Creative citizenship and the public policy process

Many decades before its recent emergence these lyrics, taken from The Sound of Music, encapsulate the opportunity and challenge that Creative Citizenship presents to public policy makers. Politicians of all political persuasions are keen on ‘catching a cloud’. Indeed, cynics contend that amongst contemporary political elites, almost any populist cloud will do! The term ‘Creative Citizenship’ has cloudlike features that politicians might find hard to resist. What politician would not want to be associated with creativity – with a capacity for capturing the moment; being of, or even ahead of, the curve; of adding value (in all of its forms) through innovation and endeavour?

In political parlance, citizenship is even more motherhood and apple pie. Politicians conspicuously legitimise themselves as citizenship personified. Across all parties politicians bewail the loss of citizen engagement, not least in the political process itself. You would be hard pressed to find a politician in any party that would argue for the extension of a disillusioned, disengaged, isolated, malcontent, apathetic, and distrusting constituency of support. Indeed, contemporary UK politics is presently witnessing the rise of a fourth major political party, one of whose central propositions contends that the current malaise in citizen engagement with the political elite and the political process must be addressed.

Supporting this populist approach, contemporary theoretical and empirical research addressing Creative Citizenship offers politicians of all colours seemingly grandiose claims. Academics and practitioners report that Creative Citizenship is ubiquitous. It is new and highly original both in the multifaceted domains it addresses and in the way that it does so. Creative Citizenship is unique, it offers direct association (social, cultural, economic and political) with technological innovation and communal interaction. Some go further and contend that Creative Citizenship presents a transformational, unstoppable movement; a momentum imbibed with an alchemy that can heal, make good and which adds value across all forms of communal association.

So far, then, so good.

But political leaders in each of the three major parties have traversed similar territory in the past. In different ways and from alternative political directions they have all been courted, intoxicated, if not mesmerised by similar, cloud-like rhetoric from previous claimants to the communitarian common ground. For Labour and Blair this found its home in the development of the ‘Third Way’ championed in its modern iteration by Anthony Giddens at the LSE.

For Clegg and the Liberal Democrats it finds its voice through the reinterpretation of the ‘open society’, a concept long advocated by past Demos Director and Director of Strategy in Clegg’s Office, Richard Reeves.

For Cameron and the Conservatives it found its force in the creation of the Big Society, a central tenet of Conservative differentiation at the last general election; conceived, designed and applied through the advocacy of Cameron’s then chief strategist, Steve Hilton.

In each case the broad polemic associated with these concepts has been imposed on existing party ideology, trumpeted as the new big idea - a comprehensive solution to what Cameron referred to as a ‘broken Britain’.

But the translation of rhetoric to practical policy implementation has been patchy at best and widely ridiculed where attempted. These ‘big ideas’ have become the Loch Ness Monsters of British politics - everyone’s heard of them, there are occasional sightings but no-one is sure the beast really exists! More substantially, each has met with strong resistance and denouncement within their respective political parties and by a succession of political commentators. Discredited and now largely discarded (along with each of their respective champions), Creative Citizenship would do well not to become the next ethereally defined ‘big idea’.

To go back then to the song, rather like Maria, if Creative Citizenship is to have real salience in the public policy context we have to be able to ‘pin it down’. The danger signals for Creative Citizenship in this respect are already evident from observation of its current state of academic and practical evolution. Contemporary research contends that we should find Creative Citizenship compelling because it is abundant and defies management or control. Yet research can offer no succinct definition of the term; it points to a myriad of alternate forms and expressions whose informality of cohesion and depth of complexity appear to defy classification and/or structural confinement.

Academic rigour apart, to be effective in public policy terms Creative Citizenship must assume some form of clarity of definition in a practical sense. Given that research currently appears to conclude that it defies definition precisely because of its diverse, idiosyncratic and often anarchic nature, its place within the realm of public policy appears unsustainable. If politicians, speech and manifesto writers are tempted to align with rhetoric associated with the former, judged on public policy performance and impact, they are likely to run a million miles from the latter. Without clarity of definition, adopted in the imprecise form of a political ‘big idea’ like the predecessors identified above, Creative Citizenship might well become nothing more than a flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!

Is there then an alternative way forward to pin down Creative Citizenship and make it more resonant in public policy terms? The significance of Creative Citizenship is that it provides a new opportunity. An opportunity that is not so much a matter of public policy itself, but which when taken up can deliver activity from which further public policy opportunities might be derived. Creative Citizenship enables individuals to engage and to act, alone or with others, in new and creative endeavours made possible and enhanced through technological innovation. The mere fact that this new type of opportunity exists has ethereal value in its own right, but in public policy terms, its real benefit lies in the nature of the activity flowing from it – activity that will be of benefit to the initiator(s), the communities that they participate in, and potentially to society at large.

Articulated in this manner the research outcomes associated with the study of Creative Citizenship appear to be more helpful in guiding politicians toward the key features associated with acts of Creative Citizenship that have real contemporary resonance within specific policy arenas. To avoid adoption as the next political ‘big idea’ and the inevitable cynicism that will attend it, the focus for the public policy promotion of Creative Citizenship – a manifesto if you like to call it that – could be grounded on something like the following.