A Common Good Approach to Development: Collective Dynamics of Development Processes

Nebel, Mathias (Ed.); Garza Vázquez, Oscar (Ed.); Sedmak, Clemens (Ed.) Book A Common Good Approach to Development: Collective Dynamics of Development Processes Provided in Cooperation with: Open Book Publishers Suggested Citation: Nebel, Mathias (Ed.); Garza Vázquez, Oscar (Ed.); Sedmak, Clemens (Ed.) (2022) : A Common Good Approach to Development: Collective Dynamics of Development Processes, ISBN 9781800644045, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0290 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/281264 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ OBP A COMMON GOOD APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT EDITED BY MATHIAS NEBEL, OSCAR GARZA-VÁZQUEZ AND CLEMENS SEDMAK A COMMON GOOD APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT This edited collec� on proposes a common good approach to development theory and prac� ce. Rather than focusing on the outcomes or condi� ons of development, the contributors concentrate on the quality of development processes, sugges� ng that a common good dynamic is key in order to trigger development. Resul� ng from more than three years of research by an interna� onal group of over fi � y scholars, the volume advocates for a modern understanding of the common good—rather than a theological or metaphysical good—in socie� es by emphasising the social prac� ce of ‘commoning’ at its core. It suggests that the dynamic equilibrium of common goods in a society should be at the centre of development eff orts. For this purpose, it develops a matrix of common good dynamics, accoun� ng for how ins� tu� ons, social norms and common prac� ces interconnect by iden� fying fi ve key drivers not only of development, but human development (agency, governance, jus� ce, stability, humanity). Based on this matrix, the contributors suggest a possible metric for measuring the quality of these dynamics. The last sec� on of the book highlights the possibili� es enabled by this approach through a series of case studies. The concept of the common good has recently enjoyed a revival and inspired prac� � oners keen to look beyond the shortcomings of poli� cal and economic liberalism. This book builds on those eff orts to think beyond the agenda of twen� eth-century development policies, and will be of interest to those working in the fi elds of development, economics, sociology, philosophy and poli� cal science. This is the author-approved edi� on of this Open Access � tle. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to download for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at h� p://www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Cuetzalan, Puebla (2008). Photo by Oscar Garza-Vázquez. Cover design by Anna Ga� . EDITED BY MATHIAS NEBEL, OSCAR GARZA-VÁZQUEZ AND CLEMENS SEDMAK Collective Dynamics of Development Processes NEBEL, GARZA-VÁZQUEZ AND SEDMAK (EDS) Collective Dynamics of Development Processes e book ebook and OA edi� ons also available OPEN ACCESS www.openbookpublishers.com A COMMON GOOD APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT A COMMON GOOD APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. A Common Good Approach to Development Collective Dynamics of Development Processes Editedby MathiasNebel, OscarGarza-Vázquez and ClemensSedmak https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2022 Mathias Nebel, Oscar Garza-Vázquez and Clemens Sedmak. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Mathias Nebel, Oscar Garza-Vázquez and Clemens Sedmak (eds). A Common Good Approach to Development: Matrix and Metric for a Collective Development Processes. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290#copyright. Further details about CC licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0290#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 9781800644045 ISBN Hardback: 9781800644052 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800644069 ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 9781800644076 ISBN Digital ebook (AZW3): 9781800644083 ISBN XML: 9781800644090 ISBN Digital ebook (HTML): 9781800646742 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0290 Cover image: Cuetzalan, Puebla (2008). Photo by Oscar Garza-Vázquez. Cover design by Anna Gatti Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Mathias Nebel and Oscar Garza-Vázquez PART I: A COMMON GOOD APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT 25 Introduction to Part I 27 Mathias Nebel and Oscar Garza-Vázquez 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods 29 Mathias Nebel 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics 57 Mathias Nebel and Jorge Medina Delgadillo 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics 103 Oscar Garza-Vázquez and Viviana Ramírez PART II: DISCUSSING THE NORMATIVE ELEMENTS OF COMMON GOOD DYNAMICS 141 Introduction to Part II 143 Mathias Nebel and Oscar Garza-Vázquez 4. Collective Agency Freedom as the Engine of a Common Good Dynamic: A Conceptual Proposal for Measurement 145 Oscar Garza-Vázquez 5. The Systemic Outcome of Common Good Dynamics: Humanity 179 Clemens Sedmak vi A Common Good Approach to Development 6. Governance, Commoning and the Unequal Terms of Recognition 201 Tom De Herdt and Denis Augustin Samnick 7. Organising Common Good Dynamics: Justice 219 Rodolfo De la Torre 8. Development and Stability 251 Flavio Comim PART III: CASE STUDIES AND APPLICATIONS 273 Introduction to Part III 275 Mathias Nebel and Oscar Garza-Vázquez 9. Do We Need a Common Good Approach to Development? 277 Helen Alford 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good 293 Patrick Riordan S.J. 11. Assessing the Nexus of the Common Good: The Case of the Municipality of Atlixco, Mexico 321 Valente Tallabs and Mathias Nebel 12. Assessing the Transformative Impact of Love-Based Microsocial Communities: From Existential Peripheries into the Nexus of the Common Good 347 Simona Beretta List of Illustrations 379 Index 385 5 Introduction of as an increase in individual achievements, usually aggregated at a certain moment in time (either in terms of income, resources, utility, freedoms, rights, etc.). Social progress and development were to be measured as an increase in the autonomy of individuals. In this fictitious world, the common good rhetoric tends to disappear. Even inherently collective goods are thought to be better appraised— so the argument goes—through the language of individual human rights. Social choice theories replaced the common good discourses in development economics, with the provision and distribution of public goods becoming the main concern, while in general the focus of political philosophy and public discourse shifted toward procedural justice and liberal democracy. Of course, this is an oversimplification. But it highlights the fact that this dominant narrative curtails part of who we are as human beings, of our common life, of the collective goods we produce and enjoy together, and of our belonging and interdependency. We are also social/ relational beings who care, share, interact, and cooperate with others. We define who we are, and experience wellbeing, in relationships. We inhabit a social world, we belong to groups, we share identities and goals with others; our whole existence as individuals is embedded in a web of collectively-generated meanings, values, and goods. Even market production is a collective enterprise, which is in turn embedded in an institutional arrangement of formal and informal institutions (e.g., judicial systems to enforce contracts, property rights, reputational effects, coordination and routines between economic agents, social norms, etc.). These are all relational and common goods which are central to the dynamics of our social reality and to development processes. The effect of omitting these elements from the story goes beyond a simple misrepresentation of human life. It limits our capacity to fully grasp the nature of a true human development, and more importantly, it limits our way of thinking about how we do development (e.g., see Andreoni et al. 2021). Hence, although there are excellent reasons to account for individual goals of development, the narrow individualistic approach has non-negligible shortcomings. It fails to tell us anything about how and why development happens, and thus about how to solve our common problems. This would require an understanding (1) of the commonality 6 A Common Good Approach to Development of meanings, (2) of common behaviour and shared practices—the way people cooperate and coordinate to produce something collectively— and (3) of the interdependent and systemic nature of results. (1) Commonality of meanings. As early as 1983, criticising John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971)—one of the main theoretical arguments along the mainstream line of thought in justice and development— Michael Walzer (1983) highlighted the importance of collective goods. According to Walzer, the production and distribution of any social good entails a preexisting shared understanding of the value of this good by the community involved. In India, for example, beef can’t be produced and distributed in the same way as in the United States. The communal meaning given by the Hindu faith to animals—and especially to cows— does not allow it. Good distribution is embedded in the historical reality of a living community and heeds the social meaning of the good itself. That is, development goals are only common goals as long as they build upon the shared meaning and value given to some social goods. (2) Common behaviour and shared practices. Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work (1990) revealed the ubiquitous existence of commons such as collective pasture grounds, irrigation systems, or cooperative fisheries, whose sustainable efficient management could not be properly understood from a self-maximising individual rationality. Her work made clear that the economic dichotomy between state and market— between public goods provided by state institutions and private goods produced by a free market economy—was definitively too narrow. We were missing something important, namely the strength and capacities of civil society, the social capital imbedded in society (Putnam 2000; for an overview of social capital theories, see Joonmo 2020). The very existence of these common pool resources implied some forms of collective collaboration framing competitive individual behaviours so that they may not threaten the very existence of the common pool resource (Ostrom 1990, pp. 8–17). Indeed, commons are frameworks of governance mechanisms, rules, and roles commonly agreed upon and collectively managed. They set the ground for economic behaviours that allow for a sustainable use of the common-pool resource by all and its preservation for future generations. All in all, Ostrom’s work pointed toward our obliviousness and ignorance of the many practices of commoning existing in our societies. 7 Introduction How do commons arise in a society? How can they be sustained? How do they change and adapt through power struggles? How do we ‘do’ commons? These are no trivial questions limited to local pastures and fisheries, but also relevant queries for global issues like climate change, education, or human development. Climate change may indeed serve as an example to illustrate the two previous points. Part of the difficulty in addressing this urgent matter is that the international community needs to agree not only on the goals and procedural elements of a technical solution to CO2 emissions, but on the very meaning and value of the environment. The latter is not a question that can be sidelined forever, for it is precisely the meaning and value given to the environment that commands the very social practice sustaining the constant increase of CO2 emissions. If climate change has to be effectively addressed, it necessarily entails a change of our social and economic practice, which in turn means that we will need to review the way we collectively conceive of and value the environment. Let us stress this point: It is we who have become acutely aware that our patterns of production and consumption must change if we want to avoid a catastrophic increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (3) Interdependence and systemic nature of results. The previous example puts into sharp relief the systemic and interconnected nature of our lives. For climate change unveils first that our freedom is not an individual trait at all: it is a shared good. We are not safe until everyone is safe. Our life depends on others and the lives of others depend on us, literally. Fighting climate change requires us to reconsider the way we behave collectively, that is, how we enter into institutionalised cooperation with others. What is more, climate change is not a challenge that can be resolved without at the same time considering other social issues. We certainly need to address it, but without undermining other commons, such as the economy, human rights and freedoms, or solidarity. Likewise, it also implies that we cannot pretend to offer a proper solution to a specific problem if we isolate it from the multiple factors that—in conjunction— produce a certain result. As Beretta and Nebel recognise (2020), it is not enough to acknowledge the multidimensionality of development through a list of goals or objectives, we also need to understand how these interrelate as an ‘integrated process of this multidimensionality’. Development is a systemic, ‘dynamic process unfolding in time and 8 A Common Good Approach to Development space. It cannot be reduced to checking whether basic preconditions are in place, nor to measuring achievements on a predefined list of desirable outcomes.’ (both quotes p. 372; emphasis in original). Models based on aggregated individual rationalities are not well equipped to account for the social, interconnected world in which we live. Crucially, they cannot provide proper solutions to real-world problems and more often than not have ‘unforeseen’ and ‘unintended’ adverse effects (Tirole 2016). We need therefore new ideas to guide our actions. Neither the states, nor markets, nor the international community have been able to give a convincing answer to this necessary change of social and economic practice. We think that a common good perspective is not only pertinent, but may hint at another model of society, another way to understand development. In particular, the common good approach we advance takes up these points: that questions of justice and development are linked to the meaning and the shared value given to social goods; we understand development as a process embedded in communities and in how people produce and distribute social goods like security, education, and mobility. Thus, the common good approach we defend here focuses on the processes through which local communities create and maintain a specific set of social or ‘common goods’. It understands these goods as irreducible social goods. As Taylor (1990) argues, these are good that are immanent to the cooperation of people in a community; immanent to collective organisation that allows the achievement of a social good; immanent to the shared understanding of their value. However, taking the local community as the locus of the development process does not mean that a common good approach sacrifices the universal to the particular. Rather, such an approach understands the universal common good as a dialectic that progressively sees the many systems of common goods becoming larger in scope and deeper in humanity, in an eschatological hope that the universal common good can be real and possible.2 Similarly, we will sustain that the three features 2 The French Jesuit Gaston Fessard (1944) introduced three distinctions in the vocabulary of the common good that have inspired most of the reflections in this book. Fessard distinguishes between the ‘good of a community’ (le bien de la communauté), the ‘community of the good’ (la communauté du bien) and the ‘good of communion’ (bien de la communion), which is the universal and eschatological 9 Introduction identified above underlie any development dynamics at any level (from household dynamics, organisations, communities, states, nations, to global issues). Wherever there are people interacting with each other to produce something—as is the case in every development process— these elements are present to a greater or lesser degree. Each of these processes implies a shared background of action, a coordination and cooperation, and an interdependency. Therefore, the question of the commons and how we produce, sustain, and govern them is one of the crucial questions of the twentyfirst century. We can state it this way: while the twentieth century focused on the protection of individual rights and capabilities, the big challenge of the twenty-first century may well be communal life. How can we build a shared, common, human future for all? This seems to us a sufficiently important question to dedicate a book to. 3. A Common Good Approach to Development. Where Do We Stand? The notion of the common good is enjoying a kind of resurrection. It almost died out, suffering constant decline during the nineteenth century and a brutal rejection after the sixties. The notion however now finds itself back at the forefront of discussions. We may quote, among others, the works of Michael Sandel (2020), Alain Badiou (2019), Robert Reich (2019), Daniel Finn (2017), Jean Tirole (2016), Christian Blum (2015), Catherine Hudak Klancer (2015), Patrick Riordan (2014; 2008; 1996), Hans Sluga (2014), Axel Kahn (2013), Tim Gorringe (2014), Robert K. Vischner (2010), Dennis McCann and Patrick Miller (2005), David Hollenbach (2002), Herfried Munkler and Harald Bluhm (2001–2004), Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc Stern (1999), and Elinor Ostrom (1990).3 Together these authors have decisively added to the sense that the notion of the common good is not only pertinent for the twenty-first century, but that it offers a real and complementary way forward. common good. He therefore shapes the common good as a dialectical dynamic toward the universal common good (2015, pp. 83–85, 102–105, 123–129). 3 Still very relevant are older thinkers such as Fessard (1944) and Maritain (1949). In addition, a whole set of studies has been dedicated to the history of the notion: Kempshall (1999), Hibst (1991), Lecuppre-Desjardin and Van Bruaene (2010), and Collard (2010). 10 A Common Good Approach to Development Its revival seems closely linked to three topics: (1) The limits of political liberalism (Blum 2015, pp. 7–9; Hollenbach 2002, pp. 3–16), (2) the definition of new public goods (Kaul et al. 1999, Deneulin and Townsend 2007, pp. 19–36) and the rediscovery of ‘economies of the commons (Felber 2015, Bollier 2003, Bollier and Helfrich 2015, Ostrom 1990), and (3) a need to reassert the goals of governance beyond technical criteria and mere democratic procedures (Crowther et al. 2018, Giguère 2004, Whitman 2009). All in all, it is a pragmatic revival, linked to the preservation or the creation of ‘common goods’ whose social value is essentially intangible, such as health, education, and enjoyment of cultural heritage, wellbeing, or the environment. This is remarkably evident when the World Bank proposes to define good governance as the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised for the common good (World Bank 2004) or when UNESCO suggests using the paradigm of the common good to understand education (UNESCO 2015). As we briefly mentioned in the previous section, in her landmark book Ostrom proposes a set of guidelines needed for commons to exist and be sustained. Governing the Commons (1990) is about cooperation to achieve and sustain common pool resources. It is about the agency or freedom of a group. It is about organising this agency through roles, rules, sanctions, and goals. Her work highlighted some key elements for a dynamic of the commons to be sustained over time. While highly focused, her practical research revealed a blind spot in economic and political literature for which she would ultimately be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009.4 First, she highlighted the political dimension of the commons, that is, the fundamental decision made about the value of a common (Ostrom 1990, pp. 38–45). The local community would hold ‘in common’ that the pastures, irrigation systems or fisheries had a value that exceeded the private individual interest. It was vital for the community to reach an agreement on the way these resources could be used by all while preserving at the same time their very existence in the long run. Such agreements, held at the local level, are political in nature but eschew the logic of the free market or state institutions. They are agreements 4 See https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pdf. 11 Introduction about the collective meaning and value of commons to each and every member of a community. This process is complex. It entails at least two steps: (1) the determination by a polity about how it understands itself and (2) how it defines legitimate use and handles resources in accordance with this self-understanding. Second, Ostrom’s work put into sharp relief a ‘world of commoning’ that neither the state nor the market recognised (1990, pp. 7–28). Mainstream conceptions of the polity and the market take the commons as a given, with their existence supposed to be unlimited and stable, like natural resources. Yet the 2008 financial crisis, for example, revealed this notion to be delusional. The crisis shone a light on the fact that financial markets need trust to function but do not produce it themselves. Two major blind spots distorting the lens of modern politics and economics are therefore the understanding of commons as a given and the failure to understand the political dimension of the same. A wide range of development practices have enthusiastically built on her findings ever since. For example, the World Bank finances the so-called ‘Community-Based or Community-Driven Programs’, which are structured around three elements: (i) adopting processes that strengthen the capacity of a community to organise and sustain development; (ii) supporting community empowerment through user participation in decision-making, and (iii) reversing control and accountability from central authorities to community organisations (Narayan 1995). These Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects are thought to (a) increase the efficiency, cost effectiveness, and sustainability of development projects; (b) increase the empowerment of the local population; and (c) change the behavioural patterns of the population. These three points are intuitively tied together; you can’t achieve results if you don’t get the population to participate in the project, and the project doesn’t last long if consistent patterns of behaviour do not sustain the result. These efforts already highlight the importance of expanding development thinking to include collective goods and to involve the local community in this process. Yet, while this revival of the commons for development is welcome, it is also problematic: welcome because it proves the practical need for such a notion (as the common good cannot be reduced to individual interest or utility) but problematic 12 A Common Good Approach to Development because the notion of ‘commons’ is too narrow, and it still lacks a systemic approach. First, Ostrom’s conception of commons inherited by CDD projects focus on tangible things (e.g., construction of roads, schools, or health clinics, collective resources such as irrigation systems, fisheries, pastures, etc.). However, commons go well beyond these material goods to include intangible goods such as cultural goods, knowledge, language, and the like. We ought therefore to understand commons as a social construct inherently related to the social practice underpinning it (Helfrich 2012). Second, the revival of the commons still lacks an overall coherence that would link specific ‘common goods’ (education, health, governance, etc.) into a system or nexus of common goods. In other words, the dynamic coalescence of common goods into a shared striving for the common good is lacking as these approaches tend to see each common good in isolation, as detached from other social goods and detached from the social structure holding all of them together. Hence, a common good approach to development (see Chapters 1 and 2) extends previous efforts to revive the commons. It focuses on social action and is radically practical, starting with a community and the common goods it values and produces. It sees development as a process; as a systemic equilibrium of collective values, meanings, and actions embodied in social institutions and social practices that together generate a social dynamic that co-creates and sustains a particular way of social life—this is what we call ‘a nexus of common goods’. Therefore, the approach we investigate here centres mainly on the equilibrium created by that community among the many social goods and tries to capture the way this equilibrium—‘the nexus of common goods’—is generated, maintained, and enriched over time. The research question framing this book is therefore as practical as possible, focusing on the quality of this nexus and the possibilities of assessing it empirically. 4. Does a Common Good Approach to Development Undermines the Plurality of Modern Societies? Anyone who wishes to advance a common good approach to development faces an uphill battle and must confront a series of widely held assumptions pushing back against any attempt to do so. Some of these objections are justified, other less so. Let’s briefly review some 13 Introduction of the arguments usually held against the use of the common good language in development studies. Two major claims are regularly made against revivals of a common good approach. The most usual is that the concept is lofty, mostly rhetorical, and certainly not precise enough to be practicable. It is said to be an empty shell, a meta-discourse used to cover other, usually darker, intentions. What is the common good? Everything and nothing in particular, say skeptics. A concept meant to show that one’s intentions are noble and generous, rather than selfish and self-interested. But then certainly a mere protest of altruistic intentions does not add up to a vision of society or a set of public policies. Thus, to reason on the ground of the common good is at best naïve, at worst deceitful—or at least so say the skeptics. This rhetorical use to justify one’s intentions is well attested and can’t be denied. Most politicians do sooner or later fall into this self-justified protest of altruistic intentions. But this can hardly be considered an argument against the common good. Few words have been more misused by crooked politicians than ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ or ‘solidarity’ but nobody argues in response that the value of such concepts is thus null and void. Misuse by itself is not enough to discard a concept. A second claim frequently made against the common good is that it is rooted in theology or metaphysics. And according to this argument, this can’t be tolerated anymore. Do we not live in a pluralistic society? Why should we want to relapse to any forms of theocracy? For these critics, to argue from a worldview in which groups and collectivities take a central role is a practical rejection of pluralism. A widespread assumption is that whoever picks up the discourse of the common good is thus trying to impose on the rest of the society a religious or metaphysical view of the good. To defend the pluralism of the public square, to defend both religious minorities and agnostic citizens alike, we therefore ought to avoid a discourse based on the common good, preferring either a Habermassian or Rawlsian approach to democracy. This whole argument is however based on a double assumption: (1) that any conception of the common good is paramount to a comprenhensive and metaphysical conception of the good; and (2) that liberal views of the polity are free of similar preconceptions and can accommodate pluralistic views of the good. Both statements can be challenged. Nebel (2018) addresses the second claim at length 14 A Common Good Approach to Development in a previous publication and will not be repeated here, but we will briefly state why our approach does not contradict the pluralism of our societies nor its focus on individual freedom. First, we will propose in Chapter 1 to understand the common good as an open and dialectical political process, inherently plural and conflictual, that requires a constant political debate to discern which commons we may value together and how to achieve them. By differentiating between the universal common good as a normative horizon of politics and the many, complex, and ever-changing historical systems of common goods, we open the space needed for pluralism to exist. Second, the common good perspective introduced here is as practical as possible. It puts its emphasis on the empirical fact that development outcomes (good or bad) and the social order of a particular society are always the result of social and collectively sustained practices. It is these collective dynamics that the conceptual framework proposed in Chapters 1 and 2 aims to grasp. Bringing these collective processes into our assessment of development need not be incompatible with individualbased notions of development (Chapter 4); it can complement it and render it more truly human—as we briefly argue in the subsection below. Our main interest is to shed light to the common aspect of our social lives—which is often obfuscated in mainstream development literature—and not on a metaphysical good that ought to be pursued universally. The common good perspective developed hereafter, is that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ universal system of common goods, but a necessary and legitimate plurality of common good systems, within the limits of the normative key drivers of common good dynamics. 