Building democracy

Peter Tait

Recently I participated (personally) in the Canberra Wave of the Rising Tide Against New Coal and Gas event. I volunteered to help out with the Affinity Group training and to support running the Spokes Councils in Canberra.

The link to democracy work is that these, Affinity Groups and Spokes Councils, are methods for enabling effective governance in large decentralised movements and groups. Governance here is used in its basic sense, of making decisions about how the movement or group is going to act.

The method is not new and is based on long term activist organisations and more recent developments around Murry Bookchin’s work, Sociocracy and Democratic Confederalism.

Affinity Groups are groups of around 12 people who provide mutual support during actions and are the basic unit for decision making. Spokes Councils are large groups comprising representatives from Affinity Groups, other operational groups and Caucuses. There are other levels of organisation such as Clusters and Caucuses. A Cluster might be a group of Affinity Groups with for instance a common geographical or topic focus. A Caucus is a group sharing an identity such as First Nations People, LBTQI+ and young people. A person could be a member of a few of these.

The decision-making process in all the groupings are the same: a consent model (although Rising Tide calls it a consensus model). It is a facilitated process involving information sharing, respectful dialogue, making proposals and supporting or amending proposals. It works by engaging the slow thinking parts of our brains. It has evolved a simple sign language to speed communication. A complete description of the Council process and sign language is available elsewhereelsewhere.

The point I want to make here is that we have a participatory, nearly direct democracy model of governance in active use right now.

People learning this are preparing for localised governance in a range of situations such as natural disaster responses, small group work, municipal councils and others. It is also a model that scales geographically. It puts decision-making at the level where those affected by the decisions and the people with the direct local knowledge are making them.

Knowing how to use this model is preparing us for setting up and using alternative, resilient governance structures as the climate disaster bites, and if governments become less capable of governing well in our and the planet’s interests.

This is its relevance for Living Democracy.