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‘Abundance’ and the quest for a new political order

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , 2 Comments

(Part of a series)  

What will it take to break the downward spiral of polarization in which we seem trapped? In their best-selling book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer their answer, wielding ideas as their weapon of choice.

For ideas to be truly transformative, they need to do more than persuade intellectually, they need also to connect viscerally – both in their resonance with the prevailing discourse, and in the energy they evoke among their potential champions.  Abundance has been written with that transformative intent. The book offers both a wake-up call and a positive vision.  But it largely is silent vis-à- third task, one that is key to inspiring a sense of hope, of possibility   – it does  very little to translate its positive vision into a practical, positive agenda for action. The result has been that instead of  serving as an invitation to progressives to loosen the grip of conventional ways of doing things and embark on a new quest  Abundance  has become yet another source of polarized political combat.

The blog series introduced here endeavors to fill the gap – its principal focus is how to get from here to there. A companion post (see here) lays out  an approach for moving from vision to action centered around building problem-focused coalitions among reform-minded public officials and non-governmental actors. The third and fourth posts provide empirical  illustrations of the approach (both potential and challenges). The third post explores some interactions between civil society and the public sector in democratic South Africa. The fourth post (forthcoming in January) will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.) This post sets the stage, by locating the exploration within Klein & Thompson’s broader vision of the interaction between governance and political orders.

Drawing on the work of  Gary Gerstle, Klein & Thompson define a political order as: “a ‘constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies…..that endures beyond [individual] election cycles”. Political orders don’t change simply via the promulgation of new policies or even electoral alternation. Rather: “policy is downstream of  values……What is needed is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation …..New ideas give way to new laws, new arguments and new customs. People working at all levels of society, inside and outside government, bring these ideas into their labors….”. As Gerstle puts it: “For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life”.

A story about the good life has been central to both of the political orders that shaped American politics over the past century: the New Deal order (roughly 1933 to1979) offered a vision of middle-class prosperity; its vision ran aground in the face of social conflict in the 1960s, and stagflation in the 1970s. The neoliberal political order (roughly 1980-2015) followed; it was centered around a vision of abundance fueled by unleashing the power of private entrepreneurship and the capitalist marketplace.  But by the mid-2010s, it also had reached its sell-by date – undermined by a combination of rising inequality, financial crisis, political polarization, and (in the wake of the election of Barack Obama) resurgent racism.

Klein & Thompson argue that at least since Donald Trump’s  first electoral victory in 2016 we have been living in  “A messy interregnum between political orders; a molten moment when old institutions are failing, traditional elites are flailing, and the public is casting about for a politics that feels like it is of today rather than yesterday.“ Abundance’s implicit goal is nothing less than to offer some foundational ideas for a next-generation renewal of a progressive political order.

As per its title,  the book’s  narrative about the good life’  is one of……….abundance….. but framed from a progressive perspective. Conventionally, the pathway to abundance is via the market – and the abundance that is offered is the familiar consumer cornucopia. Abundance offers something different: “We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house, and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life……… Housing. Transportation. Energy. Health. Abundance is the promise of not just more, but more of what matters….It is a determination to align our collective genius with the needs of both the planet and each other…..“

Addressing the shortages calls not only for the entrepreneurial flair of private, for-profit business, but also for the effective provision of public goods – and thus for a capable state.  But how to achieve the latter?  As their (indirect)  answer to this question, Klein & Thompson offer a wake-up call.

Alongside its positive vision, Abundance lays out a relentless  “….critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years”. (p. 211) Klein and Thompson argue that two deeply-held progressive nostrums stand in the way of achieving abundance.  There is an ‘everything bagel’ approach to governance: “At every level where liberals govern….they often add too many goals to a single project. A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all……Many of the goals are good goals. But are they good goals to include in [this] project? ….with no discussion of trade-offs….or any admission that anything asked for even represented a trade-off”. 

And there is a pre-occupation with formal process, fueled by a hyper-sensitivity to the hazard that government will all-too-easily be captured by powerful special interests. In consequence: “Liberal legalism – and through it, liberal government – has become process-obsessed rather than outcomes oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.” (pp. 90-91)

Both critiques are underpinned with a wealth of damning examples ranging from the morass of regulatory obstacles to expanding the supply of affordable housing, to hyper-cautious constraints on the financing of scientific innovation; and to the disaster of a California high speed rail project that was approved in 2008, spent close to $15 billion over the subsequent seventeen years, but has not yet laid any high speed rail track.

Beyond the very general assertion that “to pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal”, Klein &Thompson’s discussion of governance is framed almost entirely as a critique. They largely  are silent vis-à-vis the question posed at the beginning of this blog post – how to translate their positive vision into a practical, positive agenda for action?  

In his recent book, Why Nothing Works, Greg Dunkelman suggests a way to close the gap between vision and action that aligns closely with Klein & Thompson’s analysis. He frames the issue as a tension between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian approaches to governance: “When progressives perceive a challenge through the Hamiltonian lens, the movement tends to embrace solutions that will pull power up and in. When, by contrast, a problem appears born of some nefarious centralized authority, the movement argues for pushing power down and out……our (contemporary) aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.”

A seemingly obvious conclusion follows: getting things done means becoming less Jeffersonian, and more Hamiltonian – to become more willing to use top-down power to get things done. A corollary follows: stop weighing projects down with too many goals and too many processes.

But Dunkelman’s prescription is accompanied by two large vulnerabilities of its own.  The first is highlighted in a question recently posed by Francis Fukuyama: Recognizing that the formal rules of American democracy by themselves are inadequate to create a healthy democracy, how do we design new participatory institutions that are compatible with getting things done?   A companion post explores in detail a variety of possible answers to this question. The second vulnerability is one that  practitioners who have spent decades wrestling with the challenge of integrating governance reform and practical strategies for improving peoples’ lives know all-too-well – the argument that  to change anything one must change everything. Argumentation along these lines has proven to be a recipe for hubris, disappointment, and subsequent cynicism.  

Gradually, after repeated cycles of high ambition and dashed hopes, a hard-won lesson in humility has been learned. Gains on the ground generally cumulatively, step-by-step  – achieved even in the midst of broader political and institutional messiness. As the second post in this series explores, three mutually-reinforcing guideposts seem key to success: focus on problems rather than systems; champion deliberative, rather than hierarchical/ legalistic bureaucratic norms; foster coalition building that brings together non-governmental actors and those within the public bureaucracy committed to realizing the public purpose.  (Case studies in posts three and four explore some  practical implications  – both opportunities and challenges –   of applying these guideposts.)

Here, to preview, is the overarching message of this series: Transformational change does not require fixing everything, everywhere, all at once. On the contrary,  as subsequent posts will explore,  bringing attention to the practical can inspire – through   its focus on concrete gains,  its evocation of human agency and, more broadly, in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done.

Taking the workaday seriously does not detract from Abundance’s vision. It aligns with it – and, in its practicality, enhances its potency.   Indeed,  as per Klein & Thompson’s vision of a transformed political order, as subsequent posts in this series explore (and as I analyze in depth in an article for the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice), perhaps focusing activism around “the goods needed to build a good life”  has the potential to set in motion a new kind of social movement, one centered around a vision of deliberative, problem-focused partnerships between the public sector and non-governmental actors – a social movement fueled not by polarizing rage but by practical, inclusive hope.

Achieving ‘Abundance’  –  from vision to action  

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

(part of a series)

Increasingly, we seem trapped in an accelerating downward spiral of polarization, with no way out. What will it take to break the spell? In their best-selling book, Abundance, Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson seek to answer the question by leading with ideas. They lay out a compelling positive vision, accompanied by a stark wake-up call. However, they say little about how to translate their positive vision into a practical agenda for action. The resulting gap leaves the field open for their critics to presume the worst.

This post, the lead in a series that aims to build on Abundance’s hope-evoking foundation, lays out an approach for filling the vision-to-action gap.  Subsequent posts use case studies to explore how the approach introduced here plays out in practice – both the successes that have been achieved, and challenges that have arisen. But before before getting into the details of the journey from vision to action, it is helpful to briefly recapitulate Abundance’s core argument (See this preliminary stage-setting post for a more comprehensive treatment.)

In the usual political discourse,  the pathway to abundance is via the market – and the abundance that is offered is the familiar consumer cornucopia. Klein & Thompson, by contrast, offer a vision  “not just of  more, but more of what matters ”   More housing. Better public transportation. Clean, affordable energy. And a health system that works for everyone.Achieving these requires not only private entrepreneurship but also  a capable state.  Thus, Klein & Thompson suggest, “to pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal,”  However, they say very little about  what this implies in practice, and offer instead  a relentless critique of how progressive governance is prone to an excess of (performative) responsiveness, with well-meaning initiatives becoming overloaded with  too-many goals and  too-many checks on decision-making.

As Greg Dunkelman elaborates in his book Why Nothing Works, the seemingly obvious way to close the gap between vision and action is to become more willing to use top-down power  to get things done. A greater willingness to act  is indeed part of what is needed. But  a call for bold top-down institutional renewal can also become a trap – the argument that to change anything one must change everything. 

Practitioners  who have spent decades wrestling with the challenge of integrating governance reform and practical strategies for improving peoples’ lives have learned the hard way that “best practice” argumentation along these lines can all-too-often be a recipe for hubris, disappointment, and subsequent cynicism. Gradually, after repeated cycles of high ambition and dashed hopes, a hard-won lesson in humility and practicality has taken hold. Gains can be achieved even in the midst of broader governance and political messiness – not in one fell swoop, but cumulatively.