5. Why Measure Common Good Dynamics? There is no shortage of metrics that try to measure development. Yet, most development approaches capture development through a list of items for which they provide indicators and metrics relying on individual-level data. These may be the extent to which individuals succeed to satisfy a list of basic needs, human security, capabilities, human rights, or selected features of human flourishing. But most of them focus on either preconditions of wellbeing development or a selected set of achievements or functionings (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). 21 Introduction In Chapter 10, Patrick Riordan offers a case study of Bangsamoro, a new autonomous region in the southern Philippines, from the perspective of common good dynamics. The common quest for autonomy must accommodate a complex reality in Bangsamoro, with an indigenous population composed of Muslims and animists and new, usually Christian, settlers. This case study analyses the construction of a complex equilibrium of common goods from the perspective of the five key drivers identified in the matrix. It shows that the quest for autonomy can be seen as the creation of a nexus of common goods, with the matrix highlighting the processes’ strategic political and social priorities. In Chapter 11, Valente Tallabs and Mathias Nebel apply the matrix of common good dynamics to a study of the municipality of Atlixco, in Mexico’s Puebla state, as mentioned above. They identify and aggregate quantitative data to build each of the five key drivers of the matrix and then proceed to assess the dynamics of the Atlixco nexus in terms of a simple ‘traffic light’ for each of the dimensions of the matrix. The case study highlights the possibility of framing the socio-political analysis of a municipality in terms of a common good dynamic, pointing out some deep structural deficiencies as well as the municipality’s strengths. Chapter 12 summarises Simona Berretta’s research on micro-social relations, discussing how they can contribute to our understanding of the nexus of common goods. Do transformative micro-social relations also generate a dynamic of the common good, and if so, how? What can we learn about the inner dynamics of the common good at the macro level by looking at the micro-dynamics of personalised relations of care involving vulnerable people? The author studies a faith-based rehab community in Italy and a programme for prisoners in the US. She shows that the common good matrix may help us understand the building blocks of sociality. References Andreoni, A., Chang, H.-J., and Estevez, I. 2021. The Missing Dimensions of the Human Capabilities Approach: Collective and Productive, The European Journal of Development Research 33 (2021), 179–205. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41287-020-00356-y 22 A Common Good Approach to Development Badiou, A. and Engelmann, P. 2019. For a Politics of the Common Good, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beretta, S. and Nebel, M. 2020. “Introduction”, in Beretta, S. and Nebel, M. (eds), A Special Issue on Common Good, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 4, 367–381. Blum, C. 2015. 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Public Goods, Global Public Goods and the Common Good, International Journal of Social Economics 34/1–2 (2007), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290710723345 Felber, C. 2015. Change Everything: Creating an Economy for the Common Good, London: Zed Books. Fessard, G. 2015 (1944). Autorité et bien commun, Paris: Ad Solem. Finn, D. K. (ed.) 2017, Empirical Foundations of the Common Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giguère, S. (ed.) 2004. New Forms of Governance for Economic Development, Paris: OCDE. Gorringe, T. 2014. The Common Good and the Global Emergency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helfrich, S. 2012. “Common Goods Don’t Simply Exist–They Are Created”, in Bollier D. and Helfrich, S. (eds), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Levellers Press: Amherst. http://wealthofthecommons.org/ essay/common-goods-don’t-simply-exist-–-they-are-created Helfrich, S. 2012. “The Logic of the Commons and the Market: A Shorthand Comparison of Their Core Beliefs”, in Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (eds), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Levellers Press: Amherst. http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/ logic-commons-market-shorthand-comparsion-their-core-beliefs 23 Introduction Hibst, P. 1991. Utilitas Publica–Gemeiner Nutz–Gemeinwohl, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Hollenbach, D. 2002. The Common Good, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511606380 Ibrahim, S. 2006. From individual to collective capabilities, Journal of Human Development 7/3, 397–416. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649880600815982 Ibrahim, S. 2017. How to Build Collective Capabilities: The 3C-Model for Grassroots-Led Development, Journal of Human Development 18/2, 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2016.1270918 Joonmo, S. 2000, Social Capital: Key Concepts, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kahn, A. 2013. L’homme, le libéralisme et le bien commun, Paris: Stock. Kaul, I., Grunberg, I., and Stern, M. A. 1999. Global Public Goods, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kempshall, M. 1999. The Common Good in Late Medieval Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klancer, C. H. 2015. Embracing Our Complexity. Thomas Aquinas and Zhu Xi on Power and the Common Good, Albany: State University of New York Press. Lecuppre-Desjardin, E. and Van Bruaene, A. L. (eds) 2010. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City, Turnhout: Brepols. https:// doi.org/10.1484/m.seuh-eb.6.09070802050003050209090801 McCann, D. and Miller, P. 2005. In Search of the Common Good, New York: Clark International. Maritain, J. 1949. La personne et le bien commun, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Münckler, H. and Bluhm, H. (eds) 2001–2004. Gemeinwohl und Gemeinsinn, Vols 1–4, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783050079639 Narayan, D. 1995. The Contribution of People’s Participation: Evidence from 121 Rural Water Supply Projects, Environmentally Sustainable Development Occasional Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank Press. Nebel, M. 2018. “Searching for the Common Good”, in Nebel, M. and Collaud, T. (eds), Searching for the Common Good. Philosophical, Theological and Economic Approaches, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 111–148.https://doi. org/10.5771/9783845283012-110 Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon and Schuster. https://doi.org/10.1145/358916.361990 Reich, R. B. 2019. The Common Good, New York: Penguin Random House. Riordan, P. 2008. A Grammar of the Common Good, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 24 A Common Good Approach to Development Riordan, P. 1996. A Politics of the Common Good, Dublin: Institute of Public Administration Press. Riordan, P. 2014. Global Ethics and Global Common Goods, London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474240062 Sandel, M. 2020. The Tyranny of Merit. What´s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Sluga, H. 2014. Politics and the Search for the Common Good, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107705920 Solomon, D. and Lo P. C. (eds). 2016. The Common Good: Chinese and American Perspectives, Dordrecht: Springer. Taylor, C. 1990. “Irreducibly social goods”, in Brennan, G. and Walsh, C. (eds), Rationality, Individualism and Public Policy. Canberra: Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, Australian National University, 45–63. Tirole, J. 2016. Economie du bien commun, Paris: PUF. https://doi.org/10.3917/ rimhe.023.0101 Ulrike, D. 2013. The Rise of the “Global Social” Origins and Transformations of Social Rights under UN Human Rights Law, International Journal of Social Quality 3/2, 41–59. https://doi.org/10.3167/IJSQ.2013.030203 UNESCO 2015. Rethinking Education. Towards a Global Common Good? Paris: Unesco Press. https://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/ FIELD/Cairo/images/RethinkingEducation.pdf Walzer, M. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York: Basic Books. Vischner, B. K. 2010. Conscience and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space between Person and State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0748081400001260 Whitman, J. 2009. Advances in Global Governance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. World Bank 2004, The Public Sector Governance Reform Cycle: available diagnostic tools, PREM Notes 88, 1–8. PART I: A COMMON GOOD APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT Introduction to Part I Aim of Part I This first part aims at clarifying the common good vocabulary we will use throughout the book and outlines a common good approach to development (Chapter 1). We will claim that a society can be approached and described as a dynamic system of common goods. This system may be arranged in different ways according to the specific history, culture, and circumstances of its people. It is this concern for common goods that seperates our discussion from mainstream development theories, which focus on individuals’ entitlements, achievements or capabilities and analyse societies as an aggregation of the same. A common good perspective of development focuses on two elements. First, what are the basic common goods a people must share to live together as human beings? Secondly, what are the normative key drivers of the dynamic equilibrium of common goods? Therefore, our approach does not focus so much on actual achievements of development goals. Rather, we place an emphasis on the quality of development process, which makes these goals sustainable. Hence this first part proposes a theoretical framework that identifies basic common goods and shows how they may combine to create a dynamic system conducive to development. Chapter 1 deals with the concept and vocabulary of the common good. Chapter 2 presents a matrix of common good dynamics. Chapter 3 then elaborates on the two previous chapters and proposes a metric of common good dynamics for municipalities. To Whom Is it of Interest? This first part will be of interest to social philosophers, political scientists, and development thinkers. In the following pages, they will find the © 2022 Book Editors, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.01 28 A Common Good Approach to Development theoretical backbone of a common good approach to development, one, however, which is carefully grounded in action. Chapter 2, from theory to practice, reinstates operationality to the concept of the common good and offers an original way to deal with development questions. Academics will find it useful for understanding the precise conditions under which development goals may, when combined, trigger a development process. They may also find it convenient as a means to address development questions that can’t be solved at the level of individual rationality (game theories) and require an understanding of group or community behaviours (social choice theory). In turn, students will find this part useful for its explanation of the concept of the common good in a modern and straightforward way. In contrast to the widespread impression that this concept is outdated, largely rhetorical, and even dangerous for democracy, they will see that it more accurately describes the real functioning of societies, sustains rather than undermines democracy, and is downright practical. Finally, practitioners will find in this first part a roadmap for triggering common good dynamics in development projects. Why Does it Matter? Most development theories are based on a conception of society as an aggregation of individual characteristics. This can be an aggregation of will, of interests, of rights, of entitlements, functionings or capabilities, and so on. But in all cases, the rationality of the social system is said to be grounded in the rationality of individuals. Accordingly, most development data are based on information that refers to individuals. Data on income, years of studies, adequate housing, access to health systems, and social mobility, among others, are all based on some kind of aggregation of individual characteristics. Our approach is different. It starts with the commons we create and share together; it seeks to understand a society through the commons that effectively bind individuals together as a functioning whole. Our approach refers therefore to a different informational space and addresses some of the blind spots of more conventional approaches to development, namely the structural and systemic dimensions of development. 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods Mathias Nebel Reasserting the Notion of the Common Good in the Twenty-First Century My goal in the following pages is to propose a possible understanding of a common good approach to society for the twenty-first century. This is certainly not a full-fledged theory of the common good, but rather the scaffolding for one. We apply many insights of antiquity and medieval times to the notion but then reframe the concept from the perspective of a philosophy of action. This reframing is actually our main shift in our approach to the concept. The common good has to do first and foremost with action, and not so much with metaphysics. In essence, the concept is linked to how our social interactions are generated and thrive. A common good perspective on society is therefore neither totalitarian nor conservative. On the contrary, it is creative, capable of novelty and inclusiveness; it embraces not only justice and law, but also the purpose of the good life in politics. I will proceed in two stages. The first section lays the foundation for a reinterpretation of the various traditions of the common good. The second considers the common good’s dynamics, structure and essential elements. © 2022 Mathias Nebel, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.02 30 A Common Good Approach to Development 1. The Common Good Belongs to the Sphere of Action I. A Notion Implicit in All Public Action My main intuition here is that the common good is not only or even primarily a metaphysical concept—it is an ethical principle, a principle that governs action and remains implicit in all action undertaken in the public realm. The common good is not first and foremost a question about the good itself, or about the hierarchy of human goods, or even about whether the whole or the part has priority. It is not primarily a comprehensive view of the good—some complex, splendid architecture in which each part fits into the whole, as in a cathedral. My conviction is that the common good is based on the logic of common action and cooperation (Sherover 1984, pp. 475–498; Sluga 2014, pp. 155–167). The essential input from scholastic authors on the common good was metaphysical, focusing on the quality of the ‘good’ in the term ‘common good’ (Kempshall 1999, pp. 76–101). But in the order of action planning, it is the ‘common’ generated by our interaction that is the crucial question (Arendt 1985, p. 50; Bollier and Helfrich 2015). How a community rallies around a goal, and congregates in the pursuit of that goal, is the key element of the common good. This is Thucydide’s conviction: the most precious and primary common good is our common freedom (Palmer 1992, pp. 15–37), a thought that Aristotle would further develop in his assertion that the entelechia of a city is our common humanity, emerging in the form of shared practice or virtue (Aristotle 1094). A widely shared assumption among philosophers of antiquity is the idea that the common good has to do with the expression of the human logos and, more specifically, with the glory of the deeds of freedom (Palmer 1992, pp. 111–114). That is why the question of the common good is far more prosaic and specific than is usually thought, for it is implicit in all interaction. As soon as common action is wanted, it carries a hope, the hope of a common good; and as soon as it is conceived of, the interaction reveals the structure of a dynamic, the dynamic of the common good (Nebel 2006, pp. 7–32). The issue of the common good can be extended to all public or political action, for it is its principle and its driving force. Of course, this assertion can be seen to conflict with warfare, which grows out of the constant wish throughout history to appropriate other 37 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods aware of this, the shopkeeper will take good care to avoid claiming that the building is not a school, but will argue speciously that ‘he has a fully legal contract,’ that ‘the children can be taught in the open air anyway during the dry season,’ or even that the ‘whole thing is an emergency measure’ and that he will ‘soon stop using the premises.’ He will never say, ‘the building isn’t a school any longer—it’s my storehouse.’ So the social good can’t be detached from a ‘communality of meaning.’9 What this neologism means is that the social good does not only exist materially—in the school’s walls, tables, and chairs—but also as a meaning shared by the people involved in the interaction. The community that gathers around the meaning of this social good makes it exist as such, and imposes this meaning on anyone who seeks to misuse it. Therefore, an inherent feature of every social good is a community to whom it has a particular, normative meaning.10 This is what the village blames the shopkeeper for, and it is this meaning that the shopkeeper knows he has violated. And thus the villagers will reject the shopkeeper’s specious arguments ‘in the name of the common good.’ II. The Good of Order and the Common Rationality it Creates When a number of people want to get something done, they organise themselves. The good we want to achieve together, the object of the interaction, will have to be planned. If we want to build a school, we need a site, plans, and funding; we have to persuade the families and children, find a teacher, and agree on the school timetable. To cooperate is to organise. There is no way to efficiently provide a certain social good without some immanent ‘good of order’ that organises our cooperation.11 9 Riordan (2014, pp. 83–96) proposes to understand the ‘common sense’ associated to a common good as one of its crucial elements. 10 To understand the distribution, we must therefore first understand the value given to the social good by the population. It is this normative meaning—shared by the population—that will be the base of the more or less equal distribution of the benefits, which is basically the central point made by Walzer against Rawls in 1983 (pp. 3–31). Now, regarding normative meaning, we do not refer to the discussion in analytic philosophy about the normativity of language, but to Ricoeur’s understanding of meaning as convening to action (1986, pp. 184–197). See also Sherover (1989, pp. 27–52). 11 This section builds on the old, scholastic notion of ‘good of order’, but revisits the notion through the sociology of organisation and social structures developed by Friedberg (1993) and Giddens (1984). 38 A Common Good Approach to Development This organisation of interactions generally involves determining the shared goal, each person’s status and role,12 and responsibilities in our interaction, and the rules that will govern our cooperation. The fact is that the ‘communality of meaning’ comes along with a specific organisation of the community, which, once internalised by people, is the shared rationality that makes sense of each individual action as part of the interaction. One person is responsible for finding and purchasing the future site; another draws up the plans for the school; masons supervise the volunteers who are to build it; and someone else will look for a teacher. Any interaction that seeks to produce a social good efficiently will necessarily produce a specific organisation, a shared rationality (ever more so when an interaction increases in complexity). This ‘good of order’ describes the organisation of a community so that it can achieve and then maintain a given social good. The ‘good of order’ derives its raison d’être or its value from the object of the interaction, the social good it seeks to achieve. It therefore has an instrumental value, and its quality can be judged by: (a) how it coheres to the meaning of the social good; and (b) whether the good is achieved efficiently. Finally, with the ‘subject,’ we describe a community that shares the same understanding of the social good. Each and every member of this group will have internalised the ‘good of order’ as the ‘common rationality’ of their interaction. Indeed, any given organisation—in order to be efficient—defines a set of standard statuses and rules that are rational in this specific context. Two chess players, for example, are bound by the rules of the game and the moves that can be made by the various pieces. They analyse their opponent’s strategy and devise their own on the basis of these rules. The rationality of each move on the chessboard depends thus on the logic of the game. The more the players have internalised this rationality, the more they will manage to play well and predict their opponent’s next moves. It is the logic of the game that explains the opponents’ strategies. However, just like the good of order, 12 The status describes here the powers, duties and responsibilities attributed to a position in the interaction while the role refers to the way a specific person enacts this status. The first is unpersonal and refers to a position in the interaction, for example the striker in a soccer team. The second refers to a person, acting as the striker of this team. Following the example, not every striker has the genius of a Diego Maradona or Lionel Messi. 39 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods the value of this rationality is instrumental, and is assessed through its consistency with the social good and its ability to achieve it efficiently. III. A Specific Common Good Together, the ‘social good’ (communality of meaning), the ‘common benefit’ (shared valuation), and the ‘good of order’ (common rationality) form what I will call a ‘specific common good’ (the communality of a common good). The common good created by an interaction is made up of these three features: the ‘social good’, the ‘common benefit,’ and the ‘good of order.’ Correspondingly, the common good will be upheld by the subject as ‘shared valuation,’ a ‘common rationality,’ and a ‘communality of the common good,’ as Figure 2 shows: Figure 2. The core elements forming a specific common good. It is now time to bring up what I have thus far ignored for the sake of clarity. The subject and the object are held together in the dynamic of the action. The common good cannot be reduced to its objective dimension (the production of a social good), but nor can it be reduced to its purely subjective dimension (a communality of meaning and habitus). The common good creates a social dynamic whereby a community exists and asserts itself. It is a specific community, as specific as the social good that gathers its members together. Let’s reconsider the previous example. Among the people of the village, there is a group who wanted to create the school and organised themselves to do so. This group is very specific. It enables the social good to exist and be maintained. Yet its boundaries are hard to draw. At the centre there will be a number of FIGURE 2. THE CORE ELEMENTS FORMING A SPECIFIC COMMON GOOD. S S o o c c i i a a l l m m e e a a n n i i n n g g o o f f t t h h e e s s p p e e c c i i f f i i c c c c o o m m m m o o n n g g o o o o d d •T T h h e e s s o o c c i i a a l l g g o o o o d d •T T h h e e c c o o m m m m o o n n b b e e n n e e f f i i t t •T T h h e e s s h h a a r r e e d d r r a a t t i i o o n n a a l l i i t t y y Institutionalized interaction 40 A Common Good Approach to Development people who are clearly part of it: the parents, the teacher, the children. Further away, there will be those who helped to build the school and whose work for the project is now over, and even further away, the broad circle of those who support and approve of the project without benefiting from it or being actively involved in it. So the boundaries of this community are essentially the boundaries of the communality of meaning, that is, the meaning given by the community to the social good. In contrast, those who are not part of this community are those who, for some reason, can’t or don’t commit to this conception, and whose practical actions may conflict with the coherence of the common meaning—as the shopkeeper’s did. Seeing the common good as a dynamic process also means that none of its embodiment can be considered as settled once and for all. To be preserved, the common good must be constantly reinvented over time. It is an interaction, and as we have seen, no interaction is spontaneous: it is the result of a certain communality of meaning and continuity of will. Thus, a specific common good will have to be readopted and reinvented by each generation if it is not to be lost and disappear—which also effectively means that the community gathered around a common good is not itself natural, but the result of a real sharing of a communality of meaning, which can easily be lost. Over time, the village in our story may become a nearby city’s smart suburb, whose children attend other schools. The village school, and what it once meant to the original population, would then gradually lose its meaning. Common goods may change or transform over time, which is only natural. But they will do so only if the meaning given to the social good radically changes. IV. The Nexus of Common Goods It goes without saying that every society is built on an often very broad set of common goods that only partially overlap. There is a whole series of relationships between these specific common goods; most of the relationships are complementary, superimposed, and mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that all these specific common goods are uniform or equally important. There are tensions, or sometimes even contradictions, between them that make it hard for them to coexist within the same society. I will use the expression ‘nexus of the common 41 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods good’13 to denote the real relationships between these various specific common goods in a given society. Such a nexus does not appear of its own accord, as a kind of spontaneous self-organisation of society (Luhmann 1984, p. 15). On the one hand, it is the result of a shared history—centuries of common experience that have gradually brought various social goods together and created a hierarchy among them—and on the other, it is a result of the constant efforts of the present generation to reframe and to some extent reinvent them. This is a shared responsibility, a political task par excellence. A nexus of the common good results from exercising this political responsibility. That is why nexuses vary considerably in quality, with substantial gradations. Their quality partly depends on this shared history and partly on the present generation’s commitment and wisdom. This commitment usually takes the form of a specific interaction seen as a particularly important social good: contributing governance to the ‘nexus of the common good.’ It is political power itself that is here valued and constructed as a common good, and one which is of crucial importance to any society. Indeed, the task given to governing bodies is to pursue an ever richer, deeper, and more inclusive nexus of the common good. Their task is to work out a real conjunction between the many specific common goods existing in the society, so that their nexus may be more humane. Such a need for ‘collective wisdom’ appears frequently after terrifying or traumatic man-made events such as war, revolution, or genocide. