Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host I have an obligation to understand the effect that my role and choices have on the groups we are working with. Especially if I am making claims to be working in systems change, I need to understand that distinction more rigorously so I can become a better host and a better contributor to the change work that is being called for in the world.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to Dave from the perspective of an Art of Hosting practitioner, about why his challenge moved me and why I took it on board, and also what I think this practice, the Art of Hosting, offers to the world.
This letter is to my mates within the Art of Hosting community, to share where I have been challenged in thinking through this work and what it means for how I practice the Art of Hosting. And it’s an invitation to all of us to engage with these questions with each other and with those we teach, support, and serve.
Dear mates:
For nearly 25 years the Art of Hosting has been my practice home. The Four Fold Practice (being present, participating, hosting, and co-creating) offers key reminders to me about what helps create conversations that matter. The large-group methods we use and have developed make a meaningful difference to the organizations that I work with.
As a community we have accumulated authentic practitioner wisdom and knowledge about invitation, conditions for convening, the power of questions and inquiry, and the effectiveness of co-creation and collective harvesting. We have explored and documented an approach to facilitation that does not concern itself with the outcome, but attends to what shapes the container. We have extended that into forms of leadership, organizing, and activism that hold participation at their heart and find a home amongst those who long for inclusion, democratic governance, and better workplaces.
These are distributed, experimental, and messy lines of thought and practice that billow out from our core inquiry about hosting. For me now, the question is, “What exactly is working, and how?”
The distinction: the hosted conversation is not the system
Those of us who have been lucky enough to work in larger contexts and over longer periods of time will recognize that the dialogic container we are hosting is not the system. It is sometimes the hardest thing for me to hear when a participant says, “This is great, but what about the REAL world?” I get defensive. I insist that this IS the real world. Change can happen at many scales, including right here and now, in the midst of dialogue. And while that can be true, I have noticed that it runs the risk of dismissing what a person is saying: “I have real problems and I need this meaningful conversation to make a consequential difference now, or I have to do something else.”
For longer-term and deeper work in complex contexts, a hosted gathering creates a temporary set of conditions inside of which a group of people is gathered: I call this a dialogic container. Of course, these people and their questions are a part of the bigger context of work, but the container is not the system. It is not even a microcosm of the system. It is just a group of people with varying connections and influence in relation to the issues at hand.
A humble approach to my work invites me to consider these realities:
- People from a system are not THE system.
- Diverse perspectives alone are not representations of the system.
- Emergent insight is not the collective intelligence of the system.
- Changed relationships are not changed structures.
- Powerful experiences are not system change.
This isn’t to say that my work doesn’t matter. Temporary hosted conditions can indeed result in different interactions that can create new possibilities. It is true that small changes in a complex system can eventually lead to larger changes. But we cannot know that in advance, and making the link between different scales is especially vulnerable to exaggeration.
My engagement with complexity, including the work of Snowden and others, has brought me to a critical point in my practice where I am seeking to understand the bounded applicability of the work of hosting, while extending my practice in other ways to get at some of the real challenges associated with working in complex systems. That includes being clear about the influence that the host and the hosting team have when designing and employing methods, shaping the harvesting, choosing the questions…all of it.
Reconsidering the container
I think it is easy to be lulled into the hope that a meaningful conversation can generate what we call the “magic in the middle” that takes us to new vistas. So much good can happen in a well-hosted and meaningful conversation, and learning how to convene these moments is a good and important skill. We talk about creating and holding a container in which something beautiful can emerge.
This work comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. When we shape an encounter, we are shaping what is possible. Surprising, moving, and genuinely novel work can legitimately arise, even while it is conditioned through the architecture out of which it emerged. Because of the power we carry into hosted spaces, we shape that architecture in every move we make before and during the gathering. The nature of our methods and practices can sometimes have us believe that what happened was genuine collective intelligence, but the design, hosting choices, and harvesting work shape what is possible.
