The Importance of Collective Control

Attempts at improving state-citizen cooperation will fail unless the protagonists ensure that citizens share control over the process with their counterparts in the state on a genuinely equal footing. This chapter focuses on collective control and the pivotal importance of confidence – the perception that it is possible to influence decisions and make things happen, or prevent things happening – for the benefit of the community. Drawing on published findings as well as the New Economics Foundation’s own field research, it considers how systems in state institutions can be geared to build the confidence and capacity of citizens to collaborate constructively with public sector policy makers. The second part of the chapter examines collective control and state-citizen co-operation in relation to ‘the commons’: resources that are essential for human survival and flourishing. It shows how the ‘commoning’ movement will help to test the limits of both citizen and state control, as well as the potential of state-citizen cooperation.