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, for example, emerged from a rejection of the structural injustice upon which the ancien régime was built. It was an explicit effort to learn to live by another standard of humanity. It encompassed and enshrined hard-earned wisdom about what it means to live together as human beings. Now, we should not think of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man as the ultimate expression of such wisdom. A document like this should be constantly reassessed and renewed by each generation, as 13 Rather than the terms ‘network’ or ‘web’—now overused because of the Internet and globalisation—I prefer the Latin term ‘nexus’, which means ‘relationship, intertwining or linkage of causes, connection, bond,’ a term linked in Roman law to that of responsibility or duty. It is derived from the verb nectere, which means ‘to tie together, to unite, to link.’ 42 A Common Good Approach to Development indeed has been the case for the Declaration after the Second World War in 1948, and again in 1976. And this is precisely where wisdom comes back into politics. In my framing, the sole and purest goal of governance can’t be justice. The most pressing political question does not concern distribution, but rather coherence of meaning embedded in the nexus— the coherence of what it means to be human. We can summarise the point easily enough: does the nexus—in all its complexity—provide a social system where we can all live together as human beings? Or does this nexus only permit such standard of living for a restricted part of the population? Or even worse, does the nexus thrive by considering some of its population useless and redundant—the poor, for example? Even if this question obviously implies a notion of justice, it does start with an insight into what it is to be human. It starts with a wisdom whose legitimacy is only as strong as the collective experience that validated this ‘truth’ in the public square—war, genocide, systemic humiliation, etc. It starts, in other words, with an understanding of humanity as a shared, common humanity (see Chapter 5). What is ultimately at stake in political governance is the humanity of our coexistence; no political entity can escape this question forever. As Aristotle said long ago, a polity, to be recognised as such, has to serve the common good. Now, this wisdom is not formal. It can’t be enshrined in a declaration or a constitution. Real wisdom is linked to real behaviours. Along with authors as different as Bourdieu (1980), Giddens (1979),14 or McIntyre (2007, p. 187), we may recognise that social structures entail social practice, or, as Bourdieu (1980, pp. 88–89) would have it, collective habitus.15 These normative social practices are standard expectations of behaviours directly linked to the overall rationality of a nexus. These are the social practices needed to access and play along with the 14 Social structures are for Giddens dual in the sense of ‘both the medium and the outcome of the practices which constitute social systems.’ See also Giddens (1981, p. 27). 15 Bourdieu develops a rich understanding of the duality existing between social structures and practice. To quote his impossible French, habits are for him a « système de dispositions durables et transposables, structures structurées disposées à fonctionner comme structures structurantes, c’est-à-dire en tant que principe générateurs et organisateurs de pratiques et de représentations qui peuvent être objectivement adaptées à leur but sans supposer la visée consciente de fins et la maîtrise expresse des opérations nécessaires pour les atteindre ». 43 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods institutional framework of a society. They are objective and not a matter of individual choice. You can obviously disagree and reject them at a personal level; but not to follow them entails a cost not limited to public shame or underground culture. Being excluded from the basic social goods controlled by the nexus may be tantamount to death. Social goods like work, citizenship, or education are so important that the person will usually abide by the practices directing the work ethic, citizenship, or intellectual integrity in higher education. Not all collective habitus in a nexus are relevant to humanity. However, at a systemic level, there is no nexus that does not present a number of normative practices regarding the way we should behave with fellow humans in the nexus (outside of close family and friends). Indeed, a frequent error is to believe that the nexus of the common good is a given, a natural state of affairs. On the contrary, the nexus is fragile and changes constantly. Its humanity is the result of a collective wisdom painstakingly acquired through history about what is more and what is less human in the organisation of society. It is always a patchy and imperfect wisdom. More often than not, a nexus will also carry some form of collective blindness to and tolerance of structural injustices. That is why its political governance needs more than legislators to determine what is just. It needs public actors who can assign a value to the coherence between many specific common goods, and understand their limitations and the tensions that both separate and unite them—in other words, public actors who endeavour to judge the moral quality of the nexus. This essential exercise of judging largely depends on the horizon of the universal common good. Finally, it is important to underline that the nexus of the common good is what lends societal coherence to the communality of meaning. The communality of meaning is what binds together a society or a culture, providing it with some degree of identity and unity—a fragile and dynamic identity, to be sure, but an identity nonetheless. Perhaps even more importantly, the stability and resilience of the nexus derives from its quality (see Chapter 10). The richer in connections and more coherent the nexus is, the better it will be able to withstand shocks and reinvent itself. The poorer and more superficial it is, the more blindly it will focus on its supposed identity, and the more likely it is to be destroyed when confronted with a different social ethos (see Figure 3). 44 A Common Good Approach to Development Figure 3. A nexus of common goods. I. The 'common good' as the nexus between specific common goods II. The 'common good' as a dynamic equilibrium between these specific common goods III. The 'common good' as the tension of the system of common good toward an ever deeper sense of humanity time Society Elementos que conforman el bien común Figure 3. A nexus or system of common goods Normative horizon Our shared humanity 45 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods Using this vocabulary, the next sections of this paper will attempt to explain the specific features of this nexus and its dynamic tendency towards the universal common good. 3. Aspiring to the Universal Common Good Arendt (1983, pp. 175–176) famously stated that human freedom crafts itself into being through action. Freedom of thought—this utterly internal freedom—only becomes historical to the extent that it is expressed in history, shaping its human environment through its radical novelty (Ibid., p. 177). Freedom that rejects action is freedom that rejects itself. To Arendt, freedom only achieves the radical novelty it carries insofar as it engages in action. Action is thus the place where human freedom is actualised and comes to fruition. That is why, to Arendt, political society results from action (Ibid., p. 199). It is born of shared action, free interaction between human beings. A polity is not the result of a sum—an aggregation however complex of individual acts—but rather the interplay of these actions as they produce an environment, a sphere in which each action is not only recognised as achieving a utility, but as the revelation of a thought and a freedom (novum). What she calls politics is thus the only space in which human action is recognised as human through its involvement in social interaction. Politics is the space in which an agent’s action is recognised; the space in which the various agents’ inputs construct a common world whose primary feature is humanity: accepting the fragility of humanity, making it possible, deepening and continuing it. In Arendt, this recognition does not initially assume the form of law, which remains formal. This recognition is only real where the interaction directs and develops it (Ibid., pp. 230–235). Thus the humanity of society is not so much to be sought in the various meta-discourses that supposedly legitimise it,16 but in the very specific way that interactions operate and favour a real, present recognition of our common humanity. The paradox of society is that, born of possible cooperation between freedoms, born of deliberate interactions, it is constantly undone by the 16 Ibid., 294 ff. Although Arendt does not use the term ‘meta-discourse’, she lays the groundwork for analyses such as Foucault’s of the relationship between truth and power. 46 A Common Good Approach to Development conflicts that undermine it. Conflict and violence are so co-extensive with society that they may be considered as the primary evidence of political philosophy. This is the whole Augustinian current of thinking, which sees in the power of political authority the necessary remedy for the violence that original sin induces in social relationships (Gilson 1954, pp. 47–80). It is on this skepticism that British philosophers, at the dawn of the modern age, based their view of the need for state power. As Hobbes saw it, the natural and insurmountable conflict of individual passions required a Leviathan state that would mandate prioritising the general interest over private interest. This, supposedly, is the price to be paid for a minimal threshold of peace, justice, and wellbeing to exist. And yet the vitality of society and its continuous historical reinvention bears witness to something different. It displays a deeper truth than conflict and violence as the basis of a polity. It bears witness to a hope: the hope of a possible and real conjunction between personal good and the good of the community. In other words, the hope is that my good and your good are not forever in opposition, but will eventually enrich each other. It is the hope that my good and your good are augmented by each other, as our freedoms do not so much clash, but empower us both. This hope that our freedoms are not ultimately diminished by that of the other, but augmented and enriched, drives the search for the common good (Nebel 2007, pp. 217–232). By no means does this hope deny the conflict inherent to social relationships. What it refuses is to posit violence and war as the basis of the polity (Rousseau). An anthropology of the common good states that even though conflict exists, it is no more ‘natural’ or ‘original,’ or even more dominant, than the hope for the common good. Rather, such an anthropology states that the incompatibility that frequently arises between the private good and the good of the community will be one of the specific features of the search for the common good. To desire and aim for the common good will thus be marked by conflict; and this is why the hope of the common good must be backed by a will for the common good in order for it to be achieved. This is also why any historical achievement of the common good is but a transient stage of an ever-ongoing process. Always specific, the will for the common good will also be limited by time and space. And hence, because it excludes from the achieved 53 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods nationalist withdrawal, wreck the European project, and contribute to the slow decline of the various national nexuses. Indeed, every determination of the nexus of the common good is historical, and hence incomplete and unfinished. First of all, the nexus is dynamic, and the equilibrium achieved in recent decades cannot claim to respond to all future challenges. Populations change, economies are transformed, technologies develop; and the nexus of the common good must respond to these changes. Second, the size of the reference community varies and tends to keep increasing. The common good of a family is not that of a nation, or of the whole of humanity. The nexus of the national common good is too narrow to cope with the various processes of globalisation. The national nexus must expand, for many of the interactions of the nexus are nowadays beyond the governance of the nation state, like the regulation of transnational corporations, financial flows or CO2 emissions. If the dynamic of achievement of the common good tends towards universality, it is not just with reference to a moral imperative, but also to a gradual movement towards global integration of communities (Hollenbach 2002, pp. 212–229). If every historical determination of the common good is never more than partial and incomplete, destined to be revised and transformed, and if every achievement of the common good is characterised by conflict, we can only say that what drives the wish for the common good is hope—hope that this conjunction of the individual good and the good of the community is possible and will one day be real. This hope is at the root of politics and political commitment. Should it ever be lost, the community will collapse. If the hope of the common good disappears, the institutions that make up a society can, depending on their resilience, do no more than delay the gradual dissolution of the nexus. Conclusion: The Quality of Common Good Dynamics Let me conclude this chapter with something that will be developed more thoroughly in the next one. One key open question is that of whether we can assess the quality of the nexus. Can we? The complexity of a social system is enormous. Can we really think that we may be able to assess the quality of the common good dynamic in terms of humanity? It seems a daunting prospect at best, and at worst a hubristic and morally dangerous endeavour. 54 A Common Good Approach to Development However, even the most unsophisticated person knows for sure that some nexuses are undeniably more human than others. It is obvious to any refugee: poverty, oppression, injustice, persecution, and war make for a less human nexus than peace, wellbeing, justice, rule of law, and political freedom. Why can’t academics understand what any refugee knows for sure? This book tries to formulate an answer. Can we find some normative anchors that may work to assess dynamics of the common good? We noted in the previous section that nexuses are dynamic equilibria moving toward an ever deeper and broader humanity: a humanity we described as -embedded in the collective practices or habitus that govern the relationship to others in this nexus. This means basically two things. First, that the main normative anchor will be humanity, not a formal humanity acknowledged through rights and duties, but a real one, embodied in the practices that define our coexistence. Humanity describes the overall direction, or the compass indicating the North Pole of common good dynamics. Second, if a nexus is a dynamic equilibrium, we may also identify some permanent features required for the equilibrium to move toward more humanity. The next chapter will propose that we recognise four such drivers of common good dynamics, namely: agency freedom, governance, stability, and justice. We could also think of a minimal threshold of basic common goods inherent to any nexus of the common good, including for example culture, solidarity, education, the rule of law, etc. While the drivers refer to the dynamic of the equilibrium as it moves toward humanity, an inexhaustive list of basic common goods might describe the core elements needed for any sort of nexus. Such a list would include common goods deemed so essential to human society that any nexus that does not include them would be considered below a minimal threshold of humanity. The next chapter will describe each of these elements and present a matrix of common good dynamics. References Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Aristotle. 2009. Politics (trans. Barker, E.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 55 1. The Theoretical Framework: Common Goods and Systems of Common Goods Bergson, H. 2012 (1896). Matière et mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Blondel, M. 1893. L’action, Paris: Alcan. Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. 2015. Patterns of Commoning, Amherst: The Commons Strategies Group. Bourdieu, P. 1980. Le sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fessard, G. 2015 (1944). Autorité et bien commun, Paris: Ad Solem. Friedberg, E. 1993. Le pouvoir et la règle. Dynamique de l’action organisée, Paris: Seuil. Giddens, A. 1981. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1, London: Macmillan. Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity. Gilson, E. 2005 (1954). Les métamorphoses de la cité de Dieu, Paris: Vrin. Herrera, A. O. (ed.) 1976. Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model. Ottawa: IDRC, https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/bitstream/ handle/10625/213/IDL-213.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Hibst, P. 1991. Utilitas Publica—Gemeiner Nutz—Gemeinwohl, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Hobbes, T. 2014 (1651). Leviathan (ed. Malcolm, N.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollenbach, D. 2002. Christian Ethics and the Common Good, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606380 Jehne, M. and Lundgreen, C. (eds) 2013. Gemeinsinn und Gemeinwohl in der römischen Antike, Stuttgart: Steiner. https://doi.org/10.1515/hzhz-2014-0343 Kempshall, M. 1999. The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Luhnmann, N. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Machiavelli, N. 2008 (1532), The Prince (trans. Bondanella, P.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 56 A Common Good Approach to Development McIntyre, A. 1984. After Virtue, South Bend: Notre Dame University Press. MacIntyre, A. 2007. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. South Bend: Notre Dame University Press. Mounier, E. 1949. Le personnalisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Nebel, M. 2006. “El bien común teológico: ensayo sistemático”, Revista Iberoamericana de Teología 1, 7–32. Nebel, M. 2007. “Espérance et bien commun”, in Gavric, A. and Sienkiewicz, G. (eds), Etat et bien commun. Berne: Peter Lang, 217–232. Nebel, M. 2013. “Action de Dieu et actions de l’homme”, Transversalité 128/4, 151–163. Palmer, M. 1992. Love of Glory and the Common Good: Aspects of the Political Thought of Thucydides, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ricœur, P. 1986. Du texte à l’action, Paris: Seuil. Ricœur, P. 1990. Soi-même comme un autre, Paris: Seuil. Ricœur, P. 2001. “De la morale à l’éthique et aux éthiques”, in Ricoeur, P., Le juste II, Paris: Esprit. Riordan, P. 2015. Global Ethics and Global Common Good, London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474240062 Rousseau, J.-J 2009 (1762). Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract, (trans. Betts, C.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. 1981. Poverty and Famines, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherover, C. 1984. The Temporality of the Common Good: Futurity and Freedom, Review of Metaphysics 37/3, 475–497. Sherover, C. 1989. Time Freedom and the Common Good, New York: New York University Press. Sluga, H. 2014. Searching for the Common Good, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Rochau, L. 1972 (1859). Grundsätze der Realpolitik, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein. Walzer, M. 1983. Spheres of Justice, Oxford: Blackwell. Weller, M. and Wolff, S. (eds) 2005. Autonomy, Self-Governance and Conflict Resolution: Innovative Approaches to Institutional Design in Divided Societies, Routledge: New York. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474240062 © 2022 Nebel and Medina Delgadillo, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.03 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics Mathias Nebel and Jorge Medina Delgadillo The goal of this chapter is to propose a matrix of common good dynamics allowing us to measure the quality of the nexus achieved at the local level.1 It builds on the previous chapter, which laid out the foundation for this matrix of common good dynamics. Most importantly, we decided to focus on a metric of the nexus. Other measures or proxies for specific common goods such as health, education, or associative life already exist, while measures for the universal common good remain elusive. What is lacking is a metric of how specific common goods build up—along a common good dynamic—into a nexus of common goods. We are thus interested in processes: the conditions required for a positive dynamic to build up within a nexus of common goods. The descriptive and normative dimensions of this dynamic make up our matrix of the nexus. The metric itself, which will be presented in the next chapter, is intended as a diagnostic tool aimed at assessing local-level development priorities. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first revises the empirical foundations on which the matrix can be built. The second introduces 1 This chapter benefitted from the discussion and exchanges during several sessions of the IPBC research committee and at the second IPBC research seminar in Barcelona (2018). We are grateful for the substantial remarks made by our colleagues in these occasions, many of which are now integrated to the text. We would particularly like to thank Clemens Sedmak, Patrick Riordan, Cécile Renouard, Simona Beretta, Helen Alford, Antonio Sánchez Díaz de Rivera, Valente Tallabs González, Oscar Garza Vázquez, José Luis Ávila Valdez, Ignacio Arbesu, and Viviana Ramírez Ramírez. 58 A Common Good Approach to Development and describes the five normative dimensions constitutive of any common good dynamic. We suggest that the density and the quality of the relationships between the five normative elements can be taken to be a measure of the common good achieved at the local level. Only the integration and coherence of the different normative elements within the nexus can give us an accurate account of ‘how human’ our social interactions actually are. Part I: The Empirical Foundations of the Matrix In addition to the theoretical foundations of the matrix outlined in the previous chapter, we need to empirically ground our new matrix of common good dynamics. Fortunately, two large sets of studies are at hand. The first is related to the work done by Elinor Ostrom (1990) and the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) which she helped found. Its extensive literature on presentday commons reviews cases from all over the world, reaching back into history as well.2 With a social science approach to the topic, this literature is heavily dependent on case studies and has formalised a set of stable, empirical features of commons. Ostrom’s results have been confirmed by the research done since by the IASC, as we discuss later in this chapter. However empirical research has also highlighted some limits of her approach, shifting the interest to the community engaging in commoning practices. Proper attention was not given by Ostrom to the role of the group or community in the definition of the common as a common. Her attention was instead concerned with the description of the collaboration mechanisms. The second set of empirical studies that we draw on in building the matrix are the so-called Community-Based or Community-Driven Development Programs (CBD and CDD). Over the last thirty years, such programmes have become a major instrument for further development projects, attracting billions of dollars of investments all over the world. This approach emphasises the importance of local participation and the value of being embedded in the community. To be sustainable and efficient, development programmes need to be locally 2 See the IASC ‘digital library of the commons’ https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/ dlc/ (hundreds of articles) as well as the International Journal for the Commons (https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/). 59 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics constructed and managed. The knowledge of development experience gained from both sets of empirical studies was instrumental in the creation of our matrix of common good dynamics. I. Commons and Commoning What do we understand by commons? Elinor in her seminal work started the present use of the term. She describes a common as a resource system held by a group and managed in such a way that individual ‘appropriation’ by members does not undermine the system’s sustainability. A common could be the high mountain meadows of a Swiss alpine village or irrigation systems in Spain, which are managed in common (Ostrom 1990, pp. 61–70). In both cases there is a common pool resource3—the mountain meadows, the irrigation system—whose economical rationality is outside the free market or the state management of public goods. A common pool resource implies the capacity of competitors to collaborate so that individual use of the meadow or the irrigation system does not lead to the collapse of the whole resource system. Commons, in Ostrom’s understanding, involves the sustainable use of a resource by a group of commoners. We can define commons, as Ostrom does, as ‘long-enduring, self-organized, and self-governed’ common pool resources (Ostrom 1990, pp. 58). It is important to understand that Ostrom builds on the classical distinction in economics between ‘private’ and ‘public’ goods. In 1954, Samuelson proposed to ground the difference between the two in their respective competitiveness in consumption. A private good can be ‘parceled out among different individuals’ for their private consumption, whereas a public good can be enjoyed in such a way ‘that each individual’s consumption of such good leads to no action from any other individual’s consumption of that good.’ (p. 387) For Samuelson, public goods are non-competitive in consumption, while private goods are comptetitive. Soon after, Buchanan (1965, pp. 1–14) added to the ‘competitiveness in consumption’ a second element of difference: excludability. Some goods are—by their very nature or by public decision—non excludable. On this basis, public goods differ from private ones in the sense that it is 3 Ostrom uses the terms ‘commons’ and ‘common pool resources’ almost as synonyms. 60 A Common Good Approach to Development difficult or even illegitimate to impede anyone’s access to a public good. In contrast, private goods—whether by nature, force, law or public decision—can be exclusively possessed or enjoyed. The production and distribution of private and public goods are also different. While the free market produces and distributes private goods, the state provides and regulates access to public goods. The distinction was a hugely successful one in economics, and a critical tool in delineating the boundaries and respective responsibilities of the market and the state in liberal, capitalist societies. It was so elegant: two sorts of goods, two actors, two institutions, two different logics or rationalities. Ostrom’s investigation of common pool resources highlighted the limits of Samuelson’s model. First, there were not just private goods on the one hand and public goods on the other, but a third sort of good, namely common goods. It also meant that a third economic actor, namely civil society, composed of groups and communities, would be recognised as important. Finally, it supposed that beyond state management and market mechanisms another sort of economic organisation and activity that allowed for collaboration in competitiveness had to be recognised. This theoretical breakthrough won Ostrom the Nobel Prize (2009). However, her main contribution, perhaps, is to have described in detail the practical mechanisms required to govern commons as commons. On the basis of her empirical studies, she highlighted eight principles specific to the governance of common pool resources: • Define clear group boundaries; • Match rules governing the use of common goods to local needs and conditions; • Ensure that those affected by rules can participate in modifying the rules; • Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities; • Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behaviours; • Use graduated sanctions for rule violators; • Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution; 61 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics • Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system (Ostrom 1990, pp. 91–102). The list is built on an analysis of the commons as composed of an actor (the group), an output (the common pool resource system) and shared governance mechanisms (the principles). Good governance requires: 1. a clear definition of who belongs to the group; 2. rules to structure collaboration so that they match the context and needs of the local community; 3–4. local community authority to revise the rules and to eventually change them; 5–7. a locally embedded monitoring system, capable of implementing sanctions (albeit progressive ones) and resolving conflicts; 8. a mechanism that counters the capture of the commons by elites and enforces the participation of the lower tiers of the group. These empirical principles for the governance of commons led to a flourish of research that verified the presence of these elements in the management of common pool resources (Van Laerhoven and Berge 2011, pp. 1–8). Practitioners quickly and widely adopted the list as a way to induce efficient local governance of commons. However, it soon became clear that Ostrom’s understanding of commons was too limited (Linebaugh 2009, De Angelis and Harvie 2013, pp. 280–294). One early critique was that most of the commons she studied were natural resources, which suppose a subtractability of use. But commons may also be intangible, like knowledge, language, or culture.4 In these cases, consumption by one individual does not usually limit that of another, but rather will increase the existence of a body of knowledge, a language or a culture along the lines of ‘the more we share, the more we have.’ These early critiques, however, quickly shifted toward the social and political definitions of commons. Commons ‘don’t simply exist—they are created,’ states Helfrich (2012, pp. 61–67). What a common is or is not ultimately depends not on the good itself, but on the way a society understands this good and acts accordingly. A common depends on what a community defines as being one. The study of the sociological and political process by which commons are defined as such, as well as governed, is absent from Ostrom’s detailed analysis of common pool resources. 4 Hence the term ‘new commons’ to describe them. See Hess 2008, pp. 1–75. 62 A Common Good Approach to Development Along with this second group of critiques, it became necessary to give more importance to: (a) the group or community united around the re-production of commons; (b) the interaction underpinning the commons; and (c) the definition of the legitimate use of commons. Let’s develop these three points: First, a commons always implies a community. There is no commons without a community holding it as such, without a community creating the commons and using it. This community is more than a mere ‘productive unit’; it is a complex social system (Fournier 2013, pp. 433–453; De Angelis and Harvie 2003). How it values and defines the commons is crucial to understanding the collective organisational arrangement created to govern the commons. The public assessment and political definition of commons is thus a key factor in its very existence. Second, a definition of commons should therefore put more emphasis on the activity itself and less on the output of this activity, the common pool resource system. Linebaugh puts it straightforwardly: ‘the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, an activity, rather than as a noun, a substantive’ (2009, p. 279). According to Helfrich (2012b, pp. 35–36), we may better understand commons and their institutional arrangements if we think of them first as social practices shaping a society. The process by which commons are produced and maintained is not only important for their sustainability. The process shapes the community, or as Euler states using the old scholastic distinction, it ‘in-forms’ the community (2018, pp. 10–16). We can’t correctly understand commons without thinking of the social practice underpinning the reproduction of the common (Giddens 1986). Thirdly, a definition of commons must consider the diversity of use of resources (De Angelis and Harvie 2013, Fournier 2013). The social meaning of a common is not fixed and may change according to the evolution of a society. Thus, the legitimate use of a certain good will have to be defined. In line with the two previous critiques, a resource’s diversity of use underscores the cultural and political nature of commons. Their organisational arrangements may not be driven only by questions of subtractability of use and sustainability, as Ostrom proposed, but also by the meaning given to a common from which the legitimate use defined for it by a society derives. 69 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics may be part of the current nexus. Adaptative preferences might then lead to rejection of positive development projects as incompatible with the current appalling socio-political system. The resilience of various mafias in Italy or drug cartels in Mexico proves how difficult it is to further change when criminal organisations co-opt political governance. Development is also about universal ends. Hence, the question of the development goals also involves anthropological and metaphysical strands, such as reason, passion, or freedom, to name a few. Several classical answers frame the present debate. We may argue that development is about justice as fairness, about capabilities and human flourishing, or about democracy and human rights. To leave it open—as academics like to do—is not a real alternative at the level of practice. The theoretical dilemma has to be resolved when deciding this or that specific option on the ground. Not doing so impedes action and becomes a seed of organisational incoherence in the long run. We argued in the previous chapter that the normative horizon of such dynamics is our own common humanity. The goal of development, then, is to further our humanity: a task and a goal we may only achieve together. Humanity will therefore make up the last of the normative dimension by which we assess common good dynamics. Part II: Toward a Matrix of Common Good Dynamics This second part of the chapter presents a matrix of common good dynamics (CGD) that merges the theoretical approach developed in the previous chapter with the empirical elements we just reviewed. We will argue here that the combination of the five normative dimensions selected for the matrix can provide a fair insight into the quality of CGD. The strength of each dimension, and the coherence and integration of their mutual relationships, will be considered as a proxy for CGD quality. As we argued earlier, a society can be described as a complex and dynamic equilibrium of common goods. Specific common goods do not just float around in a society, but are organised in a specific way—a nexus of common goods—unique to each society (see Chapter 1, Figure 3). It is crucially important to remember that such an equilibrium is dynamic and must evolve constantly to adapt to internal and external pressures. 70 A Common Good Approach to Development We seek to design a matrix that describes the normative drivers that will lead the nexus dynamic toward a deeper and richer humanity. If we now incorporate the conclusions of the earlier section into Figure 1, we get the following matrix of common good dynamics. Figure 1. The normative drivers of common good dynamics. We will describe in the following sections this representation of the matrix in detail, beginning with (1) what it is intended to capture; and (2) what is understood by each of the five normative drivers; then explaining (3) how we intend to measure humanity; and closing with (4) the relational nature of matrix. I. What Does the Matrix Capture? A Few Preliminary Remarks First, we intend through the matrix to capture the strength and quality of a process, not a mere outcome. The matrix illustrates how a nexus of common goods may change, either for the better or for the worse. This is why the information we are looking for is not the kind that provides us with a static picture of the nexus. We are looking for key normative drivers that may help us to identify and record the direction taken and the transformations made by the nexus, or to put it another way, to understand how the nexus moves, and if it moves in the right direction. With the expectation that it will inform the user about the strength and direction of a CGD, the matrix thus gives crucial information that few other indicators provide about the quality of a development process. Agency Governance Stability Justice Our common humanity Engine of a common good dynamic (CGD) Structuring the nexus as a CGD. Institutional dimension Basic common goods (BCG) Communality of the nexus Telos of a CGD Figure 1. The normative drivers of common good dynamics. (Open lists) 1. Freedom and responsibility 2. Justice and solidarity 3. Peace and concord 4. Prudence and magnanimity 5. Resilience and courage 6. Rationality and wisdom Achieved humanity Systemic results of a CGD Habitus 1. BCG ‘Labor’ 2. BCG ‘Culture’ 3. BCG ‘ Education’ 4. BCG ‘Rule of Law’ 5. BCG ‘Solidarity’ 71 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics Second, ethical norms do not obligate in one and the same way, so the normativity of each dimension must be differentiated. Humanity stands for the telos or normative horizon of development. It functions as the key normative aspect of the nexus, its polar star, indicating the overall direction we should aim for as well as giving us a rough idea of the distance that is still left to travel to reach the port. But it also provides a yardstick with which to gauge the overall systemic outcome of a specific nexus. In contrast to humanity, the other drivers—governance, justice, and stability—are not teleological norms, but deontological ones. These are instrumental norms that inform, structure, and regulate the relationships between specific common goods contained in the nexus in order to lead it toward a more human society, a more complete humanity. Finally, ‘agency’ functions normatively as the engine of common good dynamics, the normative element required to infuse the nexus with freedom. It is the force that flows through the nexus, transforming it, either for the better or for the worse. That’s why agency must be informed by justice, good governance, and stability in order to strive for a more human society. Our third comment flows naturally from the two earlier ones. The five normative drivers of common good dynamics cannot be considered independent elements. They are relational, by which we mean that the normativity of each one relates to that of all the others. As we’ve said, agency is not sufficient in itself. It must be concomitant with the deontological requirements of justice, good governance, and stability, exactly as justice won’t generate common good dynamics if it does not foster agency, stability, and governance at the same time. The following image may help understand the importance of this point. Let’s imagine that a nexus is like a big ship. The rear engine is agency, while several smaller, mobile engines situated at the front (good governance) and the sides (stability and justice) are used to steer the ship. All engines must point in the same direction—toward humanity— for the ship to advance along a straight line. If one of the engines doesn’t function well or is not aligned with the other three, the ship will slowly lose its heading. Worse still, if none of the engines works together, then the ship’s movement will become chaotic, going in circles or stalling altogether. The appropriate balance of the engines and the ship’s speed as the vessel advances toward more humanity is the information provided by the matrix. 72 A Common Good Approach to Development Figure 2. Common good dynamics. The analogy of a boat. Figure 2. Common good dynamics: The boat’s analogy Our ship metaphor brings up a fourth comment. Up until now, we have spoken about the normative dimensions of the matrix as if they were concepts. They obviously are, but they are not only that. We will see below that by ‘justice’ or ‘agency freedom,’ we indeed do refer to some abstract universal features essential to identify and recognise as what we call ‘justice’ or ‘agency.’ But concepts become concrete by becoming specific. Justice becomes real as it is institutionalised in the practices of a judiciary system. Collective agency freedom becomes real and effective when democratic institutions make political participation possible. The point is that each specific realisation of a concept is radically limited and incomplete. It does not embody the full, universal meaning of the concept. Therefore, when we speak here of normative dimensions commanding common good dynamics, we speak about a universal matrix that allows us to investigate the inherent diversity of reality. But at the same time, it must be clear that what we will be looking for in these normative dimensions are the very concrete institutions and social practices making them real. Ethical principles must be embedded to become effective. A fifth clarification concerns the purpose of the matrix. The metric, it may be feared, could easily become too rigid, its claim to universality squashing the inherent diversity we should expect to find at the local level. The present chapter is highly sensitive to this danger. We think that our focus on processes rather than outcomes allows us to respect the huge 73 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics diversity of nexuses existing all over the world. What is important to us is not so much the specific composition of the nexus, but the fact that it is moving in the right direction, that there is a common good dynamic furthering its coherence, integration, and humanity. The normative framework only fixes the instrumental conditions (agency, justice, good governance, and stability) for such a dynamic to exist, as well as fixing the normative horizon (humanity) by which we may value the progress of the whole. Under this framework, the diversity of possible nexuses is almost infinite, each village, town, or nation having its own specificities. But whatever the elements making up a nexus, the question will be the same: does the present equilibrium move along a common good dynamic or not, and if so, how quickly? But what about the telos then? Is humanity not defined and imposed by the matrix? Is it not a fixed concept? Not really. Humanity is a normative horizon, something we are meant to seek and slowly discover in doing so. Our common humanity is a task as well as a quest. We can’t renounce the seeking but its meaning is still to be fully discovered. What it means to be ‘human together’ is a question each generation will have to answer anew and in an incremental way. Nonetheless, we already know that humanity is not without boundaries. Humanity is like a space with borders, circumscribed by the possibility of the nonhuman. The matrix adopts this second form of framing ‘humanity’ by describing its boundaries through two open, incremental lists: one of basic common goods and another of core habitus. Lists are necessary. Without becoming specific, humanity is but an empty word. But by allowing for the list to be added to, we escape the trap of an ideological conception of humanity. Finally, as we said previously, the matrix’s normativity is relational. Each normative dimension is assessed through its relationships to all the others and therefore opens the way for partial orderings. That means it is possible to have many specific orders of priorities emerging from an application of the matrix. The matrix does not impose one and the same solution onto each situation, but allows for a plurality of solutions within a specific, normative framework. With these preliminary comments set out, we can now turn to the description of the five normative dimensions. 74 A Common Good Approach to Development II. The Five Dimensions of the Matrix The Definition and Systemic Function of Each Dimension The normative role of each dimension is specific. Agency may be understood as the systemic precondition of common good dynamics, i.e., the efficient causality of the nexus. Justice, stability, and governance describe key systemic social functions that organise the dynamic and are required to lead the nexus toward the universal common good—social functions, in other words, that are normatively bound up with the achievement of the common good (formal causality). Finally, humanity refers to the systemic achievement of common good dynamics (end causality). ‘Collective agency freedom9 refers to the overall capacity of the nexus population to engage with others and act together freely, cooperating to the sequencing of social goods (Arendt 1958, pp. 82–115). It is the collective capability to act together to solve common problems, a capability embedded in various formal and informal institutions structuring the nexus. Three systemic social functions include the following: (a) Governance describes the capacity to lead the nexus toward an ever broader and deeper human integration. It is polycentric and abides by an organic subsidiarity; (b) Justice contemplates the fairness of the processes by which people take part in the consecution of the social goods produced by the nexus and take part in their benefits, i.e., the fair generation of different social goods and the just distribution of the common benefits among the people; and (c) Stability describes the social institutions preserving and enriching the achieved humanity of the nexus into its long future. These are the institutions that preserve, transmit, and reinvent the nexus’s humanity, providing it with resilience and sustainability. Each of these three key social functions are correlated, subsequently checking and correcting the other two. Together, they structure the nexus and bring about a common good dynamic. Finally, Humanity, the systemic achievement of a common good dynamic, denotes the human quality of our coexistence in the nexus: how we relate and act together as human beings in that particular society. More precisely, 9 On agency and collective capability, see: Ibrahim and Alkire (2007, pp. 379–403), Deneulin (2008, pp. 105–124). 75 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics we characterise ‘humanity’ as the achievement of a set of basic common goods and core habitus. What Do We Mean by Collective Agency Freedom? We understand this freedom not in terms of rights, but as the real freedom to engage with others and act together freely, cooperating in the consecution of social goods (see Chapter 4). Basically, collective agency freedom describes how a given population engages in common issues, drafts solutions, and achieves some social good (commoning) (Euler 2018, pp. 10–16). It is first and foremost a positive freedom. How accustomed are people to discussing common issues and solving them together? In other words, the term describes how much agency freedom is embedded in a particular culture. But it also describes a negative freedom. Are people free to take part in such initiatives? Does the legal and administrative framework of the state make it possible for them to organise around common issues? Is there a space left between the market and the state for people to strive toward a commons? The more robust this collective agency freedom is in a given population, the more energy will power the nexus of common goods. The less agency freedom there is, the more violent, unstable, fragmented, and inhuman the nexus will be. Collective agency freedom accounts for the inventiveness and creativity existing in the nexus, and for the collective capability to generate commons in the nexus. Agency as a positive collective freedom. We consider agency freedom as one of the normative conditions for the existence of common good dynamics in a society. The importance of freedom for the common good is nothing new. The proud defense of freedom by Pericles in Thucydides’ work is a precise recognition of our collective agency freedom as a valuable social good (Sherover 1984, pp. 27–52). In Pericles’ speech, freedom is either real and effective or it is neither (Thucydides 2010, §2.34–2.46). Consequently, freedom is seen as a collective achievement and duty—you are called on by all the others to behave as a free person—not an individual right. We are free together, because we together value that freedom, live and organise our lives according to it, and, if necessary, fight in common to defend it (Palmer 1992, pp. 15–37). We are no longer accustomed to thinking about freedom in this sense. Indeed, social contract theory postulates that collective agency freedom 76 A Common Good Approach to Development will somehow derives from the recognition of equal individual rights. As a social good, agency freedom is seen as a consensus among free individuals defining equal formal rights for all. This arrangement leaves to the state the duty to protect and promote the formal rights of each citizen. But how will these rights collaborate with one another? How will they grow to be more than an aggregate of individual freedoms? The question of individual rights versus collective rights has always been a difficult one for liberal democracies. We propose a different approach. We don’t start thinking about society’s freedom from a formal set of universal rights, but from the effective capability to freely act together. We think of agency freedom as a positive collective freedom through which each member of the group actualises his or her own liberty. As such, individual and collective agency freedoms are considered concomitant. Empirically, we are born into social relationships that shape the acquisition of our own personal freedom. It seems consequently relevant to recognise collective agency freedom as a telling indicator of the quality of the engine of the common good dynamic in a society. Agency freedom as a negative freedom. The importance given to positive freedom does not mean that we don’t appreciate the importance of the negative freedom requirement of such collective agency freedom. In the long run, the rule of law, administrative requirements, and economic restrictions deeply shape our collective agency freedom. Thus, any measurement of agency freedom will have to assess it as both a positive freedom and a negative freedom. Our focus on the quality of the nexus of the common good absolutely requires both. The real, effective agency freedom displayed by a population is the mix of the positive capability and the constraints of the wider institutional context. And What about Governance? A definition of ‘governance.’ If agency freedom can be seen as the engine of the nexus, then governance is its steering wheel. The nexus is not an autopoietic system but a human construct, slowly knotted together and modified by each passing generation. As a complex and dynamic equilibrium, the web of social goods and communities that makes up the nexus is never a given. Its inherent fragility requires constant care. It needs governance to preserve itself, to adapt and project the nexus toward an 77 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics ever-more-human common future. It is this key social function of the nexus that we call governance.10 Good governance is therefore governance for the common good,11 i.e., governance aiming at an ever more universal and human nexus of common goods. ‘Governance goals.’ As a systemic social function, governance propels the existing nexus of the common goods toward deeper and broader integration, moving the whole nexus in the right direction, toward the universal common good. Governance does so not only by furthering integration, but by addressing conflicts and imbalances, seeking coherence in the commons, and preparing for incoming challenges. Governance is not just the present administration of the nexus, but the driving force that prepares and invents the future of our coexistence. We may thus distinguish two goals for the governance of the nexus. The first aims to project the nexus’s dynamic into the foreseeable future. In this goal, governance is an act of prevision, of reinvention, and of transmission of the nexus. Beginning with the prudent prevision of future events or situations that may affect the existing nexus and of how to adapt to them, governance then embraces a creative reinvention of the nexus, tackling its many limitations and directing it toward the universal common good. The second goal aims to further the existing nexus of the common good and focuses on the present of the dynamic. According to this second objective, governance aims to promote a deeper integration of the nexus. A fragmented and polycentric social function. Governance is by no means a single, all-encompassing social function, but rather a fragmented and polycentric one (Van Zeben 2019, pp. 38–49). In addition, governance of the nexus can’t be reduced to one formal institution since it is 10 As such, governance can also be thought of as a specific common good, but one arising from the necessity to forge a dynamic of the common good between the existing social goods. It is out of the need to drive the social goods toward an everdeeper nexus of the common good that governance exists. Without it, the existing system stagnates, becomes rigid, and decays. 11 ‘Governance consists of the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them’. World Bank Governance Index Definition (2019) (https://info.worldbank.org/governance/ wgi/). An early version of the definition of governance held that governance is: ‘traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised for the common good’ (World Bank 2004). 78 A Common Good Approach to Development implemented by a wide array of organisations, which can be divided into several groups. The first group of social processes concerns the generation of commons (Ostrom 1994, pp. 1–33; Tosun et al. 2016, pp. 1–12): the many processes that allow questions of the common good to emerge to be answered and implemented. What do we value together? What do we want to achieve in common? How can we achieve it together? Mostly these are associations and interest groups from the civil society. A second group is made of the institutions projecting the nexus into the foreseeable future, anticipating and preparing for social changes, political power plays, technological developments, and economic shifts, for example universities, think-tanks or international organisations (Mayntz 2002, pp. 15–27). Finally, a third group of institutions deals with the management of the public square. But for all the importance and authority of this last group of largely state institutions, they can’t possibly cope alone with all facets of the governance of the nexus.12 Indeed, the all-important tasks covered by the first and second group of institutions are usually rather poorly performed by the administrative bodies of modern states. Organic subsidiarity. A common good perspective will also insist that governance doesn’t trickle down from the top (De Rougemont 1949, pp. 59–72, 95–96). Rather, it grows from the local level up toward the national level. As a complex cooperative game, common good dynamics start with local people and real problems that must be solved in common. Then, when a solution requires taking it to the next level of collaboration (mezzo/macro), power is delegated further up, to a wider level of cooperation and governance. This movement through delegation can be called an organic subsidiarity (De Rougemont 1970, p. 124), where final decisions are kept as close as possible to the people they will affect, with decisions transferred to a higher level of governance only when they can’t be resolved at the present level. Only respect for this organic subsidiarity engenders both the authority and the efficiency of governance. Top-down, centralised forms of governance may well be more efficient in the short term, but in the long term they tend to rely more on coercion than public support. Indeed, the authority of governance is for De Rougemont directly linked to the communality of the common good, i.e., the capacity for people to exercise their 12 See for example Kautay (2016, pp. 47–61), and Weiss (2010, pp. 795–814). 85 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics speech, and collective autonomy while human flourishing is captured as the ‘higher deeds of freedom.’ Our approach is inspired by Aristotle’s, which frames a space for humanity without limiting any progression in it. The set of basic common goods acts as the lower limit, the minimal threshold below which a nexus is not human anymore. The core habitus functions— imperfectly—as a header or upper limit, beyond which behaviours are not human any more (see Figure 3). Within the space thus defined, an unlimited progression of our humanity is not only possible but is our common task. Figure 3. Humanity as a space. III. A List of Basic Common Goods and Core Habitus A List of Basic Common Goods As we noted earlier, by basic common goods we mean the relational goods linked to common basic needs and required for us to access our humanity, like culture, work, education, or solidarity. We should stress that these are not individual or personal basic needs, but common basic needs. While individual needs concentrate on what is absolutely required for an individual to survive or access a minimal standard of wellbeing, these common needs focus on what we collectively need to access our humanity. Social habitus The space of human flourishing Institutional functionings Upper threshold of humanity Basic common goods Systemic level Institutional level : structure of the system of common goods Lower threshold of humanity Standard expectation of behaviours Figure 3. Humanity as a space 86 A Common Good Approach to Development The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976) may serve as a guide for building such a list. The covenant describes as collective rights those rights whose subjects are not individuals but a community. These rights, like all other human rights, are deemed universal and inalienable, originating prior to positive law and bestowed upon each and every person due to their common human dignity. But as the goods they protect is social in nature, they have come to be seen as ‘state obligations.’ Collective rights are widely understood today as the duty of the state to provide specific ‘public goods.’ More precisely, the duty refers to the creation of institutions and public policies to generate and distribute the social goods protected by these rights. One successful example is primary education. States have over time created universal public-school systems so that each and every child can access at least a primary education. But not all collective human rights may be subsumed under the concept of the public good/state governance framework. Culture and language, for example, exist prior to and independently of state institutions. The notion of a public good— either in its Roman-law origins or in Samuelson’s economic definition— does not fully match the actuality of these collective human rights. Nor is the state the only actor involved in the production, protection, and development of these rights. We may argue with Ostrom that the social good protected by collective human rights is better approached as commons, or more precisely, as a basic common good (Deneulin 2007). UNESCO made a similar move regarding education in 2015. Such a move is more than rhetorical, letting us understand the provision and distribution of these rights in a different way. It certainly allows us to understand the rights as embedded in community life as commoning practices rather than formal rights guaranteed and provided only by state institutions. We selected from the ICESCR the following set of basic common goods. As we said before, this is an inexhaustive list. It does not claim to be comprehensive and is open to further discussion. Our selection was guided by the need to create a metric adapted to measure CGD in municipalities. We thus considered as basic common goods: culture, education, solidarity, work, and rule of law. The very existence of these basic common goods in a society can be taken as a fair proxy for a minimal threshold of humanity. Their coherent integration in the 87 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics nexus’s functioning tells us something important about its basic human quality.23 Education. As a basic common good, education takes into consideration: a) the community that values and defines it as a common good; b) the formal and informal interactions through which education is conveyed from one generation to the next; and c) the common benefit created by these interactions and how it must be used and shared. a) As a basic common good, education refers to the way a given population appraises and values the knowledge and wisdom accrued by a society over time and to how important it is to the members of that society to convey this knowledge and wisdom to new generations. b) As a basic common good, education denotes the formal and informal processes by which a person is introduced to, actualises, and reinvents the common knowledge and wisdom accrued by a society over time. Practically, education refers to the institutions and social structures by which a society actualises and conveys this knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next. c) As a basic common good, education covers general knowledge and wisdom as well as the basic intellectual and practical skills with which everybody in a society should be entrusted. Education therefore covers the basic wisdom, knowledge, and skills needed in order to be understood and to function in a society. Solidarity. As a basic common good, solidarity must take into consideration: a) the community that values and defines it as a common good; b) the formal and informal interactions keeping individuals safe in time of societal need or distress; and c) the common benefit created by these interactions, the legitimate use of solidarity, and its distribution throughout the population. 23 Beyond existence, the crucial questions are: How are they structured in the nexus? Which ones are considered the most basic? Which are considered important? Which ones are considered at odds with others? How many are problematic? Which ones are a practical priority in the present context? The point is to see if they contribute to the growth of the nexus. 88 A Common Good Approach to Development a) As a basic common good, solidarity refers to the determination of a given population to keep individuals safe from the worst forms of human need and distress. Implicit in solidarity is a strong sense of belonging to a human community that will not let one of its members fall behind without helping. Solidarity describes the value given by a community to these basic forms of human security. b) As a basic common good, solidarity denotes the formal and informal processes by which these basic forms of human security are enacted. c) As a basic common good, solidarity refers to a safety net of reciprocal help. The rules governing the access and use of this safety net are of crucial importance: they include rules determining the access to the safety net; rules defining distress, need and the conditions of reciprocity under which help will be provided. Culture. As a basic common good, culture must take into consideration: a) the community that values and defines it as a common good; b) the formal and informal interactions by which their common memory and traditions, language and values are inhabited by a given population; and c) the common benefit created by these interactions. a) As a basic common good, culture refers to the value given by a specific community to the common memory, traditions, language, and values forming their shared world. A culture is alive as long as people value it. b) As a basic common good, culture refers to the many and mostly informal interactions by which a community inhabits and actualises its common memory, traditions, language, and values. c) As a basic common good, culture refers to the shared rationality and understanding created by inhabiting a common world. Culture provides a community with the root narratives by which we understand each other and make sense of our daily lives (Swidler 1986, pp. 273–286). The use and reach of culture 89 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics are by definition constrained to the sphere of understanding inhabited by a community. Work. As a basic common good, work must take into consideration: a) the community that values and defines it as a common good; b) the formal and informal interactions by which work is socialised; and c) the common benefit created by these interactions and its distribution among the population. a) As a basic common good, work refers to the social meaning and collective value given by a population to the set of activities by which we meet our needs and achieve a certain level of wellbeing. b) As a basic common good, work also designates the institutions that socialise work by: providing it with a symbolic exchange value (money); organising it in an efficient way (firms; organisations; market); redistributing it (taxes; public policies); and protecting it (unemployment insurance). c) As a basic common good, work refers to the level of wellbeing enjoyed by the population, which involves: specifying legitimate forms of work and what amounts to a fair remuneration for work (decent work; minimum salary); looking to create the economic conditions for full employment; and protecting people against unemployment. Rule-of-law. As a basic common good, rule of law must take into consideration: a) the community that values and defines it as a common good; b) the formal and informal interactions by which a fair recognition of common dignity and freedoms is enacted in a population, and more specifically how a set of basic rights and freedoms is guaranteed, upheld, and enforced by the state; and c) the common benefit created by these interactions. a) As a basic common good, the rule of law is the value given by a society to universal respect for the law and its fair application. Built on recognition of a fundamental equality of dignity and freedom, rule of law is concerned with the enforcement of law. b) As a basic common good, the rule of law refers to the formal interactions by which a fair recognition of our common dignity 90 A Common Good Approach to Development and freedoms is enacted in a population, and more specifically, how a set of basic rights and freedoms is guaranteed, upheld, and enforced by the state. c) As a basic common good, rule of law refers to justice and freedom as the founding rationality of human behaviours and interactions in a society. Consequently, this common benefit should extend to each and every member of the society. Which Set of Core Habitus? Our common humanity is a goal, something we achieve in common. Core habitus captures the values engendered by the functioning of a nexus (systemic outcome). These are not abstract values, but concrete ones, embedded in the common practices contributing to the humanity of our lives together. These values represent the ‘higher deeds of freedom’ that the Greeks saw as the content of the good life and expressed as virtues. We do not fully go along with all of the Greek rationale in this instance, however. Where they saw virtues as personal features mediated through the law, we refer here to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. He describes the permanent internalisation of a given social order in a person—in our case the nexus—that does not prescribe any specific actions, but nonetheless orients actors to some specific set of goals.24 Habitus are the subjective, internalised representations of a given social order. They are not heteronomous norms to the person, but important features of their own autonomy, and hence they blur the lines of our often-spurious opposition to autonomy and heteronomy. What is key is that habitus, even if they are indeed internalised by individuals, are social in essence: social structures embodied within human practice. Habitus frame individual action just as a nation’s narrative frames the specific story of an individual. It is through habitus that a social system normalises and synchronises 24 We use here the word in the specific sense given to it by Bourdieu (1990, p. 53): ‘The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.’ 91 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics individual behaviours; how it produces similar forms of behaviour without pressure on or the restriction of individual freedom. Habitus function through the knowledge and meaning conveyed by social structures (Giddens 1986, pp. 25–27). It is this common, shared meaning that frames the way people understand and project their own specific behaviour, ‘naturally’ reproducing and reinforcing this narrative each time they act according to it. But the real force of a habitus lies with the ‘standard expectation of behaviour’ they create in a society. This is where habitus turns more objective (Bourdieu 1990, pp. 135–142). As root narratives spurned by the nexus and framing individual behaviours (Ricœur 1983, p. 171), habitus also create social expectations of behaviours coherent with them. These are the behaviours that others expect me to adhere to, like paying after eating in a restaurant or not jumping on a table in a classroom or not committing murder to solve a conflict with my neighbour. Such behaviours make up the specific rationality and predictability of the public space. So habitus, while part of our autonomy, can’t be reduced to individual preferences or values. Now, we are not interested in just any habitus, but in a normative set of social practices with which to compare the habitus created by a specific nexus. The differences will inform us about the humanity achieved by the nexus and complement the information we can receive from our tally of basic common goods. The habitus we have in mind here are not to be confused with the universal common good as such, but mark its progress in a society in the same way that happiness marks the pursuit of human flourishing. Habitus are actually immanent to the research of the common good and may be understood as the moral markers of common good dynamics. The list of core habitus should not be understood as a static or exhaustive list. Some social virtues may be sensitive to the sort of common goods integrated into the nexus; some will be required in certain circumstances more than others (war and peace do not produce the same sort of common practices); some will be more akin to certain religions than others, etc. This variation is why the relative importance of the virtues on the list, and their positions and arrangement on the list, may change over time and history. As the nexus of the common good is dynamic, the values it achieves may also transform slightly. 92 A Common Good Approach to Development However, we can reasonably expect these habitus to be widely shared and to be fairly universal, as expressions of our human condition. The list accounts for values and social practices around which most if not all polities have organised. They reflect a widely shared wisdom of what being human together means in practice. • Freedom and responsibility • Justice and solidarity • Peace and concord • Prudence and magnanimity • Resilience and courage • Practical reasoning and wisdom The list contemplates six groups of two habitus. The pairing of habitus here is so as to capture two aspects of a single reality through two kinds of behaviour. The polarity arising from the pairing is helpful. First, it serves to narrow the focus of one term by making reference to the other term. Second, it opens a space of flexibility to identify behaviours expressing specific aspects of the pairing. • The habitus of freedom and responsibility frame the capability to act as autonomous persons and to assume responsibility for our own decisions and actions. • The habitus of justice and solidarity frame the capability to respect the dignity and freedom of others and help them in times of need or distress. • The habitus of peace and concord frame the capability to trust others not to use violence to resolve conflicts and to seek cooperation and consensus. • The habitus of prudence and magnanimity frame the capability to seek the truth and foresee the consequences of actions. • The habitus of resilience and courage frame the capability to resist the tribulations of the time and to face difficulties with resolve and determination. • The habitus of practical reasoning and wisdom frame the capability to engage reality through reason and seek to inhabit this reality as human beings. As noted earlier, this list is not exhaustive and is only very sparingly defined in order to allow for a diversity of interpretations. However, it 93 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics provides us with a powerful definition of the higher deeds of freedom, and therefore of humanity. IV. A Relational Normativity: A Tool to Analyse Realities and Tell the Stories of Common Good Dynamics Each of the normative dimensions implies all the others. They have to be considered together in what medieval thinkers called a connexio virtutum. Recalling Ramon Llull’s intuition in his Ars Magna (Lulle 1517), the normative elements can be rearranged in a pentagon, so that each of the dimensions can be known through their relationships. The result is shown in Figure 4. The normative pentagon of common good dynamics, as we call it, is an analytical tool for understanding and explaining the complexity of common good dynamics, that helps tell the story of a specific community from a common good perspective (Ricœur 1983, pp. 31–51). Figure 4. The normative pentagram. In both the phenomenological and the analytical tradition, there are two ways to approach reality, either directly (in rectum) or indirectly (in obliquo). We may therefore define agency as we did in the previous section, or account for it through the relationships it builds with the other dimensions. This second approach of studying concepts through Agency 3 2 6 7 Governance Stability Justice Humanity 1 4 5 8 10 13 12 11 17 16 15 14 19 18 20 9 94 A Common Good Approach to Development their relational dynamics was considered by Rosenzweig as the most effective way to capture their essence (Rosenweig 2005, pp 93–100). Moving forward, we propose such a relational approach to the matrix, showing the twenty relationships across the five dimensions, and offering a core description for each relationship: 1. AG – Participation 2. GA – Empowerment 3. AH – Welfare 4. HA – Social responsibility Agency: participation, empowerment, welfare, social responsibility, collective habits, capabilities and opportunities, relational quality and resilience of the nexus. 5. AJ – Social practice of justice 6. JA – Just institutions 7. AS – Relational quality 8. SA – Nexus resilience Governance: participation, empowerment, integration, cooperation, subsidiarity, rule of law, common future and good government. 9. GH – Integration 10. HG – Cooperation 11. GJ – Subsidiarity 12. JG – Rule of law Humanity: welfare, social responsibility, integration, cooperation, shared rationality, flourishing, human ecology and culture. 13. GS – Common future 14. SG – Good governance 15. HJ – Public rationality 16. JH – Human flourishing Justice: collective habits, capabilities and opportunities, subsidiarity, rule of law, shared rationality and flourishing, social mobility and democracy. 17. HS – Human ecology 18. SH – Culture 19. JS – Social mobility 20. SJ – Democracy Stability: Relational quality, resilience of the nexus, common future, good government, human ecology, culture, social mobility and democracy. Each core description shows aspects of the relationship between the two dimensions. It obliges us to think about the importance of agency for governance (participation) or how justice must inform collective agency (just institutions). It is definitively a creative way to apply the matrix to reality, enriching our understanding of the same. 101 2. From Theory to Practice: A Matrix of Common Good Dynamics Palmer, M. 1992. Love of Glory and the Common Good. Aspects of the Political Thought of Thucydides, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ricoeur, P. 1992. 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Operational and Research Implications, World Bank Social Development Notes 137, 1–16. World Bank. 1996. The World Bank Participation Sourcebook. Washington DC: World Bank. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/ en/289471468741587739/pdf/multi-page.pdf World Bank. 2004. The Public Sector Governance Reform Cycle: available diagnostic tools, PREM Notes 88, 1–8. 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics1 Oscar Garza-Vázquez and Viviana Ramírez Introduction Development efforts are increasingly challenging as the world becomes more complex. The interconnectedness of peoples and economies, the diversity of cultures, and the endurance of global development issues demand more than ever approaches that are able to capture this intricacy and multidimensionality both at the global and local levels. In the search for such approaches, development indicators have burgeoned, contributing to the monitoring of the progress of societies and the effectiveness of policy and public decision-making in the last decades. However, most of these efforts focus on measuring progress at the international and the individual levels, overlooking the collective production of progress by people acting together in local contexts. The Institute for the Promotion of the Common Good (IPBC) seeks to meet this gap by proposing a metric of common good dynamics at the municipal level that can capture the shared construction of social goods in order to guide local governments in their development plans. Although there seems to be a growing interest in moving beyond individualistic narratives, few approaches have ventured to create measures on relational or collective processes. In addition, as explained below, the focus of these approaches either remains at the level of 1 Chapter 3 of this book presents a slightly modified version of the article with the same title available in Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, Research In Social Science (2020), vol. 4, published by Vita e Pensiero, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. We are grateful to the editors of the journal for granting the rights. © 2022 Garza-Vázquez and Ramírez, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.04 104 A Common Good Approach to Development outcomes or considers a particular dimension in isolation. Instead, the metric presented here adopts a systemic approach within processoriented dimensions. As such, the contribution of the metric offered here is that it captures the quality of the nexus of the common good by analysing how the structural and dynamic aspects of the production of common goods combine to build a society that lives together. The structure of the common good comprises the way in which the social and institutional context in the municipality frames people’s opportunity to live well and to achieve collective goals, while its dynamics involves the expected patterns of behaviour in which the residents act in the production and distribution of the basic common goods of a municipality over time. The metric examines these aspects of the nexus of the common good through the interconnection of five dimensions: Justice, Stability, Governance, Collective Agency Freedom, and Humanity. This article introduces the metric of the common good proposed by the IPBC research group and discusses the steps taken in the construction of the seventy-one indicators that comprise the aforementioned five dimensions, the advantages of this perspective, and the remaining challenges. It is structured as follows. The first section summarises and comments on the pertinence of the common good approach proposed in this book. The second lays out the process of constructing the indicators. This was primarily a dialectic process between experts in the theory of common good, measurement specialists, and local government officials and political actors knowledgeable in the local challenges of the municipalities. This section also reviews the qualities sought in the items as they were designed, as well as the challenges faced. The third section presents the dimensions and the items that comprise them, delineating the specific aspects of the dimension that each item seeks to capture. Before the conclusion, the fourth section discusses the metric’s contributions and future challenges if it is to be used to guide policy and decision-making at the local level. 1. The Theoretical Foundations of the Survey Measuring is never done for its own sake. The collection of data is necessary in order for us to keep track of the evolution of those things that we care about. It provides us with information about how we are doing, whether we have advanced, and how much more we can achieve. 105 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics As Székely’s (2005) book title states, numbers also move the world; what is measured can be improved. In addition, data allows us to infer things that are beyond our own sight. By learning about how different variables connect with each other we can better understand the world in which we live. We can also learn about some realities which have been ignored by current metrics and of whose complexity and avenues for improvement we have little knowledge. Yet, developing measurements is no simple task. It is always imperfect, and it is always value-laden. Hence, the best one can do is to try to measure what really matters based on people’s realities and a sound theoretical framework, and to be transparent about the choices one makes in this process. Previous chapters in this book have introduced the theoretical foundations of the metric of the common good presented here (see also Beretta and Nebel 2020, Nebel and Arbesu-Verduzco 2020). These chapters offer a rationale for the development of a practical measure of a common good approach as a necessary practical tool to complement existing metrics of ‘social’ progress. As mentioned, most of these ‘social’ indicators rely on aggregated individual data as a proxy for the social, and thus they fail to account for the systemic interactions, that is, the interconnection between the common institutions, values, and shared practices underlying the production of individual results. Instead, the matrix of the nexus of the common good aims its focus ‘on commons’, that is, on those things that we value, produce, share, and benefit from, as a collectivity. Likewise, as opposed to these measures, the metric developed here focuses on ‘the process by which these [collective goods] combine in society to create a nexus–of–commons’. This move is a major contribution to the conceptualisation of development and to the design and evaluation of social policies to improve people’s lives. It responds to the urgent need for measuring things that have long been left outside of our modern conception of development and wellbeing, namely the structural and relational aspects of development, in order to place them in the academic and political agenda. For a long time, we have given too much importance to what we measure (just because we can measure it) instead of measuring what is important. Indeed, some still justify the use of GDP as a measure of social progress due to its simplicity and its apparent exactitude. Yet, even if we assume that GDP indeed offers a precise measure, we may still ask 106 A Common Good Approach to Development whether it measures the ‘right’ thing.2 In the last thirty years, we have seen great advancements in terms of indicators going beyond GDP. Most of these emphasise the need to focus on what really matters, namely, the person and her wellbeing. Nowadays, we know that a GDP measure is simply insufficient (even if necessary), and not the most important indicator of the development of societies, as it does not capture what we truly care about, i.e., people’s quality of life. In response, several efforts to measure people’s wellbeing have emerged (e.g., Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, the Human Development Index, Italian BES, and others). Even if measurements differ, the great majority of them coincide in insisting on the complexity of people’s lives, and thus defend the use of multidimensional indicators to assess social realities, and to inform the design, monitoring, and assessment of policies. This has signified a huge improvement in more directly measuring the relevant dimensions of people’s lives. Now, besides income, we have information about health, education, standards of living, and so on. This has also translated into improved poverty measures which now provide a more realistic picture of the many deprivations people face when in poverty (e.g., see the Multidimensionality Poverty Peer Network, www.mppn.org). However, there are also some problems with these measures and with how we interpret them. These issues amount to the fact that these measures rely on the aggregation of individual data, and the fact that we tend to wrongly assume that they are the only thing that matters. Indeed, we have come to use these multidimensional measures of individual wellbeing as a new substitute for the supremacy of GDP, as if they were the only relevant information capable of informing development policies. This has the unintended consequence of dismissing as unimportant other features that do not appear in our statistics, even though these are crucial for an integral notion of development and for combating poverty effectively. With the transition from GDP measures to various forms of aggregation through individual wellbeing measures, we have ultimately removed the person and her 2 The following paragraphs are inspired by the ideas of two well-known economists: ‘We need to stop making important what we measure, instead we need to measure what is important’ (Branko Milanovic). Measuring what matters may involve rejecting being ‘precisely wrong in favour of being vaguely right’ (Hawthorn on Amartya Sen’s work: 1987, viii). 