It may be true that under the particular conditions of any specific hosted gathering, participants became capable of seeing, saying, or doing something that had not previously been possible. We use methods because they create particular conditions for emergence by shaping the interactions of participants in particular ways. But the methods aren’t the sole source of emergence and change. World Café does not reveal collective intelligence. Open Space is not system transformation. Circle does not eliminate status and influence.
For change work, this is critical to understand. Groups of people are capable of finding and developing their own solutions to problems, even within the constraints of the structural systems that they inhabit. A well-hosted process positioned as essential to change work runs a deep risk of making the group’s outcomes dependent on the host, the tools, or the process. For me, this role is seductive. I like to think that I am a good change maker because I host conversations on important topics and people often leave feeling positive, creative, and motivated.
But what is the cost of that?
Hosting is an exercise of power
One of the core contributions of the Art of Hosting as a community of practice and a body of work is our deep collective inquiry into the idea that a group of people can know more than a single expert or facilitator, given the chance to use their agency. The Four Fold Practice reminds us of the conditions that can help enable that. Methods help us practice. Circle helps us slow down conversations. Open Space gives participants extraordinary agency. World Café surfaces many perspectives on common questions, making more ideas available to a group. These are legitimate contributions of our suite of practices.
However, the presence of agency, deeper listening, and diverse perspectives does not eliminate the power that a host wields in the container. In fact, my deepest fear is that it hides it.
Good hosting can create the conditions for self-organization, but critical hosting practice needs to remember that someone called the meeting, someone made the list, someone framed the purpose and selected methods, someone made logistical choices, and someone decided on the harvest plan. Even if these decisions and choices are made and held by a hosting team drawn from and informed by collective need and purpose, the container is still shaped.
Our methods may look like they fade the power of the host into the background, but the architecture of the hosted container carries the power. That power can shape possibilities, often invisibly. My own hosting practice is especially vulnerable to what I cannot see because I deliberately remove myself from engaging in group dynamics and shaping the output.
If my deeper learning of this last year (and maybe my whole career) has landed on anything, it has landed on the unsettling realization that I and we need to do a lot more work to take responsibility for our power as designers. This matters partly because I am often playing the role of an expert in process work when I am working with a client, and so my decisions are trusted. But it is also important because my presence in working with a group of people usually comes with the sanction and mandate of people more powerful than me who have chosen to work with me, chosen to endorse the design that I have suggested, and chosen to commit to what we think might happen.
The host has meaningful power because we are sanctioned by power to do what we are doing, in the way in which we are doing it. As I began to realize that my own self-reflection wasn’t going deeply enough into the effects of this power, I started to look for ways that I could account for it, be honest about it, and make better choices about it.
Three kinds of constraint, three expressions of power
If you have been following my work in the past few months, you will have seen these two posts in which I describe a way of looking at the architecture of a held container. This triangle has become extremely important to my practice because it gives me a place to locate my own power in relationship with the distributed power of a group and the power embedded in the structures that pre-exist a hosted conversation.
Briefly, the three points of this triangle define a space and ask us to locate our work within it based on the way power shapes a participatory process:
Interactions (distributed power): We hold it as a deep principle in the Art of Hosting world that the group has collective wisdom, collective knowledge, and the ability to co-create. People are entirely capable of organizing, collaborating, being in relationship, creating and responding, and making change without a consultant or a host coming into their lives. It happens all the time, and I find it incredibly hopeful. As a host I like to think that, whatever my work is, I am serving this.
Structure (contextual power): It would be great if groups alone could just go and do the work, but every group of people is constrained by the existing structure in which they operate. Folks in organizations work within resource constraints, chains of command, organizational purposes and policies, and time boundaries. People in communities are subject to laws, biophysical constraints, and the reality of the scale they find themselves working at. These structures are critical and not always visible, and they convey tremendous power. They can squash or enable good ideas. They can alienate people (or imprison them). And importantly, especially if you are a host who is hired to do this work, they implicitly and explicitly shape possibilities through mandates and permissions.
