Terms of Engagement: councils and their communities

Failures of local governance – the case of Canterbury

Christchurch City and Canterbury Region have suffered not just blows of nature.  They have also been suffering ruptures of governance. 

Recent protests against the Christchurch City Council, the appointment of a “minder” to oversee its activities, the establishments of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority by government to take over reconstruction of the city, and before that replacement of elected regional councillors by government-appointed commissioners all raise questions over the effectiveness of democratic governance.  

In the case of the city, the problem has been a seeming inability to respond effectively to the difficult but urgent issues of recovery and rebuilding after the earthquakes.  In the case of the region, the problem lay in an apparent inability to resolve contentious water resource management issues. 

Bigger as better: restructuring Auckland

An assumption of inadequate governance was also the cornerstone of the inquiry by a Royal Commission into how Auckland might better play a role as the economic driver of the nation.  The assumption was made that amalgamation - a structural response - would deliver governance and management improvements.

The  hoped-for administrative or technical efficiency gains pale against the prospect of better – or worse – decisions as a result of collapsing eight councils into one.  How much money might be saved on computer systems, for example, or consolidating staff is largely irrelevant if the quality of decisions about where, why and how public resources are allocated does not improve.

And it’s the quality of the big decisions that lies at the heart of good governance.  This underpins the significance of Auckland's proposed spatial plan (and why I am so worried about it).

Governance and democracy

Governance refers to the capacity to make decisions on behalf of an organisation.   The Oxford English Dictionary gets to the nub: governance is “ruling with authority”.  In democratic institutions that authority is conferred on their representatives by the citizens.   

Things go wrong when the governors forget that they are there to make decisions in the interests of the entire polity (or company, NGO, or agency in the case of corporate governance).  They are not there to push a particular viewpoint on the assumption that they know best because they got the most votes. 

That’s especially so in local government where multiple candidates and low voter turnout mean people frequently get elected by small numbers.  Despite the undue influence of minorities on electoral results, the mandate to govern locally still reflects a responsibility to act beyond the interests of any particular group. 

The alternatives – (1) governing by decree

Contrast this with dictatorships or monarchies, where authority to govern lies in military and subversive powers or arcane traditions, with governance typically benefiting only narrowly defined groups and unconstrained by popular accountabiity.

If elected politicians do privilege particular interest groups the quality of decisions is undermined (by a failure to reflect on all the options) along with the legitimacy of their authority.  (There may, of course, be a place in a constitution for regard to be had to the claims of particular groups.  In New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi plays this role for Maori).

The alternatives – (2) governing by expertise

Good decision-making may be informed by the deliberations of experts.  But allowing technicians to prevail across decision-making is also the way of autocracy, dictatorship by another name.  The cult of the expert ultimately limits individual freedoms.  This appears to be a path that Italy and Greece have adopted after years of apparently deficient democratic governance, but it is a response to crisis, and unlikely to endure. 

In the long run playing to technical expertise to legitimate decisions contrary to community preferences limits democracy.  And it won't lead to good outcomes when implementation encounters community resistance.

The importance of transparency

Communities are hardly homogeneous.  Diversity and division, competition and complexity are attributes of society underplayed in both text books and rule books.  Resource allocation decisions almost invariably favour some groups over others.  That's why transparency is critical to good governance.  Understanding why decisions are made is a big step on the path to accepting their consequences.

People have the right to know the grounds on which decisions likely to affect claims on and access to public resources are made.  More than that they have the right to (seek to) influence them.  That’s where the terms of engagement between governors and governed come into play. 

Beyond the ballot box

There has been plenty written about how councils might engage with their communities.  I want to promote three principles here:

(1)    Engagement can take many forms, each with advantages and disadvantages.  Good engagement will draw across the full range.  Beyond the ballot box it is important not to be captured by any particular programme of consultation.  Politicians can engage with constituents informally and formally on a daily basis and in a number of ways.  Surveys and submissions, protests and petitions all play their part. 

(2)    Smaller structures are likely to be more open to engagement than large structures.  Fewer tiers of management mean that messages about delivery and performance, the feedback needed to inform decisions, have a better chance of getting onto the political agenda.  And smaller councils lift the presence and accessibility of decision-makers generally, keeping the channels open and boosting accountability.

(3)    Decentralised structures are likely to enhance engagement because they tap directly into the diversity of the community. 

Moderation by management

Information from the community is varied in content and credibility, especially in the age of the internet but, allowing for the occasional “idiot factor”, it cannot be taken lightly.  This is where council management has a role to play.  Too much or conflicting information just becomes noise, making it easy for politicians to shut it out and leading to decisions based on partial information at best and preconceived views at worst.  Or else they end up caught up in conflicting information currents, and go nowhere.

Management may moderate (not mediate) the flow of information to the governors.  So managers also need to be close to the community (another argument for moderation in the size of councils).  Their role is not to shape the information councillors receive, but to relate it to the issues at hand and, where necessary, to the interests of the wider community.

Community rules

There is clearly more to making the big decisions than simply listening to the community.  There are financial, managerial, and institutional limits on what councils can do.  And the views of experts about what’s possible and what’s feasible do need to be considered.  But management constraints and expert opinion are just two of the three legs of the decision-making stool.  Community engagement is the third. 

And as councils are beginning to discover, councils that become remote from their communities are on a hiding to nowhere.   Engagement is not just about going through the motions of listening.  If citizens are not heard even apparently logical decisions will come undone and, eventually, councils will come undone with them.