The figure below encapsulates what has been learned in the form of  two contrasting ‘models’ for fostering   results-focused renewal of government – a top-down, plan-then-implement  ‘engineering’ model, and a model centered around iterative social learning in the midst of uncertainty. (See here for an in depth technical presentation of the approach, and its provenance in the public management literature.) As the paragraphs that follow detail, the ‘models’  vary radically from one another in their answers to two fundamental  questions: “What”  should be the focus of the  reform effort?  “How”  should reform should be pursued?  Each question is considered in turn.

The difference between the two models in  the ‘what’ of reform  is captured in the top boxes in the figure  – systems-reform versus reform that focuses on the problem-level.  Improving ‘systems’ – the institutional architecture of government – is a worthy endeavor, but it yields results on the ground only over the medium term. Especially when the broader political and institutional context is messy (as it is in most places, most of the time),  reforms that aim to systematically reshuffle the bureaucratic deck can all too easily get lost in bureaucratic minutiae and end up achieving nothing.

By contrast, a problem-focus provides a compelling focal point for results-oriented action. As per its champions, it offers “…..a  ‘true north’ definition of ‘problem solved’ to guide, motivate and inspire action…. A good problem cannot be ignored, and matters to key change agents; can be broken down into easily-addressed causal elements; allows real, sequenced strategic responses.” (Note that Abundance’s  focus on housing, transportation, energy and health – on “the goods needed to build a good life” – lends itself naturally to a problem-focused approach to reform.) 

Turning to the ‘how’ of reform,  a useful point of departure for surfacing differences between the two models is a question posed by Francis Fukuyama in a recent piece  on the practical potential of Abundance.   While Fukuyama  is sympathetic both to the ideas in Abundance and to Dunkelman’s call for more top-down governance, he points to a troubling dilemma for democratic decision-making  that follows from the prescription: “Public participation is one of the thorniest issues with which modern democracies need to deal…..Public input to democratic decision-making is absolutely necessary….It has been a long time since anyone believed that the formal rules of American democracy by themselves are adequate to create a healthy democracy……But how do we design new participatory institutions to meet the conditions [….needed to get things done]? Model 1 and model 2 offer very different answers to Fukuyama’s question.

In model 1, participation plays a role on the margin, an add-on of sorts to its top-down approach to getting things done. This add-on can take one or all of a variety of forms:

  • Enhancing accountability for performance via a variety of formal checks and balances plus a range of less formal demand-side mechanisms (for example, advocacy/protest and investigative journalism).
  • Championing transparency as a way to support arms-length efforts at monitoring and enforcement.
  • Deliberative democracy – structured, time-bound mechanisms for eliciting input from citizens (see here and here).  

Note the arms-length (and sometimes adversarial) relationship between the public sector and non-governmental actors that underlies each of these. As the case study of South Africa in the third blog post in this series suggests, when underlying state capacity is strong arms-length and adversarial approaches can be effective in improving performance; but they can be counterproductive when capacity is less and citizens have become increasingly disillusioned and cynical.

Model 2’s  approach to participation is very different. The model brings non-governmental actors to center stage, not as adversaries or point-in-time deliberators, but as coalitional allies in the co-production of social value. As the figure signals, this differs from model 1 in two  far-reaching ways – in how stakeholders engage with power, and in how they interact with one another.

To begin with power,  model 1 presumes that space for reform is won and lost electorally. By contrast, in model 2  problem-level coalition-building is key to opening up space for reform. Stakeholders with an interest in the problem at hand differ  radically from one another in both their goals and in the power they can command. Some are unambiguously supportive of the social purpose associated with the coalitional endeavor. Others are predators who seek to capture for their own private purposes what the protagonists are seeking to build. Coalition-building offers a way to achieve gains via the construction of problem-focused alliances that are sufficiently strong to fend off predators who might have private and political reasons for undermining the initiatives.   

Beyond the immediate task of opening up space for reform, model 2 also  involves an ongoing shift in ways of doing things on the part of  both civil actors and reformers within government. For  civil society, a central challenge is to put aside, for  at least some problems and some key junctures in the process of change,  the allure of adversarialism and embrace a more collaborative mode of engagement with the public sector. Correspondingly, the task for the public sector is to shift, in at least in some domains of activity, from a legalistic to a deliberative mode of engagement – valuable both in itself and as key to working collaboratively with civil society.    (The third blog post in this series explores the opportunities and challenges associated with making this shift, centered around a recent in-depth analysis of interactions between civil society and the public sector in democratic South Africa. The fourth post (forthcoming in January) will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.) 

In his award-winning 2022 comparative analysis of the performance of education systems in two Indian states, Making Bureaucracy Work. Akshay Mangla captures the essence of the difference between how legalistic/hierarchical  and deliberative bureaucracies do things. As he puts it:

“Legalistic bureaucracy urges fidelity to administrative rules and procedures….The ideal-typical Weberian state motivates bureaucrats to set aside their private interests and advance the public good…by insulating bureaucrats from political pressures and instilling a commitment to rational-legal norms….Bureaucrats are judged for following rules and not for the consequences that emanate from their actions….”

By contrast: “Deliberative  bureaucracy promotes flexibility and problem-solving….it induces a participatory dynamic that urges officials to negotiate policy problems through discussion and adjust their outlooks to shifting circumstances….  It is found to have made a decisive impact with respect to literacy and the quality of education policy…  It enables state officials to undertake complex tasks, co-ordinate with society and adapt policies to local needs, yielding higher quality education services.”

As Mangla details using the example of basic education, legalistic bureaucracy is more effective in addressing logistical tasks (eg building schools);  deliberative bureaucracy is better at  addressing complex tasks that require ongoing adaptation (eg improving learning outcomes and multi-dimensional challenges such as reducing homelessness).

Embracing problem-focused coalitions rather than insulating government from civil society comes with risks: the risks of reproducing performative progressivism that inhibits action; the risks of capture. But risks can be managed and,  as argued earlier, these risks need to be set against the hazards of hubris, stasis and disillusion –  of bold-sounding reforms that lead nowhere. There is risk and opportunity in all directions. Both/and is the way forward.

In sum, stepping back from the details of the two models,  transformational change does not require fixing everything, everywhere, all at once. On the contrary,  bringing attention to the practical can inspire in its focus on concrete gains, in its evocation of human agency, and in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done. Taking the workaday seriously does not detract from Abundance’s vision, it aligns with it – and, in its practicality, gives it greater potency.

Perhaps even more may be possible. In the spirit with which Klein & Thompson wrote Abundance  (see the companion stage-setting post) might problem-level gains provide a platform for a broader transformation of the interface between citizens and public officials?  Might forward-looking political leaders embrace an electoral and governance platform centred around a problem-focused vision of partnership between the public sector and non-governmental actors to deliver “more of what matters to build a good life”? This would, of course,  be a radical departure from contemporary pressure-cooker discourses that thrive on raising rather than reducing the temperature.  But, as Robert Putnam explored in his 2020 book The Upswing,   it happened in the USA between the 1880s and the 1920s, and it could happen again: 

A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship …Progressive Era innovations were seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety… National leadership came after sustained, widespread citizen engagement….. A [new] upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”

Problem-focused coalitional governance in action – three case studies

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

(Abundance series #3)

Ideas can help break an accelerating downward spiral of polarization by offering inspiration – but to be credible, a positive vision also needs to be accompanied by a practical agenda for action. Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s best-selling book, Abundance offers a compelling positive vision along with a sharp wake-up call for progressive governance. But it largely leaves unresolved how that vision can become a strategy for action.

This post explores that question through three linked mini- case studies which focus on one central dimension of problem-focused coalitional governance: how civil society engages at the level of concrete problems – and how different modes of engagement shape outcomes. The three cases are:

  • Mini-case study #1 explores how ongoing, adaptive engagement by civil society has been key to South Africa’s reversal of a disastrous HIV/AIDS pandemic  – a decade-long high-profile adversarial campaign was followed by  sustained efforts to work more coalitionally with reformers within government to help strengthen both policymaking and implementation.
  • Mini-case study #2  explores how problem-focused coalitional governance helped improve learning outcomes in a half-dozen countries, even in the face of broader governance messiness.
  • Mini-case study #3  explores how a disproportionate emphasis on hierarchical, arms-length and adversarial modes of engagement has constrained national, subnational and school-level  efforts to improve learning outcomes in South Africa.  

The mini-case studies draw on a chapter, co-authored with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood, in a just-published book, The State of the South African State, plus a decade of prior comparative research on the political economy of education sector reform.

Together with two companion essays, this piece forms part of a short series that probes how to close the gap between vision and action.  A stage-setting post  situates Abundance within the larger arc of literature on political orders, and highlights both the book’s positive vision and its critique of progressive governance. A companion conceptual post (see here) lays out a framework centered around the collective efforts of coalitions of reform-oriented public officials and non-governmental actors to address concrete problems. (A fourth post, forthcoming in January, will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.)

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Mini case study #1: South Africa’s HIV-AIDS Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) (Click here for access to the Levy-Heywood case study;  Heywood has played a leadership role in the TAC since its inception.)