Design (privileged power): As hosts we do not operate independently of the above two sources of power in a container. We are enmeshed in the collision of constraints, and we bring our own small but significant source of power to the conversations. These are the intentional constraints we introduce into a space: the purpose of a gathering, the choice of methods, the invitation, and the design work that goes into shaping the experience. There is privilege in this position because someone, or some group, has the power to make these decisions in the room. Even if we are hosting an Open Space, the shape of the question, the choice of the harvesting template, the purpose, and subsequent uses of the work are all choices made by someone.
Distributed power, contextual power, and privileged power intersect in every hosted conversation we are involved in. Making this space visible has been tremendously helpful in my practice. It helps me see what is needed for meaningful conversations to become truly useful conversations, and it is helping me become much more aware of the choices I make as a host and how those can disempower distributed power from doing its work.
In the Art of Hosting world we focus a lot on the Design <—> Interaction axis, thinking about how our methods and designs will shape the interactions and experiences of participants. I think we have approached the question of how the existing context structures what’s possible, but the Art of Hosting alone, and a well-hosted process in particular, is not sufficient for sustained systemic change. Even developing participatory leadership skills still leaves leaders confronting the very real problems of power, resources, and politics within their settings. When we claim that our work contributes to systems change, the test of that cannot end with what emerges in the room. We have more to learn about whether and how the work we do in rooms contributes to change in the systems around them.
Contact with context
The Art of Hosting offers promise because the ways in which we use the practice to design and host conversations, lead teams, structure organizations, and work with power seem to provide immediate ways to engage the diversity of the system. A well-hosted gathering is often thought to be essential to finding new solutions.
But a well-hosted process and a powerful conversation that do not survive contact with the strategic context they promise to shift are a problem. While two days in Open Space, for example, can often unlock some important actions, it takes a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to make such a thing happen. If the promise is fulfilled, that participants will have transformative experiences and the organization or group will be better able to deal with their problems, then the investment is worth it.
But if that’s not what happens, then even a gathering with positive evaluations might have just delayed the ability of a group to activate its distributed capacity and, worse, may have made it seem like only good hosting can provide the conditions for engagement with complex problems. That can be costly where time is an important constraint on the context. The thing I most worry about in my practice is an outcome where people loved the process and the work, but nothing in their world changed.
What I am demanding of myself now is an honest accounting of the role I play as a host. It is easy for me to look at my own discrete contribution and say, “We did a good thing,” while leaders go back to the office shaking their heads and worrying that nothing has changed. This is an ethical facet of our work and one which we can always get better at.
When I was recently working with the Evans School for Public Policy at the University of Washington, my hosting colleague Amanda Bankston told me that the research literature on public policy and engagement is shockingly silent on the role of facilitators, consulting groups, and process designers in how policy gets made, or how it doesn’t get made. Consulting firms are often evaluated on their deliverables, but we know very little about the wider effect they have on whether resources were wasted, time was misspent, or distributed agency was trampled in the name of outcomes.
When she told me that, I realized that I don’t even have a framework for understanding my own role, and hence the triangle above. It helps me interrogate and name the boundaries of my work and influence, and it helps me to be more aware of the ways in which our work is shaped by the context. It has meaningfully changed my practice, most notably through the fact that I no longer do larger-scale work without doing a complexity-informed narrative capture and sense-making process with people in the system before we decide on a design for interventions. And often, just doing this work up front means that the interventions can be less reliant on the Designer and more embedded in the Interactions of people finding ways to make change within the Structures that no longer serve.
My Art of Hosting practice taught me to be aware of these things. My complexity-informed practice has brought me to a place where I am deeply discerning about the solutions I offer for convening.
The invitation
So this leaves me with an honest invitation to you, my mates.
