Ziad Majed is a founder of the Arab Network for the Study of Democracy and longtime Kettering collaborator. He recently published a piece in Lebanon Now, about the transformations underlying the most visible changes occurring in Arab countries.

The observer of the Arab world these days can say that the fall of dictators and corrupt regimes, and the fact that others have been compelled to start reforms they had refused for years, is only the tip of the iceberg. The transformations run deep in many Arab countries, and the popular uprisings are only one of their signs – even if they are the most important and exciting signs politically.

Perhaps reviewing some of the elements of this depth will aid the discovery of this iceberg. These elements include:

· The transformation of Arab demographics over past decades with massive urbanization. This transformation permitted daily interaction in uninterrupted arenas, which modified people’s ideas and allowed them to unite based on politics, interest or sentiment in a way not previously possible given geographical separation in the countryside and desert. (This is a separate issue from the ruralization of cities and its effects in more than one cultural and societal level.

· The evolution of some social values in middle-class circles, and the tendency of this class’s individuals toward living in smaller family units, not drowning in extended families as in the past. This liberated some of them from the daily economic relations and burdens that had controlled the details of their lives. It provided girls and women with free space (albeit limited) in which they could dispose of their time, interact with their surroundings, and enroll in different levels of education, as well as in some sectors of the labor market.

· The 15-30 age group surpassing the 30 percent mark of the region’s population. The majority of these are either studying (albeit at extremely varied levels), working or seeking work. A great number of them use the internet and mobile phones and record films on YouTube or upload them onto Facebook, globalizing what is theirs and becoming acquainted with what others have. Their interaction with one another expands at record speed, creating states of identification and audiovisual resemblance among them that traditional media channels and newspapers did not allow.

· The (re)construction of social and political ties that dictatorship had previously destroyed – a new construction that is difficult to control or prevent. These ties began in a “virtual” world (the internet), then charges of collective emotions (following Bouzai’s self-immolation in protest of humiliation in Tunisia, or the slogan “We are all Khaled Said” condemning the barbarous murder of a young man by police in Egypt) transformed them into real or “territorial” relations in protests, sit-ins, conferences and festivals. These launched a process of collective reclamation of the public domain and many of its functions.

All this is generating new feelings in the region: pride in liberation from fear and pride in the construction of citizenship. It is also generating excitement over the solidarity – human solidarity first, and national solidarity second – that now finds its daily and nightly expression in public spaces (after the screens).

All this too could generate a new conception of belonging to the Arab world, unrelated to outdated nationalist concepts or loyalty to movements or leaders. This is a sense of belonging to founding moments, in a region whose youth speaks one language, understands the difficulty of its conditions and experiences its oppressions. It is an affiliation with human concerns that unite them and all humanity: the issues of freedom, dignity and sustenance, which come before anything else…

By Randall Nielsen

“Among the great variety of developments that have occurred in the twentieth century, I did not, ultimately, have any difficulty in choosing one as the preeminent development of the period: the rise of democracy.“ — Amartya Sen

At the Kettering Foundation’s semiannual retreat last January, staff and associates discussed opportunities for—and challenges to—engaging our research in international contexts. Some proposals focused on new lines of research. Others identified existing areas of Kettering research that might be usefully illuminated through wider international experience. As always, we tried to identify critical problems that the particular strengths of the foundation’s research might speak to. What have we learned about what people in other countries see as the central challenges to their efforts to strengthen democracy?

Participants noted the problems resulting from viewing democracy as a Western import. Subsequent discussion quickly led to insights about the importance of thinking clearly about how international research into the challenges of “making democracy work” should be done. One unique strength of the foundation’s research is the result of what we call joint-learning agreements. How might a similar approach in the international research help alleviate the “Western import” problem?

In a widely cited article published in the Journal of Democracy (1999), Amartya Sen argues that the “recognition of democracy as a universally relevant system, which moves in the direction of its acceptance as a universal value, is a major revolution in thinking, and one of the main contributions of the twentieth century.” However, Sen notes a critical challenge to democratic experiments, one identified by the Kettering Foundation a decade ago—a thin notion of what democracy is and what it requires of people, communities, and institutions.