107 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics experience of life from the social context in which she is embedded and in which her wellbeing is co-constructed. It is in this sense that, by emphasising the dynamic processes and the socio-structural aspects of development, the common good approach proposed in this volume makes an important contribution. It asks us to reinterpret and broaden the way in which we read the success or failure of social life in at least two areas. First, it recognises that the processes through which a society generates its outcomes in terms of individual wellbeing are also relevant to our lives. That is, it is not enough to know what kind of functionings people manage to achieve. We also care about other things such as the social arrangements in which we live, people’s collective freedom to exercise their agency and responsibilities in society, and the humanity of the processes to achieve them, as these are all part of the complex social dynamic in which we live, and which informs our behaviour. While these concerns are not unique to the common good approach presented in this edited volume, our approach does go further, since these structural aspects are understood as an inherently connected, systemic whole. That is, rather than treating these aspects as isolated dimensions that form part of the development process (e.g., measures of Rule of Law), they are seen as working in a nexus. Justice, for instance, cannot be fully understood without reference to agency freedom, the quality of governance, and so on. Precisely how the latter dimensions (Collective Agency, Governance, and others) work in harmony with others determines how we address justice concerns. It is the quality of these interconnections that the common good approach sets forth, through a matrix of five dimensions—as further explained below. The common good approach does not focus on the function of legal and legitimate authority alone, but also on the total community dynamics within a territorial demarcation. Secondly, it shifts our concerns from static end states of individual functionings to actual dynamic patterns of behaviour. The common good approach’s primary concern is action rather than accomplishments. As such, it diverts its focus from what people achieve and the quantity in which they achieve it, towards what people—in conjunction with others—actually do in order to achieve whatever they value, and how. Ultimately, it is people’s practices and their social interactions that provide us with a richer understanding of the quality of the social 108 A Common Good Approach to Development development actually experienced by the members of a given community. For instance, from this perspective, to understand the situation of health in the population would imply focusing on whether shared values, goals, and practices lead people in a given community to be healthy, as opposed to measuring only the actual health of each individual (which would disregard the social context in which the results of such a study were produced). Overall, this stance encourages us to realise that many (if not all) of the things we value, such as agency, humanity, dignity, and other fuzzy concepts, do not reveal themselves dichotomously in our lives. These are not something you either have or do not have. Rather, they are states which are constantly being negotiated and co-constructed in conjunction with others. Therefore, a common good approach affirms that the experience of being agents, of living in a humane way, and so on, can be better appraised through a gradient scale at the social level (i.e., by measuring the extent to which these aspects are present as practices in a given population) rather than as an on/off condition that can then be aggregated for the population as a whole. In fact, both individual and social achievements are sustained by the recurrence of practices in society, rather than being an on-off condition of individuals within society. Hence, the problem with most measures of social progress focusing on outcomes is that, although they can tell us something about people’s wellbeing or agency, for example, the resources that people possess or their internal abilities to make choices (e.g., income, ownership of resources, literacy levels, self-esteem), do not reveal anything about the vitality of practices, nor the extent to which those practices are spread across the population, nor indeed their permanence in the near and distant future. In sum, a metric of the common good dynamic reveals the fact that although the person and her wellbeing are a central part of development, this is not the only concern, as it does not provide the necessary information to tackle the systemic problems we face in the modern world. Operationalising the common good as a nexus, therefore, makes us move beyond individualised, static measures to appraise the dynamic process through which we generate, share and enjoy common goods (including individual enjoyments). This metric seeks to move beyond a simple description of the state of things (in terms of individual access to education, health, etc.), to 109 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics allow us to say something about how these outcomes are generated. For example, obtaining a desirable outcome through a desirable process that respects human dignity and freedom, is not the same as doing so by means of an undesirable and disrespectful process. Simply stated, we could arrive at similar results in terms of individual levels of wellbeing through very different social dynamics. Therefore, we need to be able to discern between desirable and undesirable development processes, just as we need to know why desirable outcomes are not attained in certain contexts. We need to assess people’s behaviours and the processes and social structures in which their actions take place, and understand how these—together—result (or not) in a common good dynamic, in the hope of a freer, more human, more just society. The challenge is to encapsulate this process in a metric. This is precisely the task that the IPBC has set itself, and the subject of our discussion in the following paragraphs. As has been argued in the previous chapters, and as the metric will show, the questionnaire seeks to capture information through the expected social practices and expected patterns of human behaviours. This is motivated by the idea that every person is deeply embedded in a social context with specific rules that structure their actions and interactions. These socially recognised patterns of behaviour that coordinate our social interactions inform us of whether a particular social dynamic promoting the common good (or a common bad) is being reinforced or transformed. Indeed, when we think, act, and choose, we are not only deciding our way of life, we are also reproducing or confronting social structures that—partly—determine and validate our actions and the processes by which we do things in our common social life (see also Chapter 4). It is through our shared actions with others that we produce, procure, and experience common goods. As such, the metric aims to inform how institutions, behaviours, and groups interact with one another to constitute a nexus of the common good. This will be a necessary tool for informing policies through a more comprehensive view of social dynamics, with the aim of a flourishing community and flourishing individual lives. The IPBC’s team proposes to capture the collective dynamic processes and their interconnectivity through the matrix reproduced below (Figure 1). The model identifies the five normative dimensions deemed minimally necessary for the production of common goods at the 110 A Common Good Approach to Development local level. It also illustrates the fact that accounting for the presence or absence of each of these dimensions alone is insufficient; for the common good is the systemic outcome resulting from the quality, strength, and density of the interactions between these dimensions—rather than the simple results of their aggregation as separate phenomena. Therefore, the matrix envisions the nexus of the common good as the dynamic resulting from the combination of and interactions between each of these dimensions.3 Figure 1. The common good pentagram. Source: Nebel and Medina (in this volume). 2. The Design of the Survey Anyone who has designed a survey or collaborated in the process knows that it is no easy task. There are too many considerations to take into account in order to stay as close as possible to the original intention of the theoretical framework. Even apparently unproblematic features, such as the wording, response options, and order of questions in a survey can affect the quality of any metric (e.g., Kelley et al. 2003; Brown 2009). Therefore, our metric went through a careful design process, which we can map in relation to recommendations from the literature. 3 We provide a brief description of each of these dimensions below, along with the items proposed to measure each dimension. Agency Governance Stability Justice Humanity 117 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics (Justice), the dynamic aspect refers to people’s perception in terms of the way people treat each other. To capture the relationship between the dimension (Justice) and the basic common good of ‘Solidarity’ in its dynamic aspect, one item tries to capture the reciprocity among its members (“In my community, if someone is having a hard time, we organise to help him/her”). Moreover, to address the systemic emphasis of the nexus (even if partially), some items reflect the strength of the relationship between the dimensions and the way each dimension potentialises the other. For this, a number of individual items focus on capturing the two-way relationships between dimensions (e.g., Governance and Stability, Governance and Collective Agency, Governance and Justice, and vice versa). Take, for example, the two-way relationship between the dimensions of Governance and Stability. On the one hand, the governance of stability is measured by one item focused on the capacity of the municipal government to promote a dignified life for everyone in the locality in the long term (“The municipal government works to ensure that everyone can keep living in the community in the long term”). Reciprocally, on the other hand, another item tries to capture the stability of governance (“The programmes implemented by the municipal government have long-term benefits”). Hence, as mentioned before, this multidimensional metric is therefore composed of items that try to capture not only a dimension in isolation, but also the interconnection between dimensions and sub-domains (such as basic common goods). Now, the Humanity dimension is treated differently (see Chapter 2). For this dimension, the metric drops the structure/dynamic division. This dimension is treated differently since it aims at capturing the extent to which the whole structure and dynamic of the nexus results in a socially virtuous way of living together in the community, which makes itself visible through a set of social virtues embodied in people’s collective practices in a community. These social virtues include items related to freedom and responsibility, justice and solidarity, peace and concord, and others. Hence, items in the survey ask about the expected behaviour in the community in relation to these. On the basis of the theoretical framework, the next subsections present the list of indicators of a metric of a common good dynamic. 118 A Common Good Approach to Development Each subsection describes one of the dimensions. Each dimension, in turn, presents a table that includes information about: the list of items attributed to the dimension (column 1); and a justification/description of the purpose of each item (column 2). I. Justice The dimension of Justice (Table 1) captures the collective processes and institutions at play in a municipality through which people share common goods (in their valuation, production, and benefit). The dimension is measured in terms of equality of opportunity in the five basic common goods (i.e., structure), and in people’s expectations about the common practices (i.e., how people treat each other) in the context of the other dimensions of the matrix (Governance, Stability, and Collective Agency Freedom). Table 1. Justice: items and justification. Item Justification/Indicator of J-I: Basic common good “Rule of Law” J1 In my locality, each person’s rights are respected. - The rule of law understood as a basic common good. J2 In my locality, the police protect me. - This question investigates the quality of the consensus that exists regarding the rule of law and the effective adherence to legality in the municipality. J3 In my locality, public officials can be corrupted. J-II: Basic common good “Work” J4 In my locality, work is valued. - Work understood as a basic common good, not only referring to the individual who works but to the whole community (both in the benefit created and their organization). J5 Most people in my locality have work. - This question assesses the quality of the consensus that exists regarding work as a basic common good. It investigates the possibility of access to work. 119 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Item Justification/Indicator of J-III: Basic common good “Education” J6 In my community, we value that everyone can study. - Education understood as a basic common good, that is, as an institution that introduces children to a shared knowledge and a common rationality. J7 In my locality, anyone can study, should he/she choose to do so. - This question investigates the value given to education in the community, as well as access to education. J-IV: Basic common good “Culture” J8 My locality’s cultural traditions are respected by the majority. - Culture understood as a basic common good, that is, as a collective identity and a universe of shared meaning. J9 In my locality, traditional sayings are understood by the majority. - These questions investigate the value given to culture, as well as the access to the semantic meaning of this culture. J-V: Basic common good “Solidarity” J10 In my community, if someone is having a hard time, we organise to help him/her. - Solidarity understood as a basic common good, that is, as the needed unity and reciprocity among members of a community. J11 In my locality, there are places where people can go to get help (e.g., DIF, Red Cross, churches). - These questions assess the value given to solidarity and the access to institutional forms of solidarity in the municipality. J-VI Justice and Governance J12 In my locality, people are not forced to leave the municipality so as to secure their livelihood. - This question investigates the extension and distribution of the benefits of government action in the municipality. J13 Municipal government programmes benefit the majority of the population. J-VII Justice and Agency J14 In my locality, there are social groups that fail to gain access to power. - These questions investigate the existence and distribution of a collective agency. 120 A Common Good Approach to Development Item Justification/Indicator of J15 In my locality, some groups have all the power. - Measure the way in which power is distributed in the municipality. J-VIII: Systematic exclusion J16 In my daily activities in the locality, I am frequently humiliated. - This question investigates the presence of culturally accepted forms of exclusion and, therefore, invisible to the majority of the population. Source: IPBC’s team elaboration. II. Stability The dimension of Stability (Table 2) captures the permanence and transmission of the nexus of the common good. The structure of the nexus is measured through items that focus on the extent to which this structure, manifest in the five basic common goods, allows the transmission of humanity in the nexus. The dynamics of the nexus, in turn, captures the permanence of the three key elements of the dynamics of common good: Governance, Justice and Collective Agency Freedom. This permanence is measured through (a) the quality of the duration of local institutions (to all, to us, to the majority, or to some); and (b) the time projection of institutions (e.g., one, five, or ten years). Table 2. Stability: items and justification. Item Justification/Indicator of S-I: Dignity and BCG “Rule of Law” S17 In my locality, when a thief is caught, we hand him/her over to the police. - The instance of transmission is the judge which establishes rights and restores the dignity of the victim. S18 In my locality, when someone is arrested, the police treats him/her with respect. - The item measures the respect to the rule of law, correspondingly, the usurpation of the role of the judge when the population punishes thieves. - The item measures the capacity of the legal process to respect the dignity of the person arrested. 121 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Item Justification/Indicator of S-II: Dignity and BCG “Work” S19 I am proud to talk about my work with others. - The dignity of work resides in the possibility I have of recognising myself in it, that is, recognising myself as a human in what I do. - The instance of transmission is the way in which the value of work is shared with others. S-III: Dignity and BCG “Education” S20 Attending school is important to be able to participate in the locality’s social life. - The transmission of dignity in school occurs as the acquisition of the knowledge that is socially valued by the community. - The question measures the importance of the acquisition of basic knowledge to be integrated/respected in the community. S-IV: Dignity and BCG “Culture” S21 I am proud of my community’s culture. - Culture transfers dignity to the extent that it gives access to a collective memory of our humanity. Culture constitutes a universe of meanings from which individuals construct their own identities. S22 The younger generations participate in my locality’s traditions, customs, and festivities. - The question assesses the population’s rooting in a culture. S-V: Dignity and BCG “Solidarity” S23 When a family member or myself seeks help in a local institution, we are treated with respect. - Solidarity in the form of the institutional support that exists in the municipality. Solidarity transmits dignity to the extent that it prevents the exclusion of vulnerable groups in the community. - The question assesses the way in which vulnerable people are treated in the municipality. S-VI: Stability and governance S24 The programmes implemented by the municipal government have long-term benefits. - The question investigates the quality of social time created by the political governance of the municipality in terms of extension. - Measures the time extension of government action. 122 A Common Good Approach to Development Item Justification/Indicator of S-VII: Stability and justice S25 If I buy land or a house, I am confident that the government will respect my property title in the future. - The questions examine the quality of the social time created by the legal system in terms of extension. S-VIII: Stability and agency S26 Most associations in my locality have existed for a long time (for example: “mayordomía”, “jornales”, parent association, “ejido” groups). - The questions investigate the quality of the social time that the population can count on to project collective actions, both in extension and in inclusion. S27 The members of associations meet frequently (for instance: “mayordomía”, “jornales”, parent association, “ejido” groups, etc.). Source: IPBC’s team elaboration. III. Governance The dimension of Governance (Table 3) captures whether the basic common goods in a municipality are governed as common goods or not. Put differently, the focus is on whether the basic common goods are placed at the service of the community as a whole (for the good of all and everyone) and not co-opted by certain groups. The structure of the nexus is measured through items that assess the quality of the management, organisation and administration of the common goods by the local authorities and civil society. The dynamics of the nexus is captured through items that evaluate the capacity of political governance to serve the common good. Four areas of quality are studied: authority of the governance, efficiency of the governance, conflict resolution and generation of consensus. 123 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Table 3. Governance: items and justification. Item Justification/Indicator of G-I: Governance of the BCG “Rule of law” G28 In this locality the municipal administration is at the service of the majority. - The governance of the rule of law as a basic common good is verified by the effective guarantee of the legality for all. - The question revolves around: who does the law serve? G-II: Governance of the BCG “Work” G29 In my locality, most people pay taxes. - The governance of work as a basic common good is verified if individual work also contributes to the wellbeing of the entire community. G30 The government strives to improve workers’ conditions. - The question revolves around the effectiveness of tax redistribution in the community. G-III: Governance of the BCG “Culture” G31 The government of my locality actively promotes the creation and maintenance of public spaces such as parks, squares and streets. - Culture characterises, among other things, the way in which we live together. The construction of public space as a space of common use reveals the management of culture as a common good. G32 In my locality, most people take care of public spaces such as parks, squares, and streets. - The questions investigate the construction and care of public space in a locality. G-IV: Governance of the BCG “Solidarity” G33 The government provides the conditions for effective solidarity to exist among the citizens of my locality. - Solidarity in the sense of the forms of mutual help that exist in the community. - Measures the way in which mutual help can extend to all members of the community. G-V: Governance of the BCG “Education” G34 In my locality, the government works so that everyone can finish high school. - Organisation of education as a common good. - Measures the political will so that all complete compulsory secondary schooling. 124 A Common Good Approach to Development Item Justification/Indicator of G-VI: Authority of the political governance 1 G35 In my locality, the government’s authority is respected. - Authority in the sense of immediate and obvious recognition of the power of the government (recognition as something independent from legitimacy). - Measures the degree of authority that the population recognises in the municipal government. G-VII: Authority of the political governance 2 G36 The municipal government works for the good of the majority. - Authority in the sense of the municipal government’s efforts to work for the common good of the entire population. - This question investigates if the authority of the government is linked to its search for the common good. GP-VIII: Governance and efficiency G37 When someone takes office, he/she complies with the proposed government plan. - Efficiency in the sense that the municipal government really reaches the proposed projects. - The question measures the degree of perception by the population of the efficiency of municipal projects. G-IX: Governance and conflict resolution G38 The government has the will to solve conflicts between different local groups. - Conflict resolution indicates the government’s ability to mediate and resolve tensions among the various groups in the municipality, ensuring a minimum cohesion between different social actors (cohesion of the nexus). - The question measures the ability of the government to maintain cohesion between social actors. G-X: Governance and consensus building G39 The municipal government is able to reach agreements that benefit the entire community. - The creation of consensus indicates the ability of the government to create consensus in view of the common good. - Measures the government’s capacity to increase the cohesion of the nexus of common good. 125 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Item Justification/Indicator of G-XI: Governance of justice G40 The municipal government seeks to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities in the community. - Active search of justice as a goal of the municipal government. - The question captures the effort placed by the municipal government on promoting equal opportunities. G-XII: Governance of the stability G41 The municipal government works to ensure that everyone can keep living in the community in the long term. - The active search for stability as a goal of the municipal government. - The question measures the effort placed by the municipal government on the promotion of a dignified life for everyone in the long term. G-XIII: Governance of agency G42 The government of my municipality listens to us. - Organisation of the political agency as a common good. G43 I can participate in the decisions of my municipality. - The question revolves around the way in which effective participation of the population is promoted by the governance. Source: IPBC’s team elaboration. IV. Collective Agency Freedom The dimension of Collective Agency Freedom (Table 4) answers the question: ‘what determines the quality of collective agency in a municipality?’ It measures, on the one hand, the dynamic aspect of collective agency, that is, the capacity of the local population to act together in view of their future. This capacity to self-organise can be captured through (a) the value given to the capacity to self-organise in the community; (b) the legal possibility to self-organise; (c) the capacity to generate consensus around a common goal; (d) the capacity to selfgovern in the consecution of a common goal; and (e) the capacity to generate synergy with other organisations to reach a common goal. On the other hand, it measures the organisation/structure of collective agency, which can be observed through the existence of organisations that give structure to community life and its quality. 126 A Common Good Approach to Development Hence, the items related to this aspect measure the capacity of the existing collective agency in the municipality to generate dynamics that promote the common good. This can be inferred through three criteria: (a) the freedom of agency in these organisations; (b) the possibility of universalising the shared benefits generated by these organisations; (c) the quality of the existing relations between organisations. Table 4. Collective Agency Freedom: items and justification. Item Justification/Indicator of A-I. Agency and the value of self-organization A44 In my locality, it is valued that people organise themselves to solve their problems. - Measures the value given to the act of self-organising in the community. A45 People take the initiative when they have to solve problems in my locality. A-II. Agency and the capacity of consensus A46 The neighbours can reach agreements when we have a common problem. - Measures the capacity to generate consensus around a common goal. A47 The neighbours know how to organise ourselves to solve a common problem. A-III. Agency and the legality of self-organization A48 The laws often prevent us from solving local problems. - Measures the legal possibility of self-organising. A-IV. Agency and efficient governance A49 Most of the time, the neighbours achieve the goals we set for ourselves. - Measures the capacity to self-organise for the consecution of a common goal. A-V. Agency and the creation of synergy A50 When we face difficult problems, in my community we can get support from other institutions. - Measures the capacity to generate synergies with other organisations to reach a common goal. 133 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Fourth, this type of comprehensive metrics also makes explicit the tradeoffs associated with the choice of statistical tools available to construct the model, such as Factor Analysis, Principal Component Analysis or Structural Equation Modelling. Statistics such as the latter rely on the amount of variance shared by the items in order to find commonalities between them. Hence, the fact that some of the items of this metric capture different dimensions simultaneously, due to the interconnections of the model, makes it more difficult for these statistical tools to discriminate between dimensions, thereby lowering the quality of the metric based on the reliability analysis offered by these tools. In other words, it is difficult to reconcile the complexity of the metric with the assumptions and requirements behind the statistical tests.9 However, sometimes these tradeoffs need to be carefully considered and evaluated by researchers when they are interested in constructing more comprehensive, interdependent, and multidimensional measures that capture the complexity of human existence. A fifth, and last, reflection relates to the difficulty of applying this kind of metric to very diverse audiences. The items of the metric presented here are complex and require a fair amount of cognitive reflection to be answered. Some of them might also require some degree of knowledge and experience about how the local government works, how neighbours interact and act together, and the values of the locality as a whole. Additionally, some items require basic knowledge of the abstract lexicon such as ‘laws’, ‘social programmes’, and ‘property title’. This could increase the difficulty of applying this survey to individuals who have not participated in different public spheres in their localities, nor kept a household, or those who do not have a certain level of education. This is particularly relevant if the metric will be applied in diverse populations, including those municipalities with indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds. Translation issues are also relevant here, since the interpretation of the meaning of survey items might vary for people whose mother tongue is not Spanish.10 Hence, issues of meaning, interpretation and translation need to be taken into account when comparing results across municipalities. 