Increasingly, some of my most important learning comes from people outside our community whose questions and observations expose assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Taking those questions seriously has not diminished my trust in this practice. It has made me more discerning about when and how I use it.
Questions like:
- What are the boundaries of the spaces I help create, and what can they genuinely affect?
- What forms of power am I exercising through design, hosting, and harvesting, and how can I account for their effects?
- What structural constraints shape the context in which my work is embedded, and how do they shape what I can or cannot do?
- What happens when what we are doing in any given conversation encounters the world outside the meeting room?
- What else do I need to learn to contribute when the work requires something that the Art of Hosting can’t provide?
This has been a year of honest accounting and reflection for me. I find myself with a deeper appreciation for the core of our work and the genuine contribution it makes, while becoming more careful about the promises I make for it. I want to know more clearly what this practice can do, what it cannot do, what power I exercise when I use it, and what else I need to learn. I offer you these questions too, in that spirit of curiosity, learning, and mateship.
Don Schafer posts a lovely reflection of his conversations with her over the years. I was taken by this paragraph:
barbara once described herself as “entirely pessimistic and actively hopeful.” I liked the phrase when she said it, although I’m not sure I understood then how much it described her. She worried deeply about injustice and about where the world was heading, but worrying never seemed to stop her from doing something about it. The hope was in the doing.
She made a lot of history and helped make Canada a better place for a lot of people.
A former student of Canadian history George Grant has written a very interesting review of a new book by Byron Williston called Ecological Nation: Toward Peace, Order and Good Government. The subtitle of that book echoes the constitutional purpose of Canada, often quoted in contrast to the United States’ life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The reviewer, Bruce K. Ward, contrasts Williston’s book against Grant’s classic Lament for a Nation and looks at both of these work in the context of the current resurgence of Canadian nationalism (the kind directed against US hegemony). It’s worth a read especially because he fairly treats Williston ideas that Canada could become a superpower if only we focused on ecological leadership instead of our current Petro-state aspirations. And he alos takes Williston to task on his conclusion that we aren’t actually going to get there without some form of eco-elitism based on a polished moral order amongst those who govern our country.
Order, justice, limits, planetary health: these are the interconnected elements that can give meaning to our sovereignty. But can such an idea bear the weight of reality? In response to this question, Williston ventures to identify the key worry that our political leadership lacks the courage to confront: despite brave talk, Canadians might not really be prepared to make the significant sacrifices that an “elbows up” nationalism requires, especially one with a green agenda. Williston does not shy away from addressing this concern: “Why do we have such a hard time putting citizenship above consumer comfort?” Citizens with the backbone and discipline to make material sacrifices do not simply appear ready-made. They have to be formed.
I wouldn’t mind having a crack at that book. But what I really aspire to in this world is perhaps a counterfactual: a Canada that thrives because we somehow recover enough of the project we are in together to make that pivot from fossil fuels to renewables, without some kind of top-down designed intervention on our souls. It is a project that could engage the entire country, and as I’ve written in these pages before the sooner we move in that way, the less likely it is that we will need coercion to move in that direction. We have enjoyed “freedom” to burn fossil fuels for so long that so we will discover that we have deferred a future of freedom to choose.
The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention below.
Cory Doctorow has a long piece today that centres on the theme of “the world moves on.” it is a survey of how the 21st century has gone, the concentration of wealth, the degradation of products, law, governance, environments and organizations. The rise of a fascist view of the world that divides us into those “born to rule” and those “born to be ruled.” It is a push to acknowledge that the real feelings we are all having that something is fundamentally broken is not just a nostalgic throwback. The idea of “Making * Great Again” is not that we go back to a time when it was great. It is that we go forward to a time which the persona that declares that intention is in charge of everything. And others are not.