The TAC is an extraordinary example of successful activism on the part of civil society: “Upon the TAC’s formation in 1998, no person living with AIDS was receiving life-saving antiretroviral treatment in the public health sector and almost all infected people died….. [A decade later, South Africa began to roll out what has become….]  the largest HIV treatment program in the world, now covering over 5.8 million people and nearly 80 per cent of the eight million people living with HIV in South Africa.   Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of this programs results has been a rise in life expectancy of more than a decade for men and women and a massive drop in infant mortality due to HIV infection.”

The case study explores the interplay between adversarial and coalitional strategies over the TAC’s quarter century of effort: “The TAC’s history can be divided into two parts: a period of confrontation over government policy and President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism (1998–2007); and a coalitional period (and when deemed necessary, confrontation and/or challenge), working with committed public officials over implementation of a policy that TAC eventually managed to co-create with the government (2007 to the present).”

The first period was characterized by: “….almost a decade of intense conflict between TAC and the government over its policy, particularly its refusal to include a treatment component to HIV prevention and care….This first period was bitter and divisive……

Eventually, government responded to pressure from the TAC (and broader disquiet , including from within the ANC, with the prevailing policies): In late 2006/7, the TAC delegated several of its leaders to work with the Office of the Deputy President to develop a new framework for a National Strategic Plan on HIV….agreement was reached in early 2007….. Key TAC leaders were appointed to senior positions in the South African National AIDS Council, SANAC  (a body that had been set up by President Mbeki in 1999), where they worked closely with government. For a period SANAC became a forum for de facto co-governance of the AIDS response.

From 2007 onwards, there was a far-reaching transformation in how government and civil society engaged with each other: “The TAC offered public servants in the Health Department a vision of care and treatment that provided hope, encouraged innovation and inspired (rather than commanded) performance…… Through its branches, TAC assessed the actual state of delivery on the ground and frequently allied with local health workers. It was central to setting up organizations like the Stop Stockouts Project which monitors the availability of essential healthcare medicines and children’s vaccines…..The TAC tackled the serious stigma that surrounds HIV infection by building hundreds of branches for people living with HIV. Its branches were conduits for its pioneering program of ‘treatment literacy’ carried out with the guidance and support of health professionals.”

South Africa’s approach to addressing HIV-AIDS had shifted from accelerating disaster to an exemplar of what coalitional,  learning-oriented and deliberative governance can achieve – a ‘best practice’ case that paralleled the primary health care reforms in the Brazilian state of Ceara, documented by Judith Tendler in her classic book, Good Government in the Tropics.  (Note, though that, as mini-case-study #3 will explore further, an embrace of coalitional engagement has been more the exception than the rule in democratic South Africa.)

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Mini case study #2: improving learning outcomes in middle income countries.

The second mini-case study draws on a synthesis of a dozen country studies of  the politics of education policy reform and implementation written for the Research Programme on Improving Systems of Education (RISE).  What follows highlights some striking (and paradoxical when considered through a conventional lens) findings on how problem-focused coalitional governance added value at each of national, provincial, district and school levels.

At national level:

A comparison of the case studies of education sector governance in  Chile and Peru points to both some limitations of top-down governance, and some strengths of problem-focused coalitions. In Chile,  interactions among stakeholders largely were top-down and systematically managed, yet improvements in learning outcomes were modest.  By contrast,Peru achieved large gains in learning outcomes, even though it has long had to navigate an extraordinarily turbulent political and institutional environment – including an education sector led by 20 ministers in 25 years. As the Peru country case study  explored in depth,  Peru’s messier, less formalistic and more iterative process of policy formulation and adaptation helped build broad legitimacy among stakeholders:

“ Civil society organizations – NGOs, universities, think tanks and research centers – have also played a key role in defining policy agendas [and….]  in the development of education policies and reforms. Though agreements are often ignored by ministerial administrations and political parties,   they have certainly contributed to the continuity of agendas and to the advancement, through piecemeal, of reforms.”

At provincial level

In his award-winning 2022 book, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India  Akshay Mangla distinguishes conceptually between legalistic and deliberative bureaucracies, and analyzes the strengths and weakness of each in improving learning outcomes in two Indian states:

“Legalistic bureaucracy in Uttar Pradesh has promoted gains in primary school enrollment and infrastructure…. enabling officials to resist political interference when providing inputs to schools…..[But] local administration’s adherence to rules imposed administrative burdens…. Cumulatively, these processes contributed to low quality education….”

By contrast, in Himachal Pradesh, deliberative norms and participatory/coalitional governance have been mutually reinforcing. “At independence, Himachal Pradesh was among India’s least literate states…. HP is now among India’s leading states with respect to literacy and primary education policy education indicators….. Deliberative bureaucracy is found to have made a decisive impact…  enabling state officials to undertake complex tasks, co-ordinate with society and adapt policies to local needs, yielding higher quality education services.”

At district level.

Ghana and Bangladesh  illustrate how local coalitions helped improve learning outcomes, even in the face of broader systemic weaknesses. In Ghana, interactions between decentralization and clientelism added to the incoherence and politicisation of the education sector. But there was a silver lining: “The drivers of improved performance and accountability do not flow from the national to the local level, but instead have to be regenerated at the level of districts and schools…. In [some] districts…. there was evidence of the emergence of a developmental coalition between community, school and district-level actors….including ‘political officials and teacher unions…..evident at district level, and mirrored at the community level.”

Similarly: “Bangladesh features an education system which, while formally highly centralized, is in practice fairly decentralized and discretionary in whether and how it implements reforms….. Learning reforms were adopted and implemented to the extent that the relationship between school authorities, the local elites involved in school governance, and the wider community aligned behind improved teacher and student performance.”

At school level

Kenya’s long history of involving parents and communities in the governance of schools has had far-reaching consequences. As a long-standing observer of the system reported: “What one sees is an expectation for kids to learn and be able to have basic skills…. Exam results are…. posted in every school and over time so that trends can be seen. Head teachers are held accountable for those results to the extent of being paraded around the community if they did well or literally ban from school and kicked out of the community if they did badly.”

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Mini case study #3: South Africa’s fraught efforts to improve learning outcomes.

Notwithstanding the encouraging examples in mini-case-study #2, many education systems seem stuck in low-level equilibria, with repeated fruitless attempts to improve poor learning outcomes by doubling down on top-down, legalistic reforms.  Heywood and Levy’s second case study (which draws on Levy et. al, 2018) explores the balance between adversarial/legalistic and coalitional/deliberative approaches at each of national, provincial and school-levels. 

At national-level: “South Africa’s education sector stakeholders (inside and outside of government)  have failed to co-operate sufficiently to be able to bring about effective change. Part of the reason for this failure can be traced to more general societal pre-occupations with adversarial civil society approaches and bureaucratic insulation. [Examples include]:

  •  A failure among experts to constructively work through their disagreements has been an important part of why the country has repeatedly failed to put in place any systematic assessments of learning before the end of twelfth grade……
  • South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) has almost uniformly been demonized by sector professionals, media and many politicians as disruptive and as a principal cause of the sector’s failures even though, as with teachers’ unions everywhere, SADTU has to navigate inherent tensions between its role as an advocate of the material interests of teachers and its role as a professional organization. Coalitional approaches would include efforts to build common cause with teachers committed to the more professional parts of this dual identity….”

At subnational-level: “Civil society’s default mode of engagement at provincial level often has been adversarial. Yet judicial victories and resulting court-imposed obligations to improve infrastructure have limited potential for impact [in those provinces]  where bureaucracies lack the legalistic/logistical capacity for follow-through.”

At school-level: The 1996 South African Schools Act (SASA)  included reforms that gave far-reaching authority to school governing bodies in which parents were the majority. These reforms were motivated in part by the liberatory impulses of grass-roots democratic movements, and in part by the concerns of apartheid-era elites about how schools would be governed. The latter has enabled public schools serving (now more multi-racial) elites to perform well. By contrast:

“While a few exemplary civil society organizations work collaboratively at school and community levels, there has been little sustained effort to breathe life into the SASA architecture within low-income communities….. We [Heywood and Levy] recognize that, outside elite settings, it can be difficult for parents and communities to exercise their voices…but it is not the practical challenges facing civil society that account for the lack of attention paid to the possibilities for inclusive governance created by SASA. Rather, it is the ideational lens through which South Africans approach the role of civil society in public service provision.”

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As the mixed response to Abundance reveals, efforts to translate a positive vision into a practical agenda for change seem repeatedly to become snarled in binary either/or discourses. The reasons seem rooted less in evidence than in competing ideational ‘priors’ – in this instance a ‘high modernist’ perspective that top-down institutional engineering is necessary and sufficient to effect change,  versus a ‘social justice’ perspective centered around mobilizing against unjust and corrupt elites.

The case studies in this blog post (and the conceptual framework laid out in a companion post) point towards a hopeful third possibility – namely that bringing attention to the practical can inspire in its focus on concrete gains, in its evocation of human agency, and in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done. As Heywood & Levy argue, what to prioritize varies by place and time.

Here is how we open our chapter: “Civil society played a key role in the struggle to end apartheid. In the first three decades of South Africa’s democracy, civil society’s continuing efforts to hold government to account have yielded some massive, vital victories. But times have changed……” 

Here is how we conclude: “A crucial, continuing challenge for the South African state is to renew a sense of hope and possibility. Highlighting failures and mobilizing around them  does not renew hope – on the contrary, it can risk deepening disillusionment. The times call not for deepening confrontation, but for a mode of social mobilization on the part of civil society that fosters, rather than undercuts, a sense of solidarity and shared purpose.”