Sen identifies one symptom of the problem: the tendency to equate democracy with the mechanics and structures of majority rule in elections. This implies that democracy is largely a technical challenge and can be exported—or even imposed—by creating formal institutions that structure repre¬sentative voting. As such, democracy is correctly seen as a Western concept. In many countries, this makes experiments with democracy harder to legitimize, and therefore less secure under the inevitable tensions brought on by change.

We may be witnessing the impact of that “thin notion” in Latin America. A recent report issued by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) found that over 50 percent of Latin Americans say they would support an authoritarian regime over democratic government if authoritarian rule could restore order and resolve their economic problems. If democracy is viewed principally as a means of choosing officeholders, it may not seem like much to give up.

The foundation’s research is based on a deeper, more general vision of democracy. It is grounded in a focus on the roles people need to play as problem-solving actors in democratic politics. As such, democracy is seen not as a destination—which when reached will deliver particular outcomes—but as the ongoing journey of people struggling with challenges to their collective ability to rule themselves. The challenges to citizen self-rule are not fixed; they emerge from changes in technology, demographics, and global political forces. Kettering research thus emphasizes the study of practices—ways that citizens, communities, and institutions can work together—that hold the promise of increasing the ability of people to act in concert on problems they share. It also recognizes that because circumstances change, constant study and refinement of the ways those practices work is required.

Seen that way, democracy is not a thing that can be granted to people, exported to people, or imposed. Democracy has to be made to work by the people who make up the citizenry of a place. What does that paradigm suggest about alternatives to “exporting democracy”?

One way the foundation develops and tests insights is through learning agreements with organizations that have their own reasons for attempting to “make democracy work as it should.” These organizations have chosen to explore how they can facilitate the public engagement of issues. Furthermore, they hope to learn from their efforts and share that learning systematically. The foundation’s joint-learning agreements do not fund the organization’s activity, but rather support the costs of documenting and sharing what is learned about mutually agreed-upon lines of questions.

The Kettering Foundation has two general goals for the joint-learning projects. First and most obvious is to develop our practical understanding of how to make public life work better, and report findings in ways that can inform other organizations struggling with similar challenges under different conditions. Kettering realizes that organizations exploring their impact on civic life need to learn their way to more effective practice. Learning is also necessary for efforts to continue to grow through time. The development and growth of effective democratic practice does not come from building on success so much as from learning from experience. Although it is difficult for any organization to reflect on unsuccessful efforts, it is exactly those “failures” that provide some of the best opportunities for shared learning.

However, we also know that many organizations lack the capacity to interrogate their experiences in productive ways. Most are set up to do things, not to reflect on and record what they are learning in ways that allow findings to be shared. The foundation’s shared-learning relationships deliberately intend to address that dilemma. When successful, they have the long-term effect of changing the way organizations see themselves as civic actors, especially through the development of their capacity to learn and document what they are learning and thus continue to innovate in practice.

Recent meetings with international organizations revealed some intriguing possibilities for shared-learning agreements. As described in Ileana Marin’s article, an increasing number of organizations around the world are coming to see the potential of deliberately exploring how to interact with citizens in public life. Some have recognized that, although there are no simple techniques for doing so, lessons from experience can be derived and shared so that efforts can complement and build on each other. There are clearly more opportunities for international shared-learning agreements now than ever before.

However, these meetings also reinforced our understanding of the challenges to doing international research through joint-learning agreements. By far the biggest obstacle is in distinguishing the goals of the foundation as a research organization from those of grantmaking organizations. Many of the standard protocols that tie organizations in other countries to U.S. grantmaking foundations are in direct tension with the development of joint-learning relationships. Joint-learning relationships depend on keeping the responsibility for the work, and the learning that results, located in the organizations and their communities. Extensive experience with grant evaluations, however, has taught many organizations to document instru¬mental activities rather than record their reflections on experiments.

Conventional practices of evaluation often hinder effective, self-generated learning, perhaps more so in international contexts. Still, we have reason to believe that the challenge can be dealt with successfully. At a recent meeting with organizations from various countries, one participant argued that he saw no tension between acting and learning in his organization’s protocols. He noted that organizations that proceed without reflection inevitably fail. Successful organizations are constantly learning. The challenge, he noted, is in capturing the learning in ways that can be shared with others. Although that challenge may be more difficult when dealing with organizations in other countries, the growing recognition of the potential of shared-learning agreements gives reason for hope.