9 See e.g., Ramírez (2021) for a similar experience with a multidimensional model of psychosocial wellbeing and a discussion on this. 10 See the Appendix for the Spanish version of the survey. 134 A Common Good Approach to Development To close the section, we would like to point out that while these concerns may not be trivial and perhaps more reflection about them is required, we also recognise that the extent to which these previous points are relevant to the metric is a matter of further empirical investigation. Conclusion In this chapter, we have presented the rationale, the process, and the structure of the metric developed by the IPBC of Puebla, México to measure the common good dynamics of a municipality. The elaboration of the indicators was the result of a research project that received feedback from prestigious experts, local specialists, NGOs, public officials, and researchers. It was carefully designed to reflect the theoretical framework behind and the common requirements of survey indicators, but also to obtain and include the feedback of potential respondents of the survey through cognitive interviewing. Much reflection has gone into the construction of this metric. We have recognised the many trade-offs involved in the process, and made decisions to the best of our abilities. With this chapter, we wish to make these decisions and their potential implications for the final form of the survey and the resulting data explicit. We also argued that the new information that this measure of common good will offer to municipal governments, NGOs, researchers, and decision-makers can facilitate the adoption of better-informed policies that take into account the dynamics and structure of the common good produced by the citizens of a municipality. In fact, the initial process of constructing the indicator has already had concrete effects, since it has already encouraged the collaboration of municipal governments in recollecting the data and compromising in order to take the results into account in their municipal development plans. Overall, we can say that the theoretical framework and the metric presented in this book already provide valuable contributions for the purpose of bettering the measurement of development processes at the local level and the information that governments use to make better policy decisions. However, this is for researchers, governments, policy actors, and, more importantly, for people themselves to decide. Hence, the main intention of this chapter is to promote and encourage more and better discussion in this direction. 135 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics References Alkire, S. 2015. The capability approach and well-being measurement for public policy, OPHI Working Paper, No. 94. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199325818.013.18 Brown D. 2009. Good practice guidelines for indicator development and reporting. A paper at the Third World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, Charting Progress, Building Visions, Improving Life, 27–30 October, 2009, Busan, Korea. Camfield, L. 2016. “Enquiries into Wellbeing: How Could Qualitative Data Be Used to Improve the Reliability of Survey Data?”, in White, S. C. and Blackmore, C. (eds), Cultures of Wellbeing, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536457_2 Deneulin, S. and Shahani, L. 2009. An Introduction to the Human Development and Capability Approach Freedom and Agency, London; Sterling; Ottawa: Earthscan. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781849770026 Forsyth, B. H. and Lessler, J. T. 1991. “Cognitive laboratory methods: a taxonomy”, in Biemer, P. et al. (eds), Measurement Errors in Surveys, New York: Wiley, 393–418. Frederick, S., Loewenstein, G. 1999. “Hedonic adaptation”, in Kahneman, D. (ed.), Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, New York, Russell Sage Foundation. Gasper, D. 2007. Uncounted or illusory blessings? Competing responses to the Easterlin, Easterbrook and Schwartz paradoxes of well-being, Journal of International Development 19/4, 473–492, https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.1383. Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. 1984. Choices, values and frames, American Psycological Association, Inc. 39/4, 341–350. Kelley, K., Clark, B., Brown, V., and Sitzia, J. 2003. Good practice in the conduct and reporting of survey research, International Journal of Quality in Health Care 15/3, 261–266. https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzg031 Krosnick J. and Fabrigar, L. 2012. “Designing rating scales for effective measurement in surveys”, in Lars Lynberg et al. (eds), Survey Measurement and Process Quality, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics, New York, Wiley, 141–164 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118490013.ch6. Nebel, M. and Arbesu-Verduzco, I. 2020. “A metric of common goods dynamics”, in Beretta, S. and Nebel, M. (eds), A Special Issue on Common Good, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, 4, 383–406. Ramírez, V. 2021. Relational Well-being in Policy Implementation in Mexico: The Oportunidades-Propsera Conditional Cash Transfer, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74705-3 136 A Common Good Approach to Development Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali. 2020. A Special Issue on Common Good, Beretta, S. and Nebel, M. (eds). https://riss.vitaepensiero.it/ scheda-fascicolo_contenitore_digital/simona-beretta-mathias-nebel/ rivista-internazionale-di-scienze-sociali-2020-4-a-special-issue-on-common- good-000518_2020_0004-370666.html Stiglitz J. E., Sen A., and Fitoussi, J.-P. 2009. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Perfornance and Social Progress. Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), Paris. https://ec.europa.eu/ eurostat/documents/8131721/8131772/Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Commission- report.pdf Székely, M. 2006. Números que mueven al mundo. La medición de la pobreza en México, México: Miguel Ángel Porrúa. Willis, G. B. 1999. Cognitive Interviewing: A ‘How To’ Guide. Reducing Survey Error through Research on the Cognitive and Decision Processes in Surveys, short course presented at the 1999 Meeting of the American Statistical Association. https://www.hkr.se/contentassets/9ed7b1b3997e4bf4baa8d4eceed5cd87/ gordonwillis.pdf Zapf, W. 2000. Social reporting in the 1970s and in the 1990s, Social Indicators Research, 51, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006997731263 Appendix Instrument’s questions to measure the common good dynamics in original language (Spanish). Ítem J1 En mi localidad, los derechos de cada persona son respetados. J2 En mi localidad, la policía sirve para protegerme. J3 En mi localidad, se pueden corromper los funcionarios públicos. J4 En mi localidad, se valora trabajar. J5 En mi localidad, la mayoría tiene trabajo. J6 En mi comunidad es importante que todos tengan la posibilidad de estudiar. J7 En mi localidad, cualquier persona puede estudiar si así lo decide. J8 Las tradiciones culturales de mi localidad son respetadas por la mayoría. J9 En mi localidad, los refranes los entienden la mayoría. J10 En mi comunidad, si alguien la pasa mal nos organizamos para ayudarle. J11 En mi localidad, hay lugares donde la gente puede acudir para recibir ayuda (DIF, Cruz Roja, Iglesias, etc.). 137 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Ítem J12 En mi localidad la gente no necesita dejar el municipio para poder vivir. J13 Los programas de los gobiernos municipales benefician a la mayoría de la población. J14 En mi localidad hay grupos sociales que no tienen acceso al poder. J15 En mi localidad hay algunos grupos sociales que tienen todo el poder. J16 En mis actividades diarias en la localidad, soy frecuentemente humillado. S17 En mi localidad cuando se atrapa a un ladrón lo entregamos a la policía. S18 En mi localidad cuando alguien es arrestado, la policía lo trata con respeto. S19 Me enorgullece hablar de mi trabajo con otros. S20 Es importante haber ido a la escuela para participar en la vida social de la localidad. S21 Me siento orgulloso de la cultura de mi comunidad. S22 Las generaciones más jóvenes participan en las fiestas, costumbres y tradiciones de mi localidad. S23 Cuando yo o algún familiar buscamos ayuda de una institución en la localidad, somos tratados con respeto. S24 Los programas del gobierno municipal tienen beneficios de largo plazo. S25 Si compro un terreno o una casa, tengo confianza que el gobierno respetará mi título de propiedad a futuro. S26 La mayoría de las asociaciones de mi localidad existen desde mucho tiempo (Por ejemplo: mayordomía, jornales, sociedad de padres de familia, grupos ejidales, etc.). S27 Los miembros de las asociaciones suelen reunirse con frecuencia. (Por ejemplo: mayordomía, jornales, sociedad de padres de familia, grupos ejidales, etc.). G28 Considero que en esta localidad la administración municipal está al servicio de la mayoría. G29 En la localidad, la mayoría paga impuestos. G30 El gobierno se esfuerza para que los trabajadores tengan mejores condiciones laborales. G31 El gobierno de mi localidad promueve de manera activa el mantenimiento y la creación de espacios públicos como parques, plazas y calles. G32 En mi localidad la mayoría cuida los espacios públicos como parques, plazas y calles. G33 El gobierno crea las condiciones necesarias para que exista una solidaridad efectiva entre los ciudadanos de mi localidad. 138 A Common Good Approach to Development Ítem G34 En mi localidad el gobierno hace el esfuerzo para que todos terminen la preparatoria o bachillerato. G35 En esta localidad se respeta la autoridad del gobierno municipal. G36 El gobierno municipal trabaja para el bien de la mayoría. G38 El gobierno tiene la voluntad de resolver conflictos entre diferentes grupos de la localidad. G39 El gobierno municipal es capaz de generar acuerdos que benefician a toda la comunidad. G40 El gobierno municipal busca que todos tengan las mismas oportunidades en la comunidad. G41 El gobierno crea las condiciones necesarias para que nadie tenga que dejar la localidad para vivir. G42 El gobierno de mi municipio nos escucha. G43 Puedo participar en las decisiones de mi municipio. A44 En mi localidad, se valora que la gente se organice para resolver sus problemas. A45 La gente toma iniciativas cuando se tienen que resolver problemas de mi localidad. A46 Los vecinos logramos ponernos de acuerdo cuando tenemos un problema común. A47 Los vecinos sabemos organizarnos para solucionar un problema común. A48 Las leyes nos impiden frecuentemente dar solución a problemas locales. A49 La mayoría de las veces, los vecinos logramos los objetivos que nos proponemos. A50 Cuando nos enfrentamos a problemas difíciles, en mi comunidad podemos conseguir el apoyo de otras instituciones. A51 Puedo expresar mis opiniones en los grupos en los que participo. A52 La mayoría de los grupos de mi comunidad contribuyen al bien común. A53 Es posible la cooperación entre los grupos de mi localidad. A54 Los grupos de mi localidad cooperan con el gobierno. H55 La gente de mi localidad exige que me haga responsable de mis acciones. H56 La gente de mi localidad se molesta si no cumplo con mis promesas. H57 La gente de mi localidad se molesta si no trato a los demás de manera cordial y respetuosa. H58 La gente de mi localidad se molesta si no hago lo correcto. H59 En mi localidad, se ve mal a la gente que no es solidaria con los demás. H60 En mi localidad, la gente es honesta. 139 3. Design and Reflection on the Metric of Common Dynamics Ítem H61 En mi localidad, cualquier persona puede salir de día sin temor. H62 La gente de mi localidad acostumbra a resolver conflictos de manera pacífica. H63 La gente de mi localidad se enoja si no pienso antes de actuar. H64 La gente de mi localidad no tolera que una persona sea mala onda con los demás. H65 La gente de mi localidad espera lo mejor de mí. H66 La gente de mi localidad espera que yo sea fuerte cuando sufro alguna desgracia. H67 La gente de mi localidad esperan de los demás que hagan prueba de valor en la vida. H68 La mayoría de las personas de mi localidad, expresa sus opiniones de manera clara. H69 Cuando se habla de temas importantes, la gente de mi localidad pide que se haga de manera seria y objetiva. H70 La gente de mi localidad espera que yo no cometa dos veces el mismo error. H71 La gente de mi localidad sabe reconciliarse después de un conflicto. PART II: DISCUSSING THE NORMATIVE ELEMENTS OF COMMON GOOD DYNAMICS 245 7. Organising Common Good Dynamics: Justice could be measured in relation to three common basic goods: rule of law; inequality of basic opportunities (health, education, and employment); and intergenerational transmission of inequality of opportunity. The dimensions of justice should be measured in terms of rights, distribution of current opportunities, and intergenerational transmission of inequality of opportunity, according to the survey questions laid out in Table 7. This basic set of questions could be extended to the necessary means to preserve freedoms and rights (i.e., police resources, absence of corruption, the way the judicial system works), to the distribution of other basic resources (i.e., wealth, income, consumption), or to other ways to measure the transmission of opportunities (i.e., persistence of socioeconomic status, social mobility, coefficient of determination in multiple regressions). However, the questions in the table define the indispensable information needed to measure the dimension of justice for the common good. Conclusion There are several implications of the analysis previously laid out in this chapter: 1. To measure the basic aspects of justice, the metric should capture justice’s procedural and distributional dimensions. A measure of those dimensions should focus on institutions’ effectiveness in protecting freedoms and rights in a narrow sense, on current distributive results, and on intergenerational inequality of opportunities. Justice in these three forms could be measured in relation to the rule of law, inequality in health, education, and employment opportunities, and the intergenerational transmission of inequalities. 2. Justice conceived as limitations on what people can do to others to avoid coercion or the unacceptable loss of autonomy seems to be more a matter of agency than of opportunities to be free. However, procedural justice demands only particular ways to establish social relationships within the nexus of the common good. 246 A Common Good Approach to Development Table 7. Basic questionnaire for the measurement of justice at the local level. Questions Justification Related quantitative data Basic common good: ‘Rule of Law’ 1. In my locality, the rights, freedoms, and contracts of each person are respected. - The rule of law understood as the basic protection of negative rights, liberty, and voluntary agreements 1. Data on criminality. Basic common good: ‘Equal distribution of present opportunities’ 2. In my locality, people have access to public health services. 3. In my community it is important that everyone is able to go to school. 4. In my locality, people have the opportunity to obtain decent work. - Health understood as a basic common good, needed for functioning in a community. Education understood as a basic common good for sharing knowledge. - Work understood as a basic common good to transform individual and social surroundings. 2. Data on access to health services through formal work or other means. 3. Data on years of schooling. 4. Data on employment. Basic common good: ‘Intergenerational transmission of opportunities’ 5. Years of schooling. 6. Parents’ years of schooling. - These questions link the results between generations to measure non-chosen inequalities. 5. Intergenerational correlation of education. 247 7. Organising Common Good Dynamics: Justice 3. The conception of justice as protection of negative rights has a limited scope but is a key ingredient to defend the agency aspect of freedom. It is unsuitable as a measure of distributive justice, not only because it ignores effective freedoms, but also because it is insensitive to the effect of end results on social welfare. 4. If the objective is to measure the basic aspects of distributive justice at the municipal level, the equal opportunities approach has conceptual advantages, although it requires making geographical imputations of the simplest correlation index or surveys representative of municipalities. Both exercises are technically feasible, but represent very different strategies in terms of the research involved and its costs. 5. The equal opportunities approach can be elaborated to include multiple dimensions (correlations between the achievements of parents and children can involve, for example, health, occupational position, and income) and even address public policy interventions, such as the EU and OECD Social Justice Index. The greater the number of dimensions and components in the selected index, the lower its viability or relevance in the calculations for a particular municipality. 6. While income inequality indices are relatively easy to calculate, it is difficult to justify them as indicators of distributive justice. Equality of resources, although it has its advocates, generally implies ignoring the agency of individuals or their differences to transform resources into effective freedoms. 7. The complexity of the concept of justice makes any of its measurements a pale reflection of what we are trying to measure. In particular, any indicator of justice must not be isolated from other elements, such as the notions of agency, governance, stability, and humanity. 8. The concept of the common good, designed to evaluate the good of a situation, involves not only the positions but also the relationships between the individuals, with the solidarity between them particularly important. Solidarity among the members of a group implies concern for those who are in a 248 A Common Good Approach to Development disadvantaged position, which translates into providing equal opportunities to progress on their own. Hence, equality of opportunity is also a relevant concept to measure this aspect of the common good. The formalisation of the concept of the common good as ‘social conditions that individuals provide as relational obligations to shared interests’ has a long way to go in providing better grounds for the measurement of its components. Justice as what we owe each other is not completely captured by the current measures. But sometimes an imperfect measure is the only thing we need to avoid patent injustice. References Anderson, S. E. 1999. What Is the Point of Equality?, Ethics 109, 287–337. Bandura, R. 2011. “Composite indicators and rankings: Inventory 2011”. Technical report, Office of Development Studies, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), New York. Berlin, I. 1969. “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brunori, P., Peragine, V., and Ferreira, F. 2013. 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This happens for several reasons: stability is less tangible, it comprises overlaps with other normative dimensions, such as governance, and unlike other elements of the common good, it can be normatively ambiguous. Thus, more agency freedom is better than less, more governance is better than less, more justice is better than less, and more humanity is obviously better than less (this does not mean that they cannot have negative unintended consequences). But is more stability better than less? And if so, how can we measure the stability dimension of the common good? Within this context, this chapter starts with a conceptual discussion about the stability dimension of the common good, exploring its links with similar constructs such as sustainability, and resilience (WCED 1987). Then, it examines the normative character of stability, echoing Anand and Sen’s (2003) critique of the use of the sustainability concept. The main point is examining positive and negative aspects of stability. Thirdly, it delves into technical issues related to the measurement of this dimension, such as the issue of intertemporal rates of discount (Stern 2007) and the use of RBM to link common objectives to a single framework. Finally, it puts forward a very tentative classification of stability common good indicators according to their usefulness in empirical common good nexus models. There are several normative and technical challenges that need to be tackled in order to assess and operationalise the stability dimension © 2022 Flavio Comim, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.10 252 A Common Good Approach to Development of the common good. Thus, it seems prima facie natural to suggest that whereas the normative challenges should be solved by stakeholders, there are technical issues, involving handling attribution problems, counterfactual inferences and the use of econometrics, that are better left to technical analyses. This chapter explores however the complexities necessary in this kind of articulation for taking stability as a key element of the common good. 1. The Stability Dimension In the context of the ‘nexus of the common good’ project led by Nebel, Garza-Vázquez, Sedmak, and colleagues, there is a methodological decision to focus not on a specific list of common goods but on how specific common goods build up. So, the choice of common good metrics should not reflect a simple assessment about the supply or availability of key common goods (as important as they might be) but rather about how they can be used to characterise the processes that takes place in the production of these goods, or in other words, how different interactions can create common goods. This is not a trivial point because often common good analyses are structured around the provision of common or public goods such as health, education, and infrastructure (Etzioni 2015; Kaul et al. 1999). Stability is an equivocal term. As such, it can be used to designate different processes. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it is useful to distinguish between four different senses in which the concept of sustainability could be used, namely: 1. The dictionary sense of stability: in common parlance, stability means a state of continuity without change or with very minor changes. It could also refer to the absence of its opposite, namely, the absence of instability, such as excessive fluctuations in a variable of interest. Quite often, this sense of stability refers to outcome variables. From this ordinary language interpretation, stability of the nexus of the common good would mean simply the continuity or permanence over time of the outcomes that it generates. This is indisputably a valuable property but it does not provide a sufficient criterion depending on its normative quality. Two issues are relevant 253 8. Development and Stability here. First, in the dictionary sense of stability, the stability of the nexus of the common good would be the constancy of its outcomes and not necessarily the constancy of the nexus per se. Secondly, we should suspend judgment for a while about the normative nature of these results (this topic is further discussed below); 2. The process sense of stability: some aspects of stability are related to governance and the underlying processes that it can control and generate. This criterion focuses on processes rather than on outputs or outcomes. They might even include them, for instance in situations that could be characterised not as culmination outcomes (only final results matter), but as comprehensive outcomes (including processes and their final outcomes), as argued by Sen (2009). In other words, stability means the continuity or permanence of certain processes that might or might not give rise to certain outcomes. In this sense stable processes can produce unstable results and there is nothing unexpected or unnatural with this sense of stability when we see traditional economic systems (very stable in this sense) producing the deterioration of environmental conditions and further instability at the level of outcomes. This seems to provide an interpretation of stability much closer to the concept of the nexus of the common good; 3. The fairness sense of stability: in social terms, stability is not simply about good outcomes or good processes. It can also refer to political or social consensus, to agreement, to harmony. Rawls (2001) employs this sense of stability to argue for the importance of agreement on his principles of justice. Thus, stability becomes an important element for effectiveness, for a public basis of justification, for criteria that might prove relevant for discussing political questions. For this reason, stability is considered a sufficient criterion for supporting a sense of justice. In other words, the common good nexus can be stable because people agree with it and therefore there is no other force of disagreement that will push for its change; 254 A Common Good Approach to Development 4. The sustainable sense of stability: mostly in environmental terms, stability refers to conservation of ecosystems without undermining people’s ability in using them in the future or without unbalancing other social and economic priorities (WDR 2003). Here, stability is not simply about continuity or the absence of changes but about keeping a balance among competing social claims. This is not about processes, nor about governance. It is still about results and about how they should be normatively balanced, but with a clear focus on environmental issues. From this perspective, it is possible to be sustainable, protecting the environment without protecting or even caring about human beings. Thus, stability is not simply about continuity of outcomes and processes but about their political and normative significance. From this perspective, the issue of stability can be understood in relation to other constituents of the nexus of the common good. Unfortunately, this has not been the rule in sustainability debates. For instance, in the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (1987), the notion of stability, beneath the concern for sustainability, contains a negative moral evaluation of current generations for future ones. The report is careful in specifying that sustainability does not depend on the same level of resources but on the nexus that would allow different generations to maintain their common good. Its view is that this nexus is at risk by practices that do not take into account the nexus of the common good for future generations. The Earth Charter (1992) highlights an important characteristic of sustainability that can influence future stability prospects, namely, people’s acknowledgement of their interdependence and fragility. This point cannot be ignored, because it provides a simple, but essential, link between stability and the common good, mediated by the use of natural resources. Instability comes as a result of our lack of acknowledgement of our interdependence and common destiny. Stability is thus an outcome of a common good based on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice and a culture of peace. There is clearly a mix of different conceptual perspectives here but it should not detract us from the main point about stability being a feature of societies in which 261 8. Development and Stability Finally, stability seems a critical element for the promotion of justice, in particular distributive justice. In the common good nexus, justice is not simply about how people participate in the generation of social goods and how these goods are shared among them, but how the nexus itself incorporates processes of interaction, cooperation, and collaboration necessary for these results (see Chapter 7). Of course, these processes need to be stable somehow, because otherwise they cannot take place. As such, they demand stability in the way that different individuals recognise each other at a societal level and that the state consolidates in rights and laws the results of these processes of interaction, cooperation, and collaboration. For many, justice can only be achieved when these more consolidated, stable elements are in place. This is as much the case of philosophers in the liberal tradition such as Rawls, Sen, and Nussbaum as it is the case of philosophers in the critical tradition such as Honneth. Therefore, the common good nexus demands stability in the establishment of shared meanings of justice and implementation of socially just arrangements. In order to achieve the social function of justice a minimum stability is also required, otherwise we would see much volatility in the processes necessary for certain basic arrangements of justice. One cannot develop a certain relation with others and then suddenly change it in a random way. The element of ‘togetherness’ of justice needs some minimum stability for its evolution. Stability is neither good nor bad per se. It depends on how it complements other dimensions of the common good nexus. As much as it is true that it seems important for the characterisation of other dimensions of the nexus, it needs to be further clarified in relation to its normative quality. We can have good stability and bad stability and probably only participatory and communicative processes, similar to what Rawls named public reason or overlapping consensus, can establish this normative quality in democratic states. At the bottom, there is an element of collective choice in defining the normative quality of stability. We cannot forget however that different social groups have different powers and voices and that somehow these processes will always be imperfect. There is an aspect of ugliness in considering this imbalance in power and voice as shaping the normative guidelines of the common good nexus. But it is a reality that needs to be faced. 