The above is not relevant only to South Africa.  The contemporary USA finds itself trapped in its own downward spiral of disillusionment and polarization.  In Abundance, Klein & Thompson offer acounter- vision that is intended to inspire. This, they  suggest, will require a state that is both capable and willing to act. But as a vibrant recent literature (synthesized here) has explored, effectiveness alone is not sufficient to renew civic perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain. n his 2020 book, The Upswing, Robert Putnam sought to draw lessons for the contemporary USA from the 1880s and the 1920s: 

A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship …Progressive Era innovations were seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety… National leadership came after sustained, widespread citizen engagement….. A [new] upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”

Perhaps the ideas and experiences laid out in this blog series can contribute in a small way to setting aside either/or polarities and embracing a similarly inclusive vision of change.

LA homelessness: Setting the stage for painful choices – an empirical (re-)framing

October 31, 2025 By in affordable housing, homelessness, homelessness, Los Angeles, public sector governance, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In 2023, I began a program of research on some innovative governance arrangements for addressing homelessness that  LA’s political, civic, bureaucratic and private sector leaders put in place as part of a determined effort  to finally come to grips with a long-festering crisis (see here and here).  Over the past two years, the tide of  Los Angeles’  homelessness seemed to turn. However, as highlighted by some extraordinarily forthright and stark presentations  (available here) at a  recent meeting  of one of the new bodies –  the multistakeholder Leadership Table for Regional Homeless Alignment –   new budgetary and economic pressures threaten reversal.

In coming months I plan to track how the  governance arrangements respond to this new trial by fire. This piece (and an accompanying  technical note)  sets the stage for that work by laying out –  from an empirical and ‘technocratic’ rather than a governance perspective –  how I have come to understand LA’s homelessness crisis.  The analysis builds on some recent innovative applications of  systems analysis (here and here)  that  frame  homelessness  as a “flow”, rather than only as a “stock”.  As the systems approach suggests, framing homelessness as a flow both helps surface some perhaps under-recognized aspects of LA’s homelessness challenge, and directs attention to some potentially important questions vis-à-vis the policy response to the new, straitened circumstances.

Figure 1: Homelessness in LA – inflows and outflows (2023)

Source:  Leadership Table

At first sight, Los Angeles’ challenge  seems straightforward: end homelessness for the 70,000 or so people  -roughly  50,000 of whom live on the streets –  identified as homeless in recent iterations of the region’s annual point-in-time (PIT)  count. However, as Figure 1 illustrates for 2023, the PIT count (a “stock”)  captures only a moment in an ongoing and much larger flow: in that year 103,000 people accessed  LA County’s homeless services. [Note that, while the analysis that follows draws principally on data from 2022/23, newly released data reports a 30% (!!!) increase to 133,000 in the number accessing these services in 2024/25.] Between 2020 and 2024, close to 300,000 people (3% of LA County’s population of 10 million) accessed the county’s homeless services at least once.

Viewed through a structural lens, the evidence is compelling that over time the aggregate number of people who enter into homelessness is driven by metropolitan-area level interactions between the cost of housing and income (both wages and safety net support) at the bottom end of the economy. As I summarize here, for many decades LA’s trends have been dismal vis-à-vis both housing and median-and-below wages . However, these structural drivers can only be reversed over the medium- and longer-term. In the near-term, the challenge is to make better use of existing resources.

How,  at a time when the regional economy is turning soft, the safety net is under threat, and funds to combat homelessness are set to contract, might available fiscal resources be more effectively deployed? The empirically-anchored analytical framework laid out in this piece might  hopefully  help address this near-term challenge.

Considered as a flow, homelessness is daunting in its complexity. Multiple drivers  lead to homelessness; there are multiple pathways through homelessness;  and multiple ways to exit. One way to cut through the complexity is to group the challenges posed by homelessness into three distinct ‘clusters’: 

  • Short-term homelessness –  those who enter and then exit homelessness within 6-12 month  (including initiatives to identify and pre-emptively support those most at risk of becoming homeless). 
  • ‘Slippery slope’ homelessness – those who lack/miss the ‘lifeboat’ of early exit and risk a deepening downward spiral.
  • ‘Chronic’ homelessness – those who have lived on the street for long enough and/or have personal vulnerabilities of a kind that render them unable to exit homelessness and live independently without sustained support.

The paragraphs that follow consider each of these, beginning with the last.

Many in LA view homelessness and chronic homelessness as synonymous. As the cluster framework signals,  this view is mistaken – though chronic homelessness indeed comprises the most highly visible aspect of homelessness,  and its magnitude  is large. (As the technical note details, the numbers vary depending on the definition used. According to LAHSA’s highly-granular  definition, in 2024 about 32,000 people were chronically homeless. Other estimates range widely –  from about  20-42,000 –   with the specifics varying according to the definition used.)

Careful micro-level research has shown that “housing first” (more precisely,  the provision of permanent supportive housing)  is the most effective and cost effective way of helping people who have been chronically homeless to live a stably housed life. Perhaps surprisingly to some, in recent years, LA has had an effective large-scale program of placing homeless people into permanent housing – about 20,000 annually, amounting to over 130,000 since 2017.  But permanent housing (especially with the necessary support services) does not come cheap; as of 2025, the LA region was spending well over $300 million annually on its PSH program.  

A central reason why implementing “housing first” is so costly is, of course, LA’s massive undersupply of affordable (and other) housing.  But this undersupply can only be addressed over the medium and longer-term – a narrow focus on “housing first” thus has little to offer vis-à-vis  the urgent immediate challenge of  how  best to deploy scarce fiscal resources to mitigate the damage to come.  Recognizing this brings to the fore   the two earlier stages in the homelessness “flow” –  short-term and slippery-slope homelessness. 

Estimates of the number of people who are homeless only for a short time vary widely. As the technical note details, “stock” estimates derived from the early-2024 PIT count range from 16-26,000, depending on how the cut-off duration is defined. This number is way below the 58,000 that, as per Figure 1, newly accessed homeless services over the course of 2023. [In 2024/25, the number newly accessing homeless services increased to 81,000.] A moment’s reflection will point to the reason for the disconnect –  most short-term homeless enter into and then exit from homelessness between  counts. As the companion technical note explores in detail, for most people  a spell of homelessness is relatively short: about 40% of those who become homeless exit within six months; an  additional 30% or so exit over the subsequent eighteen-month period; and a further 20% over the subsequent three years.  (Note that at the rates of exit just cited, nine out of ten people who become homeless  exit  over the subsequent five years – projecting forward this would imply that of the  60,000 people who became homeless in 2023, about 6,000 would remain so in 2028.)   

For at least three reasons, these seemingly rapid rates of exit should not be mis-interpreted as implying that homelessness is in large part self-correcting, with policy mattering little for how it evolves.  For one thing, the current rapid rates of exit are based on LA’s prevailing ambitious (and fiscally costly) efforts to reduce homelessness. In the coming period, as the presentations to the Leadership Table highlighted, budget cuts will undo a quite substantial part of this effort: entry into homelessness will accelerate;  rates of exit will slow.  For another, the number of people homeless at any point in time is the accumulated  total of those remaining homeless after initially becoming homeless in some prior year.  Increases are likely in the number of people who become newly homeless, the numbers will add up rapidly. Perhaps most fundamentally, the challenges of providing support and facilitating exit are not static –  what all-too-often happens to those who remain on the streets converts crisis into tragedy.  This last  brings us to the third ‘cluster – slippery slope homelessness.

As even casual observation of people living on the street reveals, there is a close association between homelessness and personal vulnerability. The background technical note details this association vis-a-vis  five sets of vulnerabilities: mental health (MH); substance abuse (SA); physical vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities associated with prior experience  of prior foster care or incarceration.  As detailed there, an estimated 57% of an entering homeless cohort have at least one of the five vulnerabilities;  43% have none. (Note that while the impact of economic vulnerability is not analyzed directly, its role is implicit in the relatively  large share of  ‘none of the above’. )

Figure 2: Mental health and substance abuse among a (representative)  100 person homeless cohort  – change over  the course of  three years.

Crucially for policy, as Figure 2 above illustrates,  the homelessness-vulnerability association is not static  – the incidence of vulnerabilities among the continuing-homeless cohort changes with the passage of time. Why? Because mental health and substance abuse are both causes and consequences of homelessness.   Figure 2  provides specific estimates of the magnitudes by which  MH/SA challenges compound as a result of homelessness. (See the background note for details on how these “flow” parameters were estimated.) Forty of a representative cohort of  100 homeless people  had struggled with MH/SA issues prior to becoming homeless; for 17 of the 40, symptoms become more complex over the course of three homeless years. Even starker are the trends  among the 60 people who entered homelessness with no MH/SA challenges: After three years of homelessness, 35 of the 60 have MH/SA symptoms, including 12  who wrestle with complex MH/SA challenges.

Stepping back from the details, how might the three-cluster framework help address some urgent, looming policy challenges confronting LA’s efforts to address homelessness? At its recent meeting, the Leadership Table was put on notice that in the coming year, spending to address homelessness would need to be cut by about one-third (!!), even as the number of people becoming newly homeless would continue to rise. An obvious first step is to look for efficiency gains – how well are resources being used to deliver on programs already underway? But belt-tightening can only go so far. When the required cuts are large, attention also needs to be given to effectiveness – are we doing the right things? The three-cluster framework potentially offers some insights vis-à-vis the latter question.

