Assessment of a Public Partnership (5)
Installment Five of Five: The UMN Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships: Determining the impacts of a public partnering
Contributed by Kathryn Draeger, Statewide Director of the UMN Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships and Melissa Pawlisch, Statewide Coordinator for the UMN Partnerships’ Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs)
To follow on the Regional Partnership’s discussion of evaluation, we submitted a description of the Clean Energy Resource Team program. This next piece presents the summary and conclusion sections from the CERTs’ 2005 Evaluation conducted by Drs. Steven Hoffman and Angela High-Pippert of the University of St. Thomas’ Department of Political Science. It focuses more on how community-based energy initiatives foster broader community citizenship than on the role of the University in staffing the effort but should provide food for thought on how community-based projects, in general, can help build civil society. As a UMN Regional Partnership program, this evaluation and future evaluations of CERTs will feed into the Regional Partnership impact evaluation.
SUMMARY OF THE CERTs EVALUATION
According to former United States Senator Bill Bradley, the government and the market are two legs of a three-legged stool and that without the third leg of civil society, without “a healthy robust civic sector, a space in which the bonds of community can flourish,” the stool is inherently unstable. In the United States, this “third leg” is disproportionately weak in relation to the legs of government and the private sector. Community-based energy initiatives provide one opportunity for citizens to work together to build up and repair this third and weakest leg.
This report explores the civic potential of community-based energy by carefully examining the work of the Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) project. The report begins by elaborating on the problem of civic engagement and the opportunities for the reinvigoration of civic culture. The report then examines the success of the CERTs project in creating and maintaining incentives for sustained deliberation by citizens on the shape and character of their energy system. The report concludes that the CERTS program has created a sustained dialogue about the nature of the electricity system amongst an informed and engaged citizenry.
CONCLUSIONS
The nature of community-based energy and the role that such initiatives might play in the general fabric of civic life is not well understood. This report makes it clear that several conceptual models are available. Community-based energy initiatives might, for instance, perform the intermediate role envisioned by so-called “stealth democratic theorists,” allowing the mass of citizens to avoid the sort of engagement preferred by a select group of citizens actively and continuously involved in intense, democratic debate (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002). Participation within the community-based energy initiative would be confined to a fairly narrow set of citizens, namely those citizens with the requisite education and knowledge. Interaction with the larger community would be confined to message development (“wind is good/nuclear is bad”), and the mass of citizens would have only limited personal involvement, say, a willingness to participate in a community-sponsored energy conservation program. Only very rarely would the majority of citizens be expected to aggressively participate in public policy making or in any sort of sustained political process.
A more robust conceptualization of community-based energy might be guided by Barber’s notion of “strong democracy” (1984). As Barber warns, democratic participation cannot become a full-time job. Yet, programs based upon this model would draw upon a much broader citizen base, involving people from many walks of life. In this case, participants would not operate in a public sphere intermediate between the state and the mass of citizens. Instead, the mass of citizens themselves, communicating directly with policymakers at all levels, would constitute the membership for the initiative.
Properly conceptualizing community-based energy is not a strictly academic matter. If the grid-integration model of distributed generation becomes the operant version of community-based energy, then the “stealth” version of democratic participation would seem to be sufficient. A more robust form of community-based energy, however, would seem to demand the development of strong democracy out of which would emerge a host of difficult problems. How citizens might be brought into the process, the incentives they are given to remain, the reason for their loyalty and/or exit (Hirschman, 1970), the kind of work that is required of them, how best to facilitate an aggressive form of grassroots organizing, crafting long-term and well-structured public education campaigns, communicating complex ideas to a largely non-technical audience, forging the appropriate technical and expert networks, and striking the right balance between the expert and the citizen, will all emerge as central challenges for those who seriously think about community-based energy as a viable systemic alternative.
The CERTS program offers important insights in how deal with these and many other challenges. It has brought together a wide variety of citizens in a sustained dialogue about the nature of the electricity system and it has laid the foundation for substantial discussions amongst an informed and engaged citizenry. It now faces the daunting task of building upon that foundation as it helps facilitate the transition to a sensible electricity system.