Are we there yet? Auckland welcomes 1.5 millionth citizen

Well
we know where we're goin'
but we don't know where we've been.
And we know what we're knowing'
but we can't say what we've seen.
And we're not little children
and we know what we want.
And the future is certain
give us time to work it out.
We're on a road to nowhere
come on inside
(On the Road to Nowhere, Talking Heads)

Come in citizen 1.5 million
Auckland welcomed its 1,500,000^th citizen on Wednesday 1 February. The Auckland Council decided that baby Ramonah Patience Toomalatai was the one. It was a symbolic choice, Ramonah, born of Samoan parents, reflecting Auckland’s multi-cultural face and future.

It was a gesture for the future: nominating an immigrant at Auckland airport would just not have been the same. Given the recent slow-down in migration gains, Statistics New Zealand was probably right anyway. It suggested that citizen 1.5m was more likely to arrive in a maternity ward than at a customs gate.

It was also symbolic, and maybe a bit embarrassing, that the New Zealand Herald had jumped the gun and already decided on Emily Van Wonderen, born a couple of days earlier.

Does it matter if we don’t know?
It doesn’t really matter what the choice is; that Wednesday – or maybe Monday – was the day the city hit this milestone. It was always going to be arbitrary and, apart from the photo op(s) not very meaningful.

Anyway, statistical estimates of the population are inevitably imprecise, and converge on some sort of reality only with the five yearly census. Unfortunately, the decision was made after the February 2011 earthquake in Canterbury to push the Census due that April back a couple of years. That's a pity. Just when we needed a benchmark entering what was bound to be a very volatile few years of residential and business adjustment we took the easy way out. And it adds a new level of imprecision to our current population estimates, and to our population projections.

It's a pity because if we are really going to understand our future choices we need a firm grip on where we are coming from.

Anyway, the arrival of citizen 1.5m, whoever she is, raised two issues for me.

First, you have to wonder what city the girls will grow up in.
Because beyond celebrating babies and their parents, I am not sure why we would even bother marking such a milestone unless we are really prepared to think in terms of the needs and choices of our future citizens and plan accordingly.

There is a chance that these girls will not stay here. That’s been an increasing choice for Aucklanders over recent years, especially if they are young, qualified, and ambitious. Or if they hope to buy a house and settle down. Sure, plenty of people have also been arriving in search of a better life. But don’t expect them all to stay if they cannot find it. Or to keep coming if it isn't all that better -- or different - after all.

And growing numbers are leaving - either for affordable bits of New Zealand or for destinations overseas.

Putting people on the road
It worries me, then, that Auckland’s plans appear to be more about structures than people. The future of the city is presented by the planners today as “up not out” – a mantra repeated by the Deputy Mayor on television last night. But that’s a policy built on a particular set of planners’ prejudices about the hardware of a city – the buildings and networks – and not about the software – the people who make it work. And its the software that is mobile.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that no matter how easily they role off the tongue, “compact city” and “affordable housing” just don’t seem to go together, at least not in Auckland.

And we really do run the risk of undermining what makes Auckland today a great place to be if we stick with arbitrary building targets and densities of the sort promoted widely in the 1990s and now promulgated in the draft Auckland Plan. We are having to offer up our green spaces to housing; our roads to congestion; our blue skies to high rise; all for the sake of ... actually, I am not sure for the sake of what, especially if all it leads to is higher costs, less choices, more congestion, and greater social disparities.

Maybe if we want our children in their time to enjoy Auckland’s real heritage of sea, sky, and landscape we should give low impact a try instead. Or simply watch them leave when we most need them to stay.

Second, should New Zealand have a population policy?
I raise this question because actually we do have a population policy – it just hasn’t been aired that widely. And it is simple - play the Auckland card. Interestingly, this was raised on television by Invercargill Mayor, ex-Aucklander Tim Shadbolt. Thinking about population issues – where and how people might choose to live and what role, if any, government has in influencing this – has been subjugated to yet another prejudice, that New Zealand will only do well economically if Auckland continues to dominate the numbers.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that concentrating consumption and big jobs in the city does not necessarily boost the country’s economy. In fact, it could have the opposite effect if it simply adds to congestion costs, inflates housing and the cost of employment, and drives up commercial and industrial land costs. Higher wages and higher rents do not really equate to a productivity advantage.

A bigger Auckland – cost or benefit?
High levels of consumption, the higher costs of services, and the increasing demands on public spending that they make do not add to national productivity. What might be seen as higher added value in Auckland may be little more than a cost to other parts of the economy. There is not a lot of evidence that Auckland’s higher costs add to our net export income or to our pool of innovation. So one has to wonder where this particular path is taking us (if not to Sydney and beyond).

Now I’m not advocating the sort of intervention we practiced (and I use that word advisedly) in the 1970s. This is not something that “Wellington can fix”. On the other hand, we need to be careful of policies that implicitly or explicitly favour Auckland, especially if the city’s own plans are likely to frustrate the very growth they seek to promote.

We're on the road to paradise
here we go
here we go.
We're on a road to nowhere

I’m really not sure where Auckland is heading at what is potentially a turbulent time for New Zealand and its dominant city. We certainly can’t predict an end point or steady state, so let’s not treat plans as blueprints.

And let’s hope for Ramonah and Emily’s sakes, we don’t impose a 1990s view of what a city should look like on Auckland in 2030.