Viewed as a “stock” the policy challenge is seemingly the relatively straightforward one of reducing numbers, with each person newly-housed (via, say, “housing first”) moving things closer to the goal, with priority for the chronically homeless. By contrast, viewing homelessness as a flow directs attention to the ‘short-term’ and ‘slippery-slope’ clusters –  and thus to the value of intervening  as early as possible in a person’s homelessness journey – the earlier the exit from homelessness, the lower are its personal, fiscal and social costs.   

Considering priorities through this latter lens, a variety of questions arise:   Are there cost effective ways of forestalling homelessness for those who are at greatest risk?    What facilitates rapid exit from homelessness?  For those for whom homelessness has begun to take hold, what can be done to reduce the risk of journeying all the way down the slippery slide to disaster?  

None of the above questions are new to those who have long labored to reduce homelessness.  Even so, at this moment of fiscal stringency when it is urgent to look again at how resources are being used, perhaps the empirical lens laid out in this note contributes in a small way to taking a more expansive view of the options available –  one that not only focuses on how to minimize damage to ongoing programs but also assesses comparatively  the cost effectiveness of a broad range of possibilities for  addressing our region’s homelessness crisis.

Hope in the dark? LA’s bold governance reforms to address homelessness

October 1, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The drumbeat of dispiriting daily news makes it difficult to look beyond immediate crisis. Where to find hope? Los Angeles’ ongoing homelessness crisis might seem an especially unlikely place to look. As explored in detail here, every night nearly 50,000 people sleep unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles County, and every year well over 60,000 people become newly homeless   – and the Trump administration’s efforts to shred the safety net threaten to make things much worse, soon.  Even so, as USC professor Yan Tang and I detail in a recent article in the National Civic Review,  a close look at how LA is addressing homelessness offers some unexpectedly good news.

“Populists don’t just feed on socio-economic discontent. They feed on ineffective government” Ezra Klein and Derick Thompson argue in their bestselling book, Abundance, quoting two eminent scholars.  Klein and Thompson highlight failures in LA’s response to its twin crises of homelessness and a massive shortfall of affordable housing as exhibit number one in a broader indictment of progressive governance. But things have moved on. [Author’s note: This post was written prior to my recent ‘Achieving Abundance blog series; an updated version that explores in detail the links between homelessness in LA and the arguments laid out in that series will be forthcoming in a few weeks.]

As the Levy-Tang National Civic Review article details, the LA region’s  recent efforts to address homelessness  include some bold,  largely unheralded, but innovative and potentially transformative  governance reforms. These reforms, the article argues,  have the potential to provide a platform for far-reaching improvements in the effectiveness  of the LA region’s efforts to address its homelessness crisis.

Some of the governance reforms aim to bring more top-down coherence to how hierarchical authority is exercised. Others aim to foster greater horizontal alignment across jurisdictions and service providers.  The top-down reforms  are moving forward at breakneck speed – a new, consolidated Los Angeles County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, is scheduled to open on January 1, 2026.  Yet one can readily imagine a scenario in which, rather than embracing the possibilities of the new institutional environment, many of the multiple public and non-profit organizations working to address homelessness outside the umbrella of the new  department could become pre-occupied with fending for themselves.

The “horizontal”  governance reforms – the creation of two new multistakeholder bodies to support better alignment of approaches to homelessness across the LA region – potentially could address the risk of balkanization.   The county-wide adoption earlier this year of a set of top-line goals for reducing homelessness formulated by the two bodies points to their potential. However, unlike the new department, the multistakeholder bodies lack any obvious and established champion. While they are making substantial progress in clarifying and consolidating their roles going forward, the risk remains that the painstakingly constructed shared vision that led to their emergence could all-too-easily be washed away by the crises (and parochial interests) of the moment.

Indeed, if they are to succeed, the new governance arrangements will need to hit the ground running and successfully confront what is shaping up as a potentially massive  fiscal crisis. Addressing homelessness effectively takes resources: resources for support services, resources to help the most vulnerable pay their rents, and resources to expand the supply of affordable housing. In LA,  these costs are exacerbated not only by the number of people who are homeless,  but by decades of income stagnation for the bottom half of its residents on the one hand, and rising rents (fueled by an undersupply of housing) on the other.

A recent ballot initiative approved by voters raises about $1 billion annually (via increases in local sales taxes) to combat homelessness. One third of the resources is earmarked for a new initiative to build more affordable housing. The remaining two-thirds  replenish earlier (now expired) commitments – and are barely enough to sustain existing programs.  Even in the absence of the Trump cuts, the system already was overstretched. Current Trump administration budget proposals (some of which have so far been somewhat restrained by budget committees in the House and Senate)  include billions of dollars of further cuts  in rental assistance, in permanent housing support, in  Medicaid-funded housing for health initiatives, and in food stamps and other safety net programs. In the context of a regional economic slowdown and the already-extreme economic vulnerability of LA’s low-income earners, shredding the safety net could result in a tsunami of new homelessness.

What, then, is the balance between good news and bad news? It seems certain that bad news lies immediately ahead. Recent gains in reducing the number of people living on the streets will almost surely be reversed. Increases in homelessness could be large. Fiscal pressures will worsen. Daunting strategic decisions lie ahead. The new governance arrangements confront a trial by fire, even as they have barely left the starting gate.

But the following also is true: Prior to the recent reforms, LA’s governance arrangements to address homelessness were characterized by low trust, ambiguous authority, and the absence of any coherent ways of fostering co-operation and holding the system to account. As the National Civic Review article explores, the new arrangements address these weaknesses. They may not survive the trial that lies ahead, but they have a fighting chance.  Sometimes, crisis and adversity can focus effort in inspiring ways.  

Coming months will tell. Watch this space for updates.

‘Undocumented’ in LA – some stubborn facts

June 20, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve lived through this before. My first two decades of life were during peak apartheid  in Cape Town, South Africa. Beneath the glistening surface of the city’s sunshine, mountains and ocean was tyranny.  Police cars roamed the street, looking to immediately deport black people who didn’t have the required ‘dompas’ document. Families were forcibly removed from their homes. Informal settlements were bulldozed. Brutalization coarsened life -not only for those who were direct targets, but for everyone.

When I came to the United States in the late 1970s, it was with a sense of relief, hope and possibility – now I was living in a land dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a country that promised, in words engraved above the main entrance to the Supreme Court building,  “equal justice before the law”. And when I moved  to Los Angeles about three years ago, I was thrilled to discover a city that, contrary to East Coast stereotypes, was vibrant, welcoming, and rich in its cultural  diversity. Yet in the days since the Trump administration unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and federal troops  on the city I have lain awake at night, shocked and distressed by  the parallels between my early years in Cape Town and what is happening in LA.

As someone committed to exploring how history shapes culture, politics and the economy I am mindful of the many differences between LA and Cape Town, and their implications for policy choices. But in what follows my primary purpose is not to explore nuance, but to assemble some baseline data (taken, except where noted, from  a 2024 California-wide study, centered around 2019 data)  in a way that directs attention to two urgent issues: (i) the catastrophic social and economic consequences for LA  if the Trump administration continues to pursue  its militarized and rhetorically shrill and polarizing approach  to forced removals; and thus (ii) the urgency of crafting a different way forward.  I organize the data around five sets of stubborn facts.

Stubborn Facts I: Undocumented residents  comprise a significant share of of LA’s – and California’s – population.

Stubborn Facts II: Undocumented residents are deeply embedded into Californian society.

  • 31% of California’s  2019 undocumented population  had been resident  in the state for 20 or more years; 41% for 10-19 years; 13% for 5-9 years; and 15% for less than five years.
  • More than half of the undocumented population live in households that include a citizen or permanent resident.
  • 20% of all children  under age 18  in LA County (and 17% across California)  live in a household where at least one person is undocumented.

Stubborn Facts III: The assault on undocumented residents targets especially the state and county’s Latino population

  • 48% of the population of LA County – and 39% of all Californians  –  are Latino.
  • 86% of California’s total Latino population of 15.2 million people are citizens or permanent residents.
  • As of 2019, about 75% of California’s undocumented population was Latino; almost 1.7 million people came from Mexico, and a further 360,000 from El Salvador and Guatemala. An additional 2.3 million Latino citizens of California live in a household where at least one person is undocumented;  4 million people will thus be directly affected by mass deportations.  
  • Across California,  29% of Latino children live in a household where at least one person is undocumented.

Undocumented residents are  intertwined with California’s long-established Latino community – a  community that  cuts across  classes, and localities.  In the vibrant, culturally-diverse Los Angeles County, whose Latino residents are neighbors, friends, and co-workers, targeting the undocumented Latino population for forced removal will be devastating – not only for those immediately affected, but for all of us.

Stubborn Facts IV: Undocumented residents are woven deep into the economic fabric of Los Angeles.

  • As of 2019, over 64% of all California’s undocumented residents above the age of sixteen were employed (as compared with 59% for the working age population as a whole); less than 5 percent   were unemployed.
  • Median 2019 hourly wages  across California were $13 per for undocumented workers, $19 for immigrants and $26 for the US-born population
  • Across California,  52 percent of  undocumented residents have less than a high school education; 22% have a high school diploma; and 26% have at least some college education.
  • Across California, undocumented workers account for approximately half of all employment in  agriculture –  and a similar percentage of child care, home aide, housecleaning and other domestic workers.
  • In LA County, undocumented workers account for about a third of all construction sector employment, 21% of manufacturing employment,  and 17-20% of employment in hospitality, wholesale and retail trades.