Randall Nielsen is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation.

By Ileana Marin

We live in a time when many Americans have retreated from politics and public life, and many civic-minded organizations and public leaders seek to reengage them,” Richard Harwood writes in his article “The Engagement Path.” These words could easily have become the succinct motto for what many of us—formally or not so formally affiliated with nongovernmental organizations, universities, and other types of institutes all over the world—are struggling with.

And when I write “many of us,” I have in mind the international network that, simply to have an appropriate denomination, we refer to as the International Civil Society Consortium for Public Deliberation. At last count, this network included 250 international partners representing NGOs, universities, and individuals from Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and the United States. Despite its obviously heterogeneous character, this international network, created over a number of years, is very strong.

This expanding group draws strength from a special link, the main thread of which is the body of ideas that stand behind the larger concept of deliberative democracy. The group’s members continuously seek better ways to communicate and collaborate among themselves. It would be wrong to conclude that this network is too loose, given the great encounters that have occurred over the past years.

The Kettering Foundation (KF) has been the more or less “invisible entity” that, in many circumstances, made possible and then perfected this special link. However, through their work, the members from this impressive number of institutions have mingled before and after their connections via KF. Many of them have been using a deliberative democratic approach in their work for a long time. One of the best parts of KF’s role probably has been helping people give a name to the techniques they’ve been using and frame them in a more structured manner. Furthermore, KF has encouraged an appreciation of the contacts they have developed inside a network created, at times, in a rather ad-hoc manner

If I were to go back to Harwood’s article, it would be to note that, commonly, “people reach a critical juncture; their engagement will either move forward, be derailed, or simply get stuck.” The path through this, as many have observed, is to pose and respond to the right probing questions. In my mind, Kettering has continuously been the entity that always tries to pose the right questions. Furthermore, Kettering has, whenever possible and appropriate, offered a space for people—from the United States or other countries—to figure out what it is that they are really talking about and to describe it collectively using their own language, based on their own ideas, beliefs, and experience.

Through years of compiling information for the international newsletters (available, for those interested, on www.icscpd.org), I have had many experiences in gathering information and details on the work of my colleagues and friends from around the world. I learned through my work that, while getting to know people is wonderful and while meeting those who share the same interests is a life-enriching experience, it nonetheless is a great challenge to stay in touch and to keep up to date on both work and other matters. That is probably one of the reasons why many ideas, contacts, and relationships get lost in this big world. Although we do share a lot through our work, and our connections may sometimes be invisible, they nonetheless bring a great deal of joy on one hand, and plenty of interesting and useful knowledge on the other hand.

It continues to be a little difficult for some (particularly our U.S. colleagues at Kettering) to stay in touch with others in the international network, particularly those who come from universities, NGOs, or institutions that are narrowly purposeful and have, for the most part, very practical concerns in communities where needs are clear and sometimes desperate.

It seems that the “message” that stands behind deliberative democracy fits extremely well in those environments the civic or public problem is fundamentally settled; that is, democratic, and even cultivated or middle-class communities. The United States represents the most eloquent example, but in a paradoxical way, even some Eastern-European countries and some of the former Soviet countries fit the description of ordered societies a central or underlying concern is always the greater engagement of citizens in the command of their own lives.

This is what, for instance, one of our Russian colleagues said “I think that this practice (deliberative democracy) is very helpful and useful for the Russian NGOs in the discussion of hot issues, and also for those who believe that effective civil society and democracy require public involvement in the decision-making process. The skills and habits of public participation and initiative are lacking. Due to the absence of a real civic experience under the authoritarian communist regime, people are missing the skills for public dialogue and for reaching common ground on those public-policy issues that concern them. Thus, in my opinion, deliberation is a rightful and successful thing in order to reach this goal.”

That, after all, is the goal of deliberative practice. Reaching that goal must present a particular challenge in societies that have experienced extreme instability or where the problems to be addressed are as basic as access to the immediate necessities of life and social organization itself.

Ileana Marin was a program officer at the time with World Learning for International Development and a Kettering Associate.

This article was published in the Kettering Foundation’s Summer/Fall 2005 Connections.