Searching for a New Paradigm: Collective Settings

Overview

The report emerged from several years’ worth of convenings, research, and analysis of existing paradigms for how to strengthen democracy. As part of the project, scholar Isak Tranvik produced an essay that lays out the important features that healthy collective settings demonstrate. 

Similarly, for this project, scholar Emily B. Campbell conducted a series of case studies to describe how collective settings play out relative to democracy paradigms rooted at the behavioral or institutional level. They feature: 

• Electoral reform (institutional) in Alaska 
• The behavioral interventions of Braver Angels of Central Texas 
• The collective settings of Blue Mountain Forest Partners in Oregon 

Emily’s work demonstrates the ways these three paradigms—behavioral, collective settings, and institutional—complement one another while pursuing distinct strategies and approaches.   

The intent of the report is not to highlight flaws in existing efforts to improve democracy, but to show that much greater attention needs to be placed on collective settings. 

Collective settings, we argue, are where Americans build the skills, habits, and dispositions necessary to successfully navigate an unknowable future together, in ways that preserve and strengthen democratic norms and institutions. 

Included in the report are several recommendations for various stakeholders: 

For Researchers: We need much more (widely disseminated) research to help us better understand multiple themes.   

• Distribution gaps: Where do well-designed collective settings exist, or not? How are they distributed across off-line and online settings?  
• Design features: What are the design features that influence whether collective settings cultivate healthy democratic capabilities?   
• Return on investment: What measures can we use to examine the impacts of collective settings? What measurement and evaluation frameworks enable philanthropists and practitioners to maintain rigor even when designing for uncertainty?   

For Philanthropy: Collective settings need both funding and philanthropic organizing.   

• Address distribution concerns: New funding opportunities can invest in creating well-designed collective settings in areas where such settings are rare or absent.  
• Shift incentives to emphasize designing for contingency: Funding opportunities can emphasize metrics that focus on the cultivation of dynamic democratic capabilities at both the individual and organizational levels.  
• Empower learning: Resourcing the connective tissue between research and practice, and cultivating fellowships and other human networks to share lessons learned, can strengthen the field.  
• Nurture the philanthropic community: Funding communities organized vertically (bringing local, state, and national funders together) and horizontally (across ideological, geographic, demographic, and issue-based difference) can coordinate resources and mitigate against unnecessary politicization.   

For Civil Society, Business, and Government: Civil society leaders can cultivate collective settings in their work and communities. Likewise, the state and markets each play a crucial role in creating settings (like the workplace) where people interact with each other. All three sectors impact the design and distribution of settings.  

• Invest in design: Thinking intentionally about the design features of self-governing communities (governance practices, accountability, learning systems) can make collective settings more likely.   
• Consider distribution: Local and regional groups across civil society, business, and government can consider working together to identify and fill gaps in access to well-designed collective settings.