Forced removal of undocumented workers will thus have devastating consequences for labor supply at the less skilled end of the labor market, with widespread bankruptcies and cost escalations likely in multiple sectors.  

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History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.  South Africa’s forced removals began in the late 1940s. They set in motion a  cascading cycle of decade-long protest, two decades of brutal repression and dehumanization – and then mass civic uprising. Sustained efforts at forced removals in LA will almost surely  be accompanied by a parallel combination of protest and repression – a massive blow to the heart of a great city.

How to avoid catastrophe? To address this question, we need to add a fifth set of stubborn facts to the four laid out above. Between 1970 and 2024, the share of the American population that was foreign born  rose from 4.7% to 15.6%,  with the latter the highest percentage since at least 1850. In the four years of the Biden administration the estimated number of undocumented people living in the United States rose by over 5 million.  If catastrophe is to be avoided, simply ignoring the structural underpinnings of America’s current anti-immigrant fervor is not an option.

But nor is it an option to ignore the far-reaching social and economic consequences of the draconian imposition of immigration policy. The bloodless technocratic advocacy of ‘robust’ enforcement of existing policies (for example, this New York Times  podcast conversation between right-of-center columnist Ross Douthat and the American Enterprise Institute’s Matthew Continetti) is as outrageously detached from any realistic reckoning with consequences as reckless, twitter-fueled  pyromania.

It has been clear for decades where a constructive path might be found – through the hard work of legislative reform.  But instead of  reform,  contestation over immigration policy has become Exhibit Number One of a broken political system.    Back in 1986, Republican-championed immigration reforms, signed into law by then president Ronald Reagan,  provided a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants who had lived and worked in the USA for at least  five years.  By contrast, a 2024 effort at legislative compromise  offered a path to permanent residence and citizenship only for undocumented residents who both  were married to US citizens, and had been in the USA for at least ten years – an astonishingly inadequate proposal when viewed through an LA lens. Even so, it was the opposition of then presidential candidate Donald Trump, not Democratic opposition, that ended the reform effort.)

But the parallel with South Africa does not only provide a cautionary tale of how things could go wrong; it also points to the possibility of something radically different.  The country’s  extraordinary ‘rainbow miracle’ transition to democracy shows that, even for conflicts that seemingly are intractable, a collective commitment to finding a way forward can yield transformational positive change. Has the USA become so incapable of collective, problem-solving deliberation that (to paraphrase the eighteenth century philosopher Samuel Johnon) even the threat of a hanging cannot focus our minds?

Reducing homelessness – the power of achievable ambition

May 21, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Beneath the surface of Los Angeles’ continuing homelessness crisis, something promising has been underway – a sustained effort by a a committed group of public officials, political and civic leaders from across the region to crafting a set of ambitious and achievable goals that can guide the region’s efforts. As I explore in an Op-Ed piece published today in the Los Angeles Times, “In a fragmented governance environment like L.A.’s — and for a multifaceted problem like homelessness — goal clarification is a vital early step. Clear goals serve as a shared point of reference for setting priorities, helping multiple participants to better align their choices. They provide a platform for institutions to be held accountable by the public.” https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-05-21/los-angeles-city-county-homelessness-goals

For those who cannot access the piece via the link, see below for the full pre-publication text.

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“Los Angeles’ continuing struggle to reduce homelessness has become exhibit number one  for a broader critique of the failure of progressive governance. Recent tensions between city and county government over how to organize the provision of homeless services have not helped.  But look a little deeper  and something more promising comes into focus.

For the past nine months,  a committed group of public officials, political and civic leaders from across the LA region have been collaborating to develop a road map for reducing homelessness – and,  in so doing,  to break with  LA’s  longstanding pattern of overpromising and underdelivering.  Central to their endeavors has been the crafting by a multistakeholder  ‘Leadership Table’  of  a set of ambitious and achievable goals that can be a north star guiding the region’s efforts. 

These efforts reached a crucial milestone in late March, when LA County’s Board of Supervisors endorsed three monitorable  top-line goals, including specific targets for 2030.  One goal aims for a 20 percent reduction in the number of people becoming newly homeless each year. Another aims to place 30,000 people into permanent housing—an increase of over 50 percent from current levels. A third targets a reduction in the number of people living on the streets in 2030 by nearly a third. 

I have spent decades exploring comparatively, as both practitioner and scholar, the ways in which participatory approaches can enhance the public sector’s problem-solving ability. That experience shows that, far from being a pie-in-the-sky academic exercise, a focus on goals can yield enormous practical benefits.

In a fragmented governance environment like LA’s – and for a multi-faceted problem like homelessness – goal clarification is a vital early step. Clear goals serve as a point of reference for setting priorities and making difficult choices.  They provide a platform for civic accountability. Further, the combination of goals, their monitorability, and accountability to citizens fosters practicality – sustaining civic support requires that target goals are neither so modest as to cause cynicism, nor so overly-ambitious that they set the stage for failure. Viewed from this perspective, the way in which LA has gone about collaboratively crafting and codifying its top-line goals provides  a basis for cautious optimism that  its homelessness governance system may finally be on a path to sustained gains.

To be sure, at first blush the goal of reducing LA’s unsheltered population by  not-quite a third over five years is hardly headline-worthy. Ending homelessness would be relatively straightforward if the task was simply to find suitable housing for the approximately 50,000 people who currently live on LA County’s streets. Indeed, contrary to the common perception that little is being done, LA’s homelessness support system currently permanently re-houses about 20,000 people each year,  more than any other city in the country.

But the region’s homelessness crisis goes well beyond the number of people on the street at a point in time. Each year, a combination of wage stagnation, an extreme shortage of affordable housing, and other personal hardships results in over 60,000 people becoming newly homeless. Given these realities – plus the likelihood that federal budget cuts will shred the social safety net  – reaching the target of 30 percent less unsheltered homelessness by 2030 would be a major accomplishment. But getting there will require both public officials and civil society to move beyond business-as-usual.

For public officials,  clear, ambitious-and-achievable goals provides the requisite platform to stop endlessly cycling from one seemingly appealing initiative to another, and engage systematically with the dual challenges of improving effectiveness and efficiency.  Effectiveness calls for decisions on how to prioritize scarce resources: Which interventions are most effective in reducing inflow into homelessness? Which services and supports—psychological and social support, rental subsidies, or interim housing—best help homeless people get permanently housed?  And, looming above all of these, how to expand the supply of affordable housing?

Clarity vis-a-vis effectiveness  enables efficiency to move to the front-burner:  For each prioritized intervention, what is a minimum set of acceptable standards?  Do public, private and non-profit providers meet these standards? What will be the mechanisms for improving performance, or clawing back resources, from providers that fall short?

For civil society, an informed embrace of ambitious-and-achievable goals provides a basis for moving beyond exhortation and criticism, and embracing new ways of providing the accountability and oversight  needed to ensure meaningful results. This includes – and goes well beyond –  tracking whether agreed-upon targets are being met.

All-too-often insider interests that stand to lose from reforms that take effectiveness and efficiency seriously will try and protect the status quo. Civil society can bring countervailing pressure. Such pressure might come from  purpose-built multistakeholder arrangements (for example the ‘Leadership Table’ that led the goal-formulation effort) and other local organizing groups and coalitions.  Local officials will also no doubt recognize the risk that if they fail to make progress on these goals, voters may turn against them at the ballot box.

The people of LA identify homelessness as the region’s number one crisis. The successful recent effort to  collaboratively set and adopt ambitious and achievable  goals for 2030 is a major milestone. Success in meeting these goals  could rebuild the  public confidence in local government that has eroded over many years. To be sure, it’s still early days, and there is much uncertainty.  But the stakes couldn’t be higher. If LA’s effort to combat homelessness can stay on track, there would be a golden opportunity  to flip the narrative –  from being a poster child of  the failure of good intentions to address urgent social challenges, to becoming the face  of a renewed and effective 21st century progressivism.

100 DAY UPDATE: Protecting the guardrails of democracy – some lessons from South Africa

April 28, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In early February, I wrote a blog post that laid out some lessons for today’s USA’s from South Africa’s efforts to protect the guardrails of democracy. Here is a link to the piece.  A hundred days into the Trump administration, how well does the piece stand the test of time? While the four lessons it highlighted (see the end of this post for a summary…..) remain reasonably on target,   for at least three reasons South Africa’s experience turns out to be a more imperfect lens for understanding how to meet the challenges of sustaining democracy in the face of hostile actors than I realized at the time of writing.

First is a fundamental difference between South Africa’s early 1990s struggles to stay on a democratic path and those of the contemporary USA. In South Africa, those in control of the state (FW de Klerk’s National Party), while hesitant, wanted to go down the path of democratic constitutional reform. By contrast, in early 2025 USA,  the levers of government seem unequivocally in the hands of those who have demonstrated no commitment to a constitutional democratic order.

