By Jane DeRonne
I love a logic model. Take this big messy world and tell me that if we do A, B, and C we’ll accomplish X, Y and Z. Sure, there are assumptions and uncertainties here – put those at the bottom, so they don’t get in the way of the nice clean steps we must take to reach our desired outcomes, which will have our desired impacts, and all will be well. We’ll write a tidy report at the end.
The fact that we all know that the world doesn’t work like this doesn’t stop us from trying to make it work like this – or at least telling stories about it that work like this. More to the point, it doesn’t stop funders from asking questions that work like this.
A funder once advised me that participatory budgeting sounds great, but we need to answer the question: to what end? In other words, what end state will we reach if there’s more PB in the world?
I’m increasingly convinced that this is exactly the wrong question.
Thanks to Indy Johar for helping me think about why. His recent article on Outcomes and Systems makes the point that it’s unreasonable and unhelpful to focus only on reaching a pre-defined end state in a complex system like the US (and world) today.
To simplify part of Johar’s argument, aiming for a pre-defined target makes sense only (1) when the context you’re operating in is generally predictable and controllable, and (2) when everyone agrees what the target should be and/or thinks the people defining the target are the right people to do so.
Anyone care to argue that our current social and political environment is characterized by stability and predictability? Or that we all generally agree – on anything? If so, feel free to make a logic model.
For the rest of us, we need to rethink the question we’re starting with. So many groups are working to address the root causes of inequities in our institutions. But asking them about the end state they’re trying to reach “collapse[s] diversity, concentrate[s] power in goal‑setters, and leave[s] systems brittle in the face of uncertainty,” in Johar’s words. The alternative? “[Cultivate] the conditions under which coherent, desirable futures can emerge from within the system itself.”
This is precisely what participatory budgeting (PB) and other forms of participatory democracy aim to do: rather than defining an end state, they define a process to develop and enact solutions to public problems. And, when they’re done well, they give people in a place the tools and skills to replicate and adjust that process. This builds what Johar calls “relational maturity…capacity to host diversity without fragmentation, to reconfigure in response to feedback, and to generate evolving coherence without external command.”
For example, rather than enforcing an external conception of what’s good for the community, we “build conditions under which multiple agents can provision good for themselves and one another.” We make sure that idea-gathering events are accessible to all community members and coach local event hosts on how to effectively solicit proposals for how to spend the pot of money. The proposals that end up on the ballot are based on needs and desired outcomes that community members define for themselves.
PB processes we support are shaped by what Johar calls “distributed sense-making”: we engage steering committees, budget proposal developers, and government staff in iterative processes that not only produce a final ballot that is realistic and responsive to the local context, but also build participants’ relationships and capacities for deliberation and problem solving. In Johar’s words, we build people’s “agentic capacity—the ability of agents within the system to perceive, interpret, respond to, and transform their environment.”
This is the essential work we need to invest in right now – work that realizes and responds to how the world actually is. System-level change requires a paradigm shift. Funders who embrace this reality must be brave enough to ask about more than “to what end?” and start asking “with what capacity?”. They will ask not what outcomes will be achieved, but how grantees’ work will build and shape resilient, responsive, relational systems that maintain coherence among diverse and evolving goals.