, and it has done so across generations. At the presentation of the book “100 Ideas for Venice”, half the audience was made up of people under 45, a completely new and unexpected development for the local context.
A similar complexity is demonstrated by the list of people who contributed to this and the previous volume. Furthermore, the persistent emphasis on the collective dimension throughout the documents (collective processes, collective intelligence, a collective book, etc.) is an intentional strategy that has been used to emphasize the importance of a plurality of viewpoints. These include academics, associations, professions, businesses and their representative organizations, activists, voters, and citizens. The sum of their perspectives is of primary importance, because it creates knowledge that is greater than the sum of its parts. Knowledge is not summed up but integrated, thus giving rise to new ideas and understanding. This is key, because it creates an arena for debate where it is possible to give and take ideas, increasing the possibility that the perspectives of social groups with differing capacities to influence decision-making processes will be considered. In doing so, those who already have a voice create the conditions so that even those who traditionally do not have one can acquire one, without this being granted, however, solely out of generosity.
The quality of the final product is evidence of this: two books, containing over 400 pages of analysis and proposals, 100 ideas, 250 voices, from over two years of work. A working group has been created that has gradually grown larger, more cohesive, and able to nimbly pivot the direction of the work, further proof of the success achieved. Getting to this point required accepting the challenge of moving beyond the usual political timeframe, which demands ready-made solutions conceived before problems arise.
Engaging, including, mobilizing, discussing, and finding common ground on which to build shared proposals requires time, patience, mediation, and attention to others, as well as adequate tools. When participation is built without these ingredients, it risks becoming superficial, if not downright false, and people become accustomed to ratifying and legitimizing decisions made by others, elsewhere. However, when people realize that they can be genuine actors in the processes of developing ideas and proposals, they regain the desire to participate and to count. This is certainly one of the key ingredients of Re-Thinking Venice.
Leadership and vision thus transform in nature and become the outcome of collective and inclusive processes in which diverse knowledge, ideas, and perspectives converge, taking shape in context and through the use of appropriate tools. Leaders and their programs, in turn, become the interpreters of plans collectively written by a group intelligence that is engaged through advanced and transparent political processes. This is clearly a second ingredient of Re-Thinking Venice.
In this way, politics might return to a central position in people’s lives because it once again becomes an interpreter of those lives, not a bureaucratic manager. Of course, now it’s also a matter of inventing new forms of action so that new knowledge can also build new powers, since it’s impossible to imagine new and different logics of action operating within the constraints and frameworks of the past. Assemblies, delegations, congresses… these were fine when the parties organized the political process bureaucratically.
Today, where political participation is fostered by heterarchical logic (networked, not just within the network), it is also necessary to construct new models of action. Experimentalism – that is, a closer circular connection between knowledge, planning, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation – could be one of these and thus foster the construction of a new model of action, capable of updating the registers and codes of historical political organizations. In this way, we can also restore politics’ capacity to imagine and generate collective forms of action suited to the times in which it operates today, which, if we think about it, was the great revolution won by the political parties of the 20th century.
L’articolo How Do We Reconnect People and Politics? proviene da ytali..
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