Second, while top-down cronyism aptly describes at least part of Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, and Donald Trump’s USA, its consequences depend in important part on the character and commitment of  the leaders. I won’t try to parse which of the two is more corrupt. But what does seem clear is that Jacob  Zuma – whose life had been shaped by the African National Congress and its struggle against apartheid (including ten years’ imprisonment with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island)  – was committed in at least some part of his identity  to the ANC’s aspirations and values. These values included longstanding, deeply-rooted commitments to democracy, to non-racialism, and to the rule of law. These commitments required Zuma to at least think twice before acting in ways that were directly contrary to these values.  Donald Trump shows no evidence of any similar commitment and associated restraint.  

Third is the relentless ideological zeal of at least parts of the Trump administration. An anti-government discourse has long been part of the Republican Party’s DNA. Even so,  I have been startled by the (Musk-ian) recklessness with which agencies have been dismantled, heedless of consequences in the real world. Delving further into the  ideological pedigree of the ideas held by another part of Trump’s unwieldy (but unfailingly loyal) coalition has left me feeling even more shaken and (a little) vulnerable.

Beneath the sometimes genteel language of political philosophy is the stuff of nightmares. To illustrate, here is a quote from Patrick Deneen (whose intellectual pedigree passes through Princeton, Georgetown, and currently the University of Notre Dame, and who both JD Vance and Pete Hegseth have found inspirational):

“What is needed, in short, is regime change – the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order…..Where necessary, those who currently occupy positions of economic, cultural and political power must be constrained and disciplined by the assertion of popular power…… The power sought is not merely to balance the current elite, but to replace it…..The aim should not be a form of ‘democratic pluralism’ that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances, but rather the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people”.

For those of us who know history’s catastrophes  deep in our bones, these words are chilling. Perhaps the one silver lining is that, as of this time of writing, the agenda has been laid bare, its execution has been chaotic, and it is (perhaps) being stopped in its tracks by increasingly mobilized resistance. So, as with so much of my work these days, I’ll end by taking inspiration from Albert Hirschman’s bias for hope – in this instance the hope that, as per the first lesson of the February post, American democracy can indeed make it intact to the November 2026 mid-term elections.

*****

Here are the four “lessons from South Africa” laid out in the February piece:

Lesson #1: For the next 21 months,  the unwavering navigational north star is to get  to the  November, 2026 midterms with the machinery of electoral democracy still fully functional – avoid being knocked off course by even the most venal provocations.

Lesson #2: Leveraging checks and balances  lays important, necessary ground for victory in the struggle against tyranny – but its victories are not in themselves decisive.

Lesson #3: Keeping democratic space open requires a coalition that is broader than the usual fault lines of political partisanship –   a  sense of urgency and willingness to act not only from ‘natural’  opponents but from elite actors for whom it is more expedient to stay silent.

Lesson #4:  A vision of democratic renewal is key to a decisive victory against encroaching tyranny – more than short- and medium-term band aids are needed.

Renewing the public domain: Can a more socially embedded bureaucracy help?

April 25, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Even as time becomes shorter and the mood darker, I find it helpful to look beyond the immediacy of crisis and probe the possibilities of renewal. In so doing, I continue to take inspiration from Albert Hirschman’s  ‘possibilism’  – the endeavor to  “….try to widen the limits of what is perceived to be possible…. and figure out avenues of escape…. in  which the inventiveness of history  and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors”.  In recent years, I have sought to bring the spirit of possibilism to an exploration of  governance at the interface between citizens and the public sector.

A combination of rule-boundedness  and insulation of public bureaucracies from day-to-day pressures have long been central tenets of conventional efforts to improve public governance. But conventional efforts have not helped stem a dramatic collapse in recent decades of trust in government and of civic perceptions regarding the legitimacy of the public domains. , As I  explored in some earlier work, multiple drivers account for this collapse in trust. Even so, the question of whether the narrowness of mainstream approaches to public sector reform has contributed to the loss of civic trust has continued to nag at me.  

Complementing mainstream approaches to public sector reform, might there perhaps be another way forward – one that can both help improve public-sector performance and, of particular import in these times of polarization and demonization of government,  do so in a way that helps to renew the legitimacy of the public domain?   Might a more ‘socially-embedded’ bureaucracy (SEB) help achieve gains on both the effectiveness and legitimacy fronts?  This blog post provides (as a substantial update to an earlier piece)  an overview of some of my recently published and ongoing work that addresses these questions.

Exploration of SEB’s possibilities often is met with skepticism. In part, this is because SEB is radically at variance with  the mainstream logic of how public bureaucracies should be organized; indeed, as I explore further below, embrace of SEB is not without hazard. But another reason for this skepticism is that SEB is  one facet of a broader agenda of research and experimentation that aims to help ‘redemocratize’ the public sector – and  enthusiasm among champions of redemocratization has all-too-often outrun both conceptual clarity and empirical evidence.  In a generally sympathetic review,  Laura Cataldi concludes that much of the discourse proceeds as:

“….an umbrella concept under which a large variety of governance innovations are assigned that may have very little in common……Most of the proposed solutions are situated at the level of principles such as participation, deliberation and co-creation of public value, rather than being concrete tools……[Protagonists]  seem to propose models of management, governance and reform that are too abstract, and ultimately lacking in terms of concrete administrative tools…..”

In the work introduced below, I have sought to distil from both the academic literature and the experience of practitioners a set of insights that can help strengthen SEB’s analytical foundation.

I define a ‘socially embedded bureaucracy’ (SEB) as one that incorporates “problem-focused relationships of co-operation between staff within public bureaucracies and stakeholders outside of government, including governance arrangements that support such co-operation.”   Questions concerning the value of SEB arise at both the micro and more systemic levels:

  • At the micro level: what is the potential for improving public-sector effectiveness by fostering problem-focused relationships of cooperation between staff within public bureaucracies and stakeholders outside government?
  • At the systemic level: To what extent do gains in addressing micro-level problems – and associated gains in trust among the stakeholders involved – cascade beyond their immediate context and transform perceptions more broadly, thereby contributing to a broader renewal of the perceived legitimacy of the public domain?

The  research papers introduced in this post explore the above questions. Two of the papers are largely conceptual (see here and here), and two are more empirically-oriented –  a case study of the governance of affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, and an interpretive exploration (co-authored with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood and anchored in two sectoral case studies) of the evolving interface between civil society and the public sector in South Africa.

Figure 1  contrasts SEB with conventional notions of  how public bureaucracies should be governed.  In the conventional view, governance is organized hierarchically, with a focus on ‘getting the systems right’  Citizens engage upstream via their selection of political representatives who oversee both policymaking and implementation. The tasks of public officials are defined by legalistic, rule-bound processes, which also insulate public bureaucracy from political interference. Civil society’s  governance role is to bring pressure from the demand-side to help ‘hold government to account’.  By contrast, SEB is problem- rather than systems-oriented; it incorporates horizontal as well as hierarchical governance arrangements; interactions (both within the bureaucracy and at the interface with civil society) are less legalistic and more adaptive, oriented towards  deliberation and fostering initiative.

Figure 1: Autonomous and socially-embedded bureaucracies

SEB’s distinctive characteristics create opportunities for improving public sector performance via three channels that are unavailable to insulated bureaucratic hierarchies:

  • Fostering synergies  –  (problem-level) gains from co-operation between public bureaucracies and non-governmental actors;
  • Clarifying goals – alliance-building among reform-oriented public officials and civil society actors as a way of bringing greater clarity to the (problem-level) goals to be pursued by public agencies.
  • Streamlining monitoring – transforming the governance arrangements for (problem-level) monitoring and enforcement from a morass of red tape to trust-building interactions between public officials and service recipients.

Taken together, the above three channels have the potential to unleash human agency by  opening up (problem-level) space for public/civic entrepreneurs to champion change. (See my ‘microfoundations’ paper, published by the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice for detailed exploration of each of the channels. And see the Los Angeles case study for an exploration of how  these channels  are at the center of  efforts to more effectively address the  twin crises of affordable housing and homelessness.)

Alongside recognizing its potential,  a variety of  concerns vis-à-vis SEB also need to be taken seriously. The first two are evident at the micro-level:

  • The implications for public sector performance of a seeming inconsistency between SEB’s horizontal logic and the hierarchical logic of bureaucracies.
  • The hazards of capture or vetocracy that might follow from opening up the public bureaucracy to participation by non-governmental stakeholders.

The third is a systemic level concern, namely that:

  • Championing SEB as a way to renew the legitimacy of the public domain mis-specifies what are the underpinnings of social trust.

The paragraphs that follow consider each in turn.

To begin with the seeming tension between horizontal and hierarchical logics, the organizational literature on private organizations  suggests that there is perhaps less  inconsistency than it might seem on the surface. Viewed from the perspective of that literature,  the challenge is the familiar one  of reconciling innovation and mainstream organizational processes, and it has a clear answer:  ‘shelter’ innovation from an organization’s mainstream business processes. As Clayton Christensen put it in The Innovator’s Dilemma:

Disruptive projects can thrive only within organizationally distinct units…When autonomous team members can work together in a dedicated way, they are free from organizational rhythms, habits

Consistent with Christensen’s dictum, the problem-specific building blocks of SEB potentially provide space for protagonists to work together flexibly, at arms-length from broader organizational rigidities.

The second set of concerns  follows from SEB’s opening up of the public domain to participation by non-governmental stakeholders. At one extreme, an inadvertent consequence of opening up might be  a ‘vetocracy’,  with enhanced participation providing new mechanisms through which  status-quo-oriented stakeholders can stymie any efforts at public action. At the other extreme, openness might inadvertently facilitate capture by influential non-governmental insiders.  As the microfoundations paper explores, these hazards potentially can  be mitigated via a combination of  vigorous efforts to foster a commitment among stakeholders to clear, unambiguous and measurable shared goals – plus a complementary commitment to open and transparent processes. These commitments can build confidence in what is being done, while also reducing the pressure for control via heavy-handed, top-down systems of process compliance.