I had a lovely call yesterday with a younger colleague, a person whose dreams and aspirations and talent propelled her into a relationship with power that helped to meet her desire to have an impact in the world. But she found herself trying to wrestle with the cost of that. What does it mean to get close to power, to have a hand in the policy that changes lives, to be involved in a tangible way to make the world better for many people? There is a cost to it, and I can relate. One feels as if one is selling a soul for the chance to grab some influence.
It strikes me as an interesting bifurcation. When I worked for the federal government in the 1990s I was part of a team of people that ran a very important third party stakeholder process which brought non-Indigenous voices and interests into the treaty process. I didn’t;t always like or agree with the people that I was working with, but as a representative of the Government of Canada I took my job seriously. We were doing the work of treaty making and not including the voices and intelligence of people who would be affected by those treaties was to do a disservice to the First Nations with whom we were crafting a sustained and historical relationship.
My colleagues all had different interests in our work. Some were generally distrustful of government to be able to represent citizen interests and they were motivated to ensure that third parties, especially business interests, were as involved as possible. Others were motivated by the history we were making and desired to be a part of something that was sustainable over time. Still others were deeply motivated to ensure that First Nations found themselves in a just and reconciling process and that the honour of the Crown was of the utmost importance. And some were just good public servants which meant they did what they were directed to do and did it well.
I left that job when someone senior to me told me that “I cared too much” about the work. I wore my passion on my sleeve which led to a disagreement with a new boss who didn’t have the lofty goals of my former boss and whose inattention to relationships and the historical nature of the work was lost behind her need to establish technocratic credentials. I hung out my shingle and went to work for Indigenouos organizations, non-profits and governments that were committed to the work of building communities and caring for people.
Several of my friends went the other way, into industry or saw out their careers in the public service. We had been held together in the common project of treaty-making, even though we had many different motivations and purposes for being there. I don’t know that anyone ever felt like they were selling their soul to do the work they did after they left. But they made choices to find them places they cared about and aligned them selves with that. There is always a tradeoff.
In speaking to my colleague yesterday we both shared a sense that over time our sense of impact had shrunk, perhaps to a more realistic size. We all have huge desires to make a legacy in the world, and it takes true encounters with power to find out if we have what it takes to do that. I am in awe with my friend who have successfully run for public office and formed important pieces of federal and provincial governments, or those who has started non-profits or advocacy organizations that have pushed the needle on public policy. I have done a little of that in my own way, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the local work I get to do, by which I mean what happens in the encounter with people who are confronting real particular problems, often with no solutions. I love sitting with 80 year olds in church halls talking about the future of their congregations and accompanying them in the transition. I love sitting with leaders who are exploring how to expand their ability to work with multiple voices and multiple perspectives. I love to watch our Bowen Island business community wrestle with what a local economy might look like in THIS decade. Or a social services agency who has the talent and connections to deliver good quality services in new ways becasue the context seems to drive them to impossible situations.
Cory’s piece names a dynamic that he associates with “conservatism” and its worth quoting in detail:
I collect definitions of “conservatism,” and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin’s book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – “conservative”? What binds all these views together?
Robin’s answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That’s why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That’s why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that “diversity hires,” promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that’s just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn’t prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is “whatever the people who are born to rule desire.” Hence Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservativism, “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” It’s not a crime if the president does it. It’s also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It’s not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. “Taxes are for the little people”:
Now I don’t think that’s necessarily “conservative” although it certainly captures a big wing of the current American conservative movement. I think it’s a description of fascism. But it nevertheless points to a feature of our current times that derives from the concentration of wealth a power: we are increasingly isolated from he levers of real power such that stuff we CAN is not stuff that can FIX whatever is happening.
Doctorow concludes with a kind of muted optimism that the way to be in this world is to be political. Join a union, join a political party, get political. Put your hands on the levers of power while we still have them:
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that’s not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can’t save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it’s so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must.
