Pathways to Hybrid Government in Hawai'i

A few days ago I posted a piece on Hybrid Models of Governance on thethirdera.com blog, which centered on why hybrid representative/democratic government models are a believable pathway to political innovation. Anyone that might be momentarily nonplussed by a suggested contrast between representative government and democracy, you can catch up quickly with this post that talks about the definition of democracy. Yesterday's post, though, got me thinking about how such a pathway could unfold in a place like Hawai'i.

To start, let's quickly review the four scenario-types described in the Third Era post:

• Crisis-Driven Change at the Center: a national (in the US case, the Federal) government is driven by some form of crisis or a popular movement reaching critical mass to adopt new structures
• Slow Build to the Center: augmenting structures are experimented with at local and district/province levels over many years, and success and socialization lead eventually to adoption at the national level (as people’s expectations for political norms change)
• Proliferation and Diffusion: augmenting structures are experimented with at the local level and gradually spread as other localities mimic the new, more effective structures; hybrids become the norm at small governance scales (localities), but there is no upward adoption at the national level (one explanation could be strong and coordinated counter-narratives at the national level directed at protecting the national-level status-quo)
• Quirky Outliers: after a period of augmenting structures being fashionable and many local governments experimenting with them, most die off or are shut down as the intellectual movement passes its zenith without achieving broad institutionalization, but a few experiments survive as testaments to the idea

Let us choose Slow Build to the Center, and cast Hawai'i's state government as the "center" and the county governments and neighborhood boards as the localities. For key trends to project forward let us use things like continuing basic demographic/age-cohort transitions, proliferation of mobile technology and ubiquitous mobile internet access in daily life, and tightening budget constraints for local governments.  For key emerging issues, we will use things like "crowdsourcing" efforts and "open data."

So, how would we then expect to see hybrid governance structures emerge according to this scenario-type?

To keep it fairly simple, let us just build a timeline for our scenario:

• A local resident creates a Web app called DisPLACE that combines several public data sets to create information-rich maps of Honolulu neighborhoods
• A well-organized neighborhood board starts to use the DisPLACE data maps in their neighborhood meetings; they also use it to annotate their neighborhood issues and recommendations
• The mayor publicly endorses the Web app; public use of DisPLACE spikes; more neighborhood boards start using it
• A college team creates another application called VoteDis using the DisPLACE data that sorts issues and enables residents to prioritize them
• In a future mayoral race, campaign staffs realize that VoteDis enables them to slice resident data and get at specific constituency interests in a much more powerful way
• A well-endowed nonprofit sets up a tracking service that analyzes county council progress against the priorities showcased on VoteDis; they team with local media to run ongoing political analyses and roundtables; other nonprofits latch on to VoteDis for their own advocacy needs
• The Honolulu city council decides to use the neighborhood priorities from VoteDis to set a portion of their own agenda; resident approval and satisfaction starts to rise
• Over a few years all of the county councils begin incorporating both DisPLACE and VoteDis in their deliberations; many state legislators begin to publicly reference them as well
• Over a few more years there is a growing discussion about adapting VoteDis to create a permanent internet-enabled structure to incorporate some citizen-driven agenda-setting for the legislature
• The question of a constitutional convention is called by the lieutenant governor…

This is just a quick example, but it is illustrative of the type of slow diffusion and incremental change we might expect in a Slow Build to the Center scenario.  Essentially, we are looking at the gradual development of tools or processes that are adopted as add-ons to existing political processes.  The O'ahu neighborhood boards, while not possessed of much authority, do have a purpose of increasing citizen participation and do have a degree of flexibility in how they engage with local residents.  They, therefore, are one logical locus of augmentative political innovation.

I will work on another scenario that incorporates a few more elements to explore how new governance structures could logically arise in Hawai'i.

Notes:

1. we used a linear progression for the scenario overall, versus an exponential pattern of change

2. for simplicity we restricted the introduction of new technologies and multiple parallel developments; in a more robust scenario we would weave in a wider of array of logical developments

3. because of the focus on emerging democratic augmentative structures the scenario followed the evolution of just that type of structure and not other, more e-anarchic or plethocratic structures that could easily emerge from the current ecosystem of political innovation