The third (systemic-level) concern interrogates the presumption that SEB can help to transform more broadly civic perceptions as to the legitimacy of the public domain. As my second TWP paper explores, a variety of eminent scholars (including Sam Bowles and Margaret Levi) have argued that initiatives that seek to renew the public domain by  building working-level relationships between civil society and public bureaucracy mis-specify what it takes to improve social trust. Social trust, they argue, rests more on the quality of institutional arrangements and commitment to universal norms than on the relational quality of the government-society interface. This argument is eminently plausible in contexts where background political institutions are strong and stable. But, as the TWP papers explore,  in contexts where disillusion and institutional decay have taken hold, renewal of the public domain – and thus confidence in the possibility of achieving collective gains through social cooperation –  requires more than yet another round of institutional engineering.

There are, to be sure,  many ways to foster ‘pro-sociality’  that are not linked to SEB-style initiatives at the interface between public officials and non-governmental actors. These include strengthening of trade unions  and other solidaristic organizations within civil society, and  intensified  efforts to foster economic inclusion in contexts characterized by high and rising economic inequality.  Even so, as examples from Los Angeles, South Africa and the USA illustrate, the systemic potential of SEB should not be dismissed out of hand.

Especially striking in Los Angeles has been the repeated willingness of voters to support ballot initiatives in which they tax themselves to finance homelessness services and the construction of affordable housing. However, as declining majorities for these initiatives signal, patience is wearing thin. The SEB-like governance reforms on which the LA case study focuses are intended to help renew civic commitment via transparent and participatory processes of goal-setting and accountability; how this is playing out in practice is my current research focus.

Turning to South Africa, my recent paper with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood explored some interactions between  civil society strategies and state capacity over the quarter century since the country made its extraordinary transition to constitutional democracy. Civil society’s principal strategy of engagement has been adversarial. This adversarial approach yielded  major victories,  including the reversal of AIDS-denialism in government, and momentum for a successful push-back against state capture. Over time, however, a series of political drivers (explored here and here) resulted in a weakening of state capacity. In parallel, civil society’s wins through adversarialism became fewer, and the effect on citizen disillusion became correspondingly corrosive. The Heywood-Levy paper thus makes a case for civil society to complement confrontational strategies with approaches centered around building problem-level  coalitions with those public officials who remain committed to a vision of service. (The paper is slated to be part of a forthcoming edited volume by MISTRA; in the interim, interested readers can feel free to email me to request a PDF.)

Finally, opening the aperture even further, Robert Putnam’s 2020 book, The Upswing, raises the possibility that SEB might  usefully be part of a strategy for renewing civic perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain, a way for forward-looking leaders to champion an electoral and governance platform centred around a vision of partnership between the public sector and non-governmental actors.   Political and social mobilization centered around deliberative problem-solving would be a radical departure from contemporary pressure-cooker discourses which thrive on raising rather than reducing the temperature. But, as Putnam explored,  it happened in the USA between the 1880s and the 1920s, and it might happen again:

A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship… to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety……[Similarly], our current problems are mutually reinforcing. Rather than siloed reform efforts, an upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”

Now what? – Strategic and unstrategic ways forward

January 22, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days into DT’s second presidency, it is clear that constitutional democracy has (re-) entered into a time of extreme, urgent danger. Despair, complacency and (un-strategic) resistance traps abound. What, then, are ‘strategic’ ways forward? From the vantage point of January 2025, the crucial point is that the USA continues to be a democracy – and it is only 21 months until the next round of House and Senate elections. The overriding strategic goal is to act , between now and then, in ways that increase the odds that control of both shift back to the only political party in the USA that remains committed to constitutional democracy – the Democratic Party (and perhaps also to encourage any brave Republicans who run on a constitutional democracy platform in their party’s primaries).

Much follows from this point of departure, way more than can be said here. But (though the speed and ruthlessness are now much greater….) we were at a parallel point at the outset of DT’s first term. Back then, I wrote a piece, “hope in the dark”, that suggested some ways forward. What follows updates that earlier piece. [While I have added some new themes, and changed some emphases, much of what I said then remains relevant, and is quoted directly. Subsequent work, linked below, elaborates on some key themes. And here is a link to the original piece.]

*****

When power shifts and the presumptions that have underpinned our way of engaging the world no longer hold, what then? For the past quarter century, many of us engaged in policy analysis and implementation have worked in the spirit of ‘possibilism’ – seeking entry points for change that, though initially small, have the potential to set in motion far-reaching, positive consequences. But more than we perhaps had realized, our work has presupposed that the center broadly holds.

We have presumed that there is a reasonably stable ‘outer’ concentric circle within which experimentation plays out, facilitating an evolution-like process — momentum for initiatives that add value, and dead-ends for bad ideas.  But with the election of Donald Trump (henceforth DT) in the USA (and similar elsewhere, though in this piece I will write principally from a US perspective) we find ourselves in a world where the stability of the outer circle, the container, has itself been put into question. How, now, are we to engage?

In an earlier effort to explore possible pathways of development for messy democracies, I distinguished between long-run vision, medium-run strategy, and short run process. The vision as to what comprises the core elements of a flourishing democracy remains intact. However,  when confronting a risk of reversal of the magnitude which is possible under a DT presidency, strategy and tactics need to shift profoundly. But how?

The air is filled with talk of resistance, of the necessity of not normalizing  a DT administration. The urgency of the moment is clear, and I do not want to lessen it. So what follows might perhaps usefully be viewed as a complement rather than an alternative to this sense of urgency.  How can we act in ways that not only respond to the short-term imperatives, but also help incubate a platform for a reinvigorated politics and society?  Here (adapting some with the grain approaches for the current moment) are some  potential entry points.

First, checks and balances institutions – for societies endowed with them, these comprise the first, and crucial, line of defense against the erosion of freedom and democracy.

Second, protect the electoral process – and win elections. As per the opening of this blog, the 2026 midterm elections are only 21 months away. Those opposed to democracy will look to ways to fuel the flames of polarization in advance. [Think: “Reichstag fire” – on which, see more here.] Resist their provocations. Stay relentlessly focused on what it will take to win votes. Political parties are THE crucial actors.

Third, cultivate alliances. Beyond checks and balances institutions and programmatic political parties, the sustainability of democracy rests on a broad societal consensus in favor of democracy and the rule-of-law. This consensus has been America’s ‘civil religion’, one reason why it is so startling that so many voted for DT [in 2016 – and again in 2024]. But it is wildly premature to conclude that a short-term expression of discontent reflects a broader abandonment of America’s core principles. Defense of democracy requires a coalition that reaches across the traditional left-right ideological spectrum. Thus, rather than responding in kind to anger and polarization, opposition to DT needs to capture the higher ground of America’s political center.

Fourth, embrace a democracy-friendly discourse —  one which, as per Albert Hirschman, “moves beyond extreme, intransigent postures, with the hope that participants engage in meaningful discussion, ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of other arguments and new information”. DT’s discourse has, of course, been the exact opposite – an embrace of whatever might help to arouse supporters, with zero regard for its truth value.  But the breakdown in discourse goes beyond DT.

Openness to evidence comprises the bedrock foundation, the necessary condition, for civilization to thrive; yet we find ourselves in a world where the arbiters of the truth value of claims are losing their legitimacy. This can be explained, in our era of rapid change, by the power of cognitive dissonance to override inconvenient evidence.  But explaining is not enough. We urgently need to rebuild mutual confidence, a consensus across society as to the legitimacy, indeed the necessity, of fact-based discourse – else (if it is not already too late) all will be lost.

Fifth, focus on the consequences for inclusion and equity of the coming tsunami of policy initiatives from the DT administration. DT’s success is a (perverse) consequence of the accelerating dualism of American society – major gains at the top, stagnation for everyone else. In his campaign, DT promised to make things ‘great again’ for the struggling (predominantly white) middle. But the reality is (again) likely to be the opposite. Here are a few  examples:

Sixth, cultivate islands of effectiveness. Developmental forces continue to be present throughout society – within civil society, at state and local level, within public bureaucracies. As I explored in depth in my earlier work, in politically contested environments developmental actors can achieve valuable victories by focusing on specific initiatives, acting collectively, and building coalitions capable of fending off destructive, predatory influences. (Here is a link that introduces some new 2024/5 work that explores the possibilities of cross-cutting alliances between the public sector and civil society.) Not all space has closed. In a generally dispiriting time, showing what is possible continues to matter — both as antidote to despair and as inspiration, pointing the way towards a more hopeful future.

Some of the entry points I have highlighted above might seem inadequate to the moment. But it seems to me crucial that we look beyond a politics that offers nothing beyond deepening polarization. German politics in the interwar Weimar years of 1918-1933 provides a cautionary tale. As a white South African inspired by the fall of apartheid, as a Jew who has refused to be defined by history, the stereotypes of others (or a narrow ethno-nationalist vision of identity….), as a parent with two American children, I continue to believe that the life worth living is one fueled by our hopes and dreams, not our nightmares. The dream that all humans are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The dream of equal dignity. The American dream (perhaps even now in 2025….]. The human dream.