This book makes a significant contribution to an emergent international literature that looks at democracy through the pragmatic lens of problem solving. Xavier de Souza Briggs locates this in the tradition of John Dewey, though its contemporary variants are much more explicit about the role that citizens, as well as different kinds of civic associations and intermediaries, can play in working with other stakeholders to solve important public problems in ways that are innovative and accountable. He steers a quite interesting path within this literature and brings to bear his own six case studies designed for theory building, not rigorous comparison or hypothesis testing. The six are paired across continents, with the U.S. cases as the repeating ones. Thus, under the policy problem of managing urban growth, the Salt Lake City region is paired with Mumbai, India. On restructuring the economy, Pittsburgh is paired with a region within Greater São Paolo, Brazil. For youth development, San Francisco is paired with post-apartheid Capetown, South Africa.
The core of Briggs's argument is that in many policy domains, public problems have become so complex and have so many interacting parts that new forms of civic capacity need to be built that are customized to address the specific nature of the challenges they pose (in addition, of course, to aligning with local and regional civic and political cultures). Aggregate measures of social capital do not tell us much about how this can be done, and historic civic legacies (see Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 1993), while important, often disguise emergent possibilities for “resourceful” (p. 300) civic innovation represented by new intermediaries and coalitions. While he does not say so directly, Briggs also implies that the classic multitiered civic associations in U.S history (see Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy, 2003) have also lost much of their relative capacity because of the increasingly complex nature of many problems and the multifarious forms of coalitions and partnerships that need to be generated to address them. I would argue further that the classic multitiered associations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries displayed almost no propensity to develop complex policy frames and capacities for the problems of the late twentieth century and beyond, and that in addition to the causes that Skocpol pinpoints, the diverse organizational ecologies generated to respond to such complexity tended over time to undermine the structural privileges of the multitiers as civic aggregators at the local level and, thus, in the democratic system as a whole.
Briggs's analytic approach draws fruitfully from the work of Clarence Stone, especially upon his social production model of “power with” in urban regimes (though Briggs goes beyond the regime model), as well as Stone's specific analysis of what it means to build civic capacity for reforming urban schools. The latter, according to Stone and his colleagues, are “high reverberation subsystems … characterized by frequent reshuffling of mobilized stakeholders, multiple and strongly felt competing value and belief systems, deeply held stakes by both educators (the professional providers of education) and parents (the consumers), and ambiguous boundaries” (Clarence Stone et al., Building Civic Capacity, 2001, p. 50). Only new forms of civic capacity and mobilization are likely to be adequate to such systems and, Briggs adds, to many other systems (ecosystems, public health and safety, housing, employment, urban and regional development).
Briggs stresses models of democratic coproduction and reciprocal accountability among various partners (civic, government, business, other institutions) because implementation is as critical as setting agendas or enacting legislation. Leadership for such partnerships can come from many directions, sometimes from the top down, but also from the bottom up, as radical engagement by poor people's groups in Mumbai and the ABC Region of São Paolo set agendas and sparked collaborative action. His understanding of partnership accommodates inevitable conflict and inequalities of power since these can hardly be wished away, and since responsible democratic actors must seek to enhance governance even while battling persistent inequalities. His best cases incorporate some version of responsible bargaining and genuine policy learning within partnerships, moving beyond simple interest-group models, but also beyond forms of deliberative democracy that tend to stress large public forums and/or representative samples of participants. In the author's model, the complexity of problems, relationships, and coproduction within extended networks for public value creation requires building forms of trust and mutual accountability that are more dense, persistent, and reflexive than typically found in many forms of deliberative democracy—though some do tend to focus on recurrent problem solving, reducing inequalities of voice, and institutionalization (e.g., Archon Fung, Empowered Participation, 2004).
The analysis of the creative role of civic intermediaries is the great strength of the book, although Briggs could have given us more measures of organizational capacity (resources, networks, staff, public communication, membership mobilization). In one case at least, the dynamic has been even more robust than he shows. Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, which spearheaded the successful San Francisco ballot campaign in the 1990s for a children's budget and generated independent youth and parent groups to ensure passage and reauthorization, was also at the center of the struggle to establish a citywide youth commission. Composed of young people, ages 12 to 23 years old, the commission helps organize through youth networks across the city, and it has official responsibilities for public deliberation and reporting to the board of supervisors on all policies affecting youth. When Margaret Brodkin, the dynamic leader of Coleman, was appointed to head the city's department of children, youth, and families in 2004, she brought her frame of youth empowerment to the process and criteria by which the department managed grants, sparking a culture change within the department, as well as within some of the traditional nonprofits in the field (see Carmen Sirianni and Diana Schor, “City Government as Enabler of Youth Civic Engagement,” in James Youniss and Peter Levine, eds., Policies for Youth Civic Engagement, 2009).
This example represents one way to bring innovations to scale, a key challenge noted by the author. While he is right to warn against relying on the public sector and to highlight diverse avenues, I think that the enormous challenges of building and sustaining civic and partnership strategies and capacities for public problem solving calls for a much more systematic approach by public agencies at all levels of government (see Carmen Sirianni, Investing in Democracy, 2009). We have a good number of cases from the United States and around the world where local as well as national government agencies enable civic engagement, collaborative problem solving, and democratic network governance. We have available many practical tools, templates, and policy designs that can be leveraged for much greater scope and impact. But we need to look at the concept of policy design for democracy, civic policy feedback, public administration, and planning in broader ways, especially when tailored to local/regional policy challenges, and we also need to be willing to view public spending through the lens of investments in democracy.
Briggs's book is an indispensable contribution for those figuring out how to make collaborative problem solving a core component of vibrant, effective, pluralist, and just democracies in the twenty-first century.