I like his spirit. But I don’t know. I don;t know what to tell younger colleagues and I don’t know what to tell activists. Politics has become thoroughly enshittified. I have great respect for the people that run for office and chose to govern, especially in the local sphere, but the way politics is related to governance is constrained to serve the interests of the market, the “economy” and those that wield power in those places. That doesn’t mean I don;t think we should devote ourselves to one another and the things we believe in. And I do think we need more unions. The law is still somewhat intact which is why First Nations in Canada are coming in for so much attack. The powers that be know that Constitutionally protected rights throw a wrench in the works of global capital interests who wish to be as unfettered as possible to extract, ship and profit from resources that are located in territories in which First Nations exert a legal form of title. The law still matters a bit, at least in Canada. If I was a young person want ting make social change, I might go into law. I found myself donating to organizations like Egale that fight for the protection of human rights.
My father’s world was different to mine. I started my first real job the same week he was downsized from his, from a company where he had spent 26 years, where he had reached to ceiling of promotion and where he was happy to live out his life as a junior executive. He was escorted from the building at 6pm on a Friday night, because he had been working late. His sole piece of advice to me was “don’t give your loyalty away.” That served me well. Perhaps my advice to folks now is “don’t surrender your love, purpose or integrity.” But I done;t know ho you also make money doing that.
I think the world is different than it has been. Maybe you feel the same way. All I was able to offer my friend yesterday was a connection to someone I felt she might resonate with, and a willingness to just stay in the inquiry because she was so genuinely committed to doing good work in a full-hearted way, with incisiveness and discernment.
What kinds of things are you doing to find your way in it? What do YOU tell younger colleagues who want to do the work you do?
Eroding democracy happens with a slow and persistent trickle of cynicism and mistrust of citizens by their governments. In this review of Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson, Kyle Wyatt reflects:
Democracy is not an idea, not a value, not a right; it’s a practice.” For far too long, citizens have been discouraged from that practice by duly elected governments on the left and the right?—?and by the civil servants and professional consultants in their employ. “Say as little as possible, as late as possible, in the most positive way possible,” they write of a general modus operandi that shapes Queen’s Park as much as it does Ottawa, Washington, London, and most other Western capitals. “It’s a defensive posture?—?useful for political survival, but corrosive to democratic understanding.”
Inevitably, MacLeod and Johnson argue, such corrosion will “slowly poison the democratic well,” leading to widespread cynicism, strongmen, and extremists?—?and to events like the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Populism, resentment, authoritarian nostalgia: These are not fringe forces. They flourish wherever people feel ignored, humiliated, or locked out.”
Every year I teach a course at SFU in Vancouver in the certificate program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. Amongst the most assertive points I make is that inauthentic consultation and engagement is a betray of the promise of democracy, especially if you are working for government but also if you work in the corporate sector.
We are reaching the point where there is very little imagination in this field. The cult of efficiency and the brute impatience of powerful interests has deprived a generation of public engagement specialists from the knowledge and experience required to do this work right. What happens in its stead is performative consultation – engagement washing, I sometimes call it – and in my course I am certainly not afraid of pointing the fingers squarely at those that work at the frontlines of consultation. If you are actively engaged in this form of performative consultation you bear some personal and collective blame for why citizens are feeling disengaged and unrepresented at every level in Canadian governance.
The solutions are beyond us at the moment because the power that dictates what happens and what standards are applied to it are now writing legislation that essentially eliminates the requirements to meaningfully work with communities or interested groups in the pursuit of public policy initiatives. We are at a final chapter for this practice as neo-liberalism has pushed such engagement to the market. Unless you own a tangible interest in a project you really aren’t a stakeholder.
Perhaps what we need now are community investment coops that buy shares of major projects in order to influence them. Many First Nations are already doing this. It’s a cynical response to the problem but at this point it’s the most influential vector for engagement.
I’ll still teach the ideal because I hope people can find avenues of practice to develop these skills during this era while the public square is being auctioned off. But, inspiring examples aside, I’m not hopeful that the kind of meaningful engagement we built in the 1980s and 1990s will be sustained for much longer.