262 A Common Good Approach to Development Sometimes, the common good nexus defined by societies might reflect the power and prestige of a select few. 3. Measuring the Stability of the Common Good Nexus Assuming however that the normative aspects of the common good nexus work in a democratic and stable environment, it remains a challenge to operationalise these measures of stability of the nexus. Indeed, there are several technical issues involved in the measurement of this dimension. Let’s start with the most evident: given that stability involves different moments in time, how do we compare them? This would be a trivial question if not for the fact that people (and societies) normally have a time preference. That is, enjoying the benefits of the common good nexus today is better than enjoying the same benefits tomorrow. Or, alternatively, enjoying the common good nexus today is better than enjoying the common good nexus tomorrow. But if we prefer to have it today, how much are we willing to pay to have it today, rather than tomorrow? This will depend on our time preference. The result will define our intertemporal rate of discount. This is a traditional common problem that has not been fully addressed by well-known sustainability definitions such as the one from the Brundtland Report (1987), according to which sustainability involves a kind of development that satisfies the needs of the current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. But why should current generations bother about future generations, if quite often they will live longer, and be more educated and richer? Thus, the issue of discounting is not a trivial one. More importantly, behind this technical issue there is a serious debate about the notion of intergenerational equity. The same thing applies to the common good nexus. Why should we bother about the common good nexus today and not about the common good nexus tomorrow? But if we do, should we discount the future common good nexus in relation to our current one or not? If we discount it, we are actually favouring our generation over the future generation. We can proceed with the current generation discounting the common good of all future generations, and each successive generation doing the same for their successors. But should we allow discounting on a regular basis? As Solow (1993, p. 165) has argued, 263 8. Development and Stability You may wonder why I allow discounting at all. I wonder, too: no generation ‘should’ be favored over any other. The usual scholarly excuse—which relies on the idea that there is a small fixed probability that civilization will end during any little interval of time—sounds farfetched. We can think of intergenerational discounting as a concession to human weakness or as a technical assumption of convenience (which it is). However, not everyone would be happy with this alternative. In analysing the issue of climate change, which comprises very long timeframes (such as 50–100 years), Stern (2007) advocated for a zerodiscount rate on the ethical basis that every person should count equally in this problem. There is also a practical issue. Because the timeframe is very long, even a very small rate of discount will produce net present values of their flows (of wellbeing, for instance) that will be close to zero. This raises a key issue when we talk about the stability of the common good nexus, namely, what is its temporary? Is the nexus something that lasts four to five years, as part of a political cycle, or is it something that might last a generation? Or even longer, if we consider that it can reflect the political history of a country? In this last case, one can approach the issue following Stern’s advice of discounting less and less the outcomes of the common nexus that will flow to future generations. But if we are talking about arrangements (in terms of agency freedom or governance) that might have a more immediate impact, then perhaps we should discount the outcomes for future generations. How much this discount would be is an important policy issue to be discussed depending on the particular configuration of a certain common good nexus. This will have another important implication concerning the use of strategic planning behind the promotion of a particular common good nexus: the choice of outputs (what one does) and outcomes (the results of what one does) within different timeframes. This is different from the theoretical frame that establishes the logical relations between the different dimensions. When stability and time are the essence of the matter, as is the case in strategic plans, one should move towards implementation issues and distribute outputs and outcomes in time. Because all different dimensions of the common good nexus have different time horizons, concern with stability might suggest different arrangements between the dimensions of the common good nexus. By 264 A Common Good Approach to Development doing so, the pure conceptual model can be translated into a diversity of ‘impure’ empirical models, such as one that tackles the empirical links between governance and agency freedom towards a particular justice issue (Figure 1): Figure 1. Illustration of a possible empirical model of common good nexus. Stability in these dimensions would imply different timeframes for each of these outputs and their corresponding activities. In fact, the methodology of RBM (Results Based Management) would be most convenient here, allowing an analysis of the degree of coherence of the stability of different dimensions of the common good nexus. This analysis is relevant depending on the implementation model of the nexus (for instance, bottom-up vs top-down). Quite often, bottom-up models would take more time to be implemented and would add more demand on the stability component whereas top-down models tend to be accompanied by stronger governance elements and might, at least for the short-term, be more stable. There is an additional complication that might arise in terms of stability: if the common good nexus can be employed to achieve different policy objectives, it is natural that the nexus can be affected by the temporality of these objectives. Not to mention that some of these objectives, following Cunha and Heckman (2007), might be subject to 265 8. Development and Stability sensitive and critical periods. For instance, if the common good nexus is applied to the promotion of child education, the dimensions of humanity, governance and justice should be considered altogether for a period of at least eight to nine years for primary school and twelve years for primary plus secondary school for many countries in the world, allowing the nexus to finish a cycle of human flourishing. The situation might be different if the common good nexus is to be used to tackle for instance a pandemic, such as the one resulting from COVID-19. The nexus necessary for fostering short- to middle-term agency freedom should be built (empirically) on well-grounded forms of governance that need strong stability to cope with an emergency situation. So, different timeframes for different policies or institutions can be translated into distinct policy commitments with specific stability requirements. We should expect a multi-stability requirement because there are diverse durations that will produce or enable multidimensional human flourishing. Different dimensions can also show different sensitivity to change. Altogether, this makes the measurement of the stability dimension of the common good nexus very complex and to a large extent dependent on the aims for its use. For this reason, it is important to make a distinction between the common good nexus theoretical model presented in this book and its several different empirical manifestations. One should expect, as Sen (2009, 2017) warns us, that empirical counterparts of the common good nexus (as other justice artefacts) would at their best be incomplete, partial, and limited in their outreach. We should expand further on this discussion in the next section, but for the moment it is important to acknowledge that several technical issues involved in seriously taking the stability issue into account would comprise an extended concern with intertemporal rates of discount, empirical models of the common good nexus, different timeframes, and attention to different policy objectives. 4. Stability Indicators: A Tentative Taxonomy Whereas most indicators focus on outputs and outcomes, stability indicators are more concerned with processes and as such seem suitable for use in analyses about the common good nexus. They are part of what Sen named ‘comprehensive indicators’, tackling not only culmination 266 A Common Good Approach to Development outcomes but also their processes. This means that they should not be seen as a list or a checklist about the provision of common goods. Rather, they should focus on the normative aspects involved in the stability of the common good nexus, such as fairness and equality. This is not a minor point. The normative or ethical aspects of stability indicators should not be ignored, because unlike other dimensions there is no clear scale in the stability dimension. One can perpetuate unequal and unfair arrangements and therefore a simple notion of continuity is not enough to assess the common good nexus in this situation. Stability indicators can be classified according to the influence that they have on particular dimensions that we are talking about. We should however keep in mind that these dimensions interact, either logically or empirically, and as such they might provide a much more complex picture resulting from their integration. This is normally the case when the nexus is part of policy planning. Stability indicators should also respect some technical issues that cannot be ignored once we employ the common good nexus for social policy objectives. Similarly, they should adapt to particular empirical models that do not by necessity have to comprise all dimensions of the common good nexus. Table 2 below offers a tentative and simplified picture of this taxonomy (with some examples as illustrations). One important point to remark on is that not all indicators need to be quantitative. In the absence of quantitative information, qualitative indicators can be used, where ratios can be compared, trends can be analysed, different assessments and scenarios can be considered, etc. The key issue is that indicators should contain a threshold or any other indication about the normative status of the situation that one is analysing. That is, one should know whether the situation is good or bad, as simple as that. When this is not possible, an alternative, as suggested by Sen (2017) could be the use of partial rankings or complementation strategies with the use of other informational spaces (subjective views, resources, etc.). Another key point is that this table offers a series of examples of stability within selected common good dimensions taken in isolation. This is often not the case both conceptually and empirically. In fact, the common good nexus is precisely about the interaction of these dimensions. However, it is very difficult to assume or to guess what Table 2 A taxonomy for stability indicators. Agency freedom Humanity Governance Justice Normative anchor Indicators of the degree of consolidation and coherence of social views. Example: difference of time trend between what governments want vs what opinion polls suggest Indicators of revisability of values. Example: number of times collective agency freedom changed during a certain timeframe (this can be seen here as a positive aspect) Indicators of stability of moral psychology and collective values. Example: evolution of values measured by a well-known scale Indicators of coherence of collective choice. Example: existence of incoherent claims and inconsistencies over time (this can be a qualitative indicator) Indicators of quality of stability of management. Example: qualitative trend suggesting evolution of management on similar or different governance nexus Indicators of expansion of the common good nexus. Example: number of times that governance changed to favour common good policies Indicators of the degree of generation and distribution of social goods. Example: proportion of the top 20% poorest and top 20% richest appropriators of a country’s social goods Characteristics of processes Indicators of aggregation of individual agency freedom. Example: qualitative availability of referendums or compilation of initiatives of popular participation Indicators of provision of social goods. Example: degree of decentralisation (or other process characteristic) of provision of basic social goods Indicators of stability of governance. Example: progressive vs radical changes in the constitution of the governance apparatus Here, it depends on how we consider justice. For instance: if injustice is understood as a lack of legislation necessary to achieve a certain end, a compilation of this legislation could be a good process indicator of the nexus. Agency freedom Humanity Governance Justice Alternatively, if justice is a question of income distribution one can assess the processes that are conducive to unequal income distributions, as part of the nexus. The key element is to see how these processes evolve over time in relation to these fair or unfair outcomes Policy objectives Indicators of discount rate in cases where the policy in question is long-term. Example: assessment of the use of discount rates for different groups of people in society (and their respective agency freedom) Indicators of representativeness of humanity. Example: degree of stability in the collective values inbuilt in certain policy objectives (this depends on the policies in question) Indicators of implementation power. Example: degree of coherence between policy objectives and the power constituted for a governance nexus structure Indicators of alleviation or mitigation of injustices over time. This will clearly depend on specific policy objectives. Example: with the objective of managing a pandemic, the stability of the common good nexus in relation to objectives and justice can be given by the proportional share of sacrifice demanded from different sectors of society and how this evolves over time. Agency freedom Humanity Governance Justice Empirical model Empirical indicators of stability of individual or collective agency freedom. Example: indicators of stability of municipal agency or indicators of stability of community agency, measured by a series of questions focusing on a particular link between a partial form of agency freedom and certain outcomes (one of the features of an empirical model would be its partiality) Indicators of sensitivity to change (should change be necessary). Example: subjective indicators about how people feel affected by a certain category of interventions Indicators of implementation timeframe. Example: indicator of density of governance during a certain period of time, related to a particular activity or to a particular timeframe Indicators of sustainable achievable outputs and outcomes. Example: indicators of constancy of provision of certain common goods Timeframes Indicators of duration of agency freedom (individual and collective). The point is that the duration might not be compatible with expected timeframe. Example: time of mobilisation of certain collective agency freedom Indicators of transmission of culture. Example: assessment of intra- and intergenerational transmission of certain cultural values Indicators of projection of human community. Example: subjective indicators of aspirations and expectations Indicators of duration of governance within a certain policy frame. Examples are context dependent Synchronicity indicators. Within the context of RBM one should find certain synchronicity and coherence among timeframes. It is not possible that an input to a certain process takes more time to be achieved and is not available when needed 270 A Common Good Approach to Development the appropriate stability indicators would be without knowing the particular problem at hand. This does not mean however that we have no guideline in this task. Instead, the table above can provide a starting point, with some suggestions. But these should be complemented with indicators that will register the stability of interactions between all of the other dimensions. This would be tantamount to a 3D picture (given that the table above already crossed the stability dimension with other dimensions, as if we had a 2D picture, to use the same metaphor). One additional complication is that all of the five vertices in the common good nexus are bi-directional, suggesting that some indicators might not be symmetrical when we add time, which is precisely the case with the issue of stability. Perhaps when we use the political (Rawlsian) notion of stability, the temporal dimension might be less pronounced, but for those of governance, humanity, and agency this seems to be less the case. Of course, there will be trade-offs to sort out and normative issues to be settled before the nexus is established. In certain cases, where the nexus depends on overcoming certain violations of human rights and key hurdles, such as gender discrimination, these should be tackled before a nexus can be established. This is what Sen (2009) suggests when he argues that justice should not be seen as a perfect concept. Instead, common good can be promoted by tackling several senses of injustice on a realisation-focused basis. The common good nexus does not need to be all encompassing when applied to the messy real world. In addition, the stability of basic institutions of society should be viewed critically as evidence (or not) of agents’ disposition to construct the common good in the short and long term. We cannot take for granted that stability is a desired property of the common good nexus and attention to its appraisal should be constant. Conclusion The stability dimension is one of the most complex and intricate dimensions in the common good nexus. This happens because there is not as much reflection about it as we find for other dimensions such as agency, humanity, governance, and justice. But this does not mean that stability is less important, only that we know less about it and how it interacts with the other dimensions. 9. Do We Need a Common Good Approach to Development? Helen Alford 1. Let’s Start with Two Stories Over thirty years ago now, I became acquainted with a professor of English in a university in the US. Teaching English did not pay very well so he earned his real income from teaching courses in marketing communication. In one lecture, he showed his students an advertisement with a picture of a woman wearing a pair of jeans. The implication of the picture, reinforced by the text that went with it, was that young women wearing these jeans become more attractive to the opposite sex. He pointed out that nothing was said about the kind of material from which the jeans was made, nor was any other information given about the nature of the product. He then said something which stunned his students: “this message is clearly a species of lying”. As he continued to explain why, the atmosphere in the classroom became colder and colder, until finally one of the students in the class raised her hand and asked “what’s wrong with selling dreams?”1 And then there is the story of Ian Goldin (2018), the author of the Very Short Introduction on development, which he recounts in his talk at Google. In both, he synthesises the current state of play on development in a way that only someone who has dedicated his life to it could manage, 1 Indeed, a quick check of the search term ‘selling dreams’ in any search engine on the Internet will bring up videos aimed at sales people with titles like ‘Sell dreams not products’, and articles with titles like ‘Selling Dreams is the Secret to Customer Loyalty’. © 2022 Helen Alford, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.12 278 A Common Good Approach to Development someone who was exiled from South Africa during apartheid and who never thought he would see his country change—until it did. Yet, despite all that he has seen and done, the most emphatic statement in his talk is: “ideas are the driving force of history”. The way we think about the world and about ourselves within it creates the framework within which we can imagine something new and better (a ‘more developed’ state). Why open with these stories? Well, stories can impress us with a truth that can elude us in reading purely academic texts. In the first story, we can see the power of selling dreams. The students were shocked that the professor should ‘unmask’ this process; they did not feel gratitude to him for having opened their eyes to how they were being sold illusions. Indeed, they wanted to be taken in by the advertisement, so that they could aspire to the dream it promised. At the same time, aspiring to a dream seems good. The young people could be forgiven for finding their professor’s criticism unhelpful. Even though the professor’s contention seems right, it still doesn’t seem easy to side with him against the students. Insofar as development is about aspiring to a dream—a world that could be, but which is not yet—this story raises a crucial point for us here. What development dreams are ‘true’ (not lies)? And why does a dream that, on one level, we can see as a lie, still seem to inspire us? We will come back to this intriguing and vexing problem towards the end of this chapter. Goldin’s comment—“ideas are the driving force of history”—leads us to the main issue we will discuss here: the way we think about development will be a driving force behind that development itself. Changing our ideas, or what I would like to call our ‘mindset’, that is, an integrated set of ideas for understanding what we need to do—can change our history. Real improvement in our mindset may thus bring about real change for the better in our history. My main argument in this chapter is that we face development today within a mindset that was largely defined during the Enlightenment of the 1700s, and which is no longer fit for purpose. The mindset that was synthesised during the Enlightenment became a powerful driving force, changing history and driving many improvements.2 We only have to look at many parts of the world that have not been through the processes 2 Among the many texts that could be mentioned here, Larry Siedentop’s (2014) is particularly enlightening. 279 9. Do We Need a Common Good Approach to Development? generated by the Enlightenment to see the difficulties with which they must often contend today, including nepotism, a lack of meritocracy and difficulty in maintaining the rule of law. The Enlightenment mindset has a lot going for it. However, like all other syntheses of this kind, it was at least in part a product of its time and of the problems that needed resolving then, so it was focused on resolving some issues and not others. Its key issue was individual freedom: for all sorts of good normative and historical reasons, defending the freedom of the individual had become a central problem by the time we arrived at the eighteenth century. Let’s look briefly at two consequences of this mindset. Firstly, if individual freedom is central, the social systems of which individuals are a part become problematic. Such systems become a real, or at least a potential, threat to the exercise of that freedom, and ways have to be found to keep that threat at bay. Secondly, protecting individual freedom means protecting the possibility for each individual to define for themselves what the goals or purposes of their life should be. Social problems then become reduced to economic and procedural questions, because we can only share with each other how we achieve the goals of our lives, not what those goals are. This mindset also did other things which both allowed us to make progress and created collateral problems for us. Focusing on these key elements, however, can help us identify some of the strengths of this mindset, as well as its limitations, in the face of the problems we must face today. In the 1700s, we still had very powerful systems of social control, which operated through the local communities of which people were a part and involved the religious traditions to which those communities belonged. The industrial revolution had not yet begun; the mass of poor people in every country far outnumbered the small number of aristocrats and the new, rising ‘middle’ classes. It was quite reasonable to see the need for more individual freedom as crucial, and to reduce social problems to economic ones, with the creation of wealth as the key ‘development’ issue. Nowadays, we face problems that are very different. We might even go so far as to say that our problems are the mirror image of those of the eighteenth century. We face pressing social problems like inequality and systemic existential crises like climate change. Our difficulty today is to find shared solutions to these problems, harmonising the exercise of 280 A Common Good Approach to Development our individual freedom with a common goal—a good life lived together, and a life-giving relationship with our environment. We cannot avoid these problems anymore, but our inherited mindset was not designed to deal with them. Just as the Enlightenment thinkers recognised that what they had inherited was not fit for purpose in their day, and developed a new mindset to confront their problems, so now we need to recognise that what they bequeathed to us is not able to give us the basic vision we need to confront our problems. If we look at development questions, we can see reflections of these issues in the literature. We are in a context where development is seen primarily through the lens of the 2030 Agenda and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. On the one hand, this agenda is the result of a long process of negotiation, and in many ways is a really remarkable achievement. Yet we can see problems with it that changing the mindset we are talking about here could help us resolve, such as thinking about human development as a final goal, and the integration of the sustainable development goals. Human development emerged in a powerful way within the development discourse with the launch of the Human Development Reports in 1990. The new ‘Human Development Index’ was a symbolic triumph; the report’s initiator, Mahbub ul-Haq, correctly understood that an alternative indicator was needed to rival GDP, in order to have any chance of drawing attention to a human development agenda. It consisted of a combination of measures dealing with income, education and health. However, the text of the 1990 report did not have a clear definition of human development, and did not always refer to it in the same terms as the index measured it. Near the beginning of the ‘Overview’ of the report, we read: ‘Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices. The most critical of these wide-ranging choices are to live a long and healthy life, to be educated and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. Additional choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and personal selfrespect’ (UNDP 1990). This last phrase shows that the idea of human development was not resolved between two positions: one focused on freedom of choice (building on the Enlightenment mindset we have been discussing), and the other focused on the substantive or normative issues of life expectancy, health, education, and a decent standard of living. The 281 9. Do We Need a Common Good Approach to Development? tension between these two positions is captured in the last phrase just cited: ‘Additional choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and personal self-respect’. Can ‘guaranteed human rights’ really be called an ‘additional choice’? The text tries to hold together the idea of human development as the widest possible choice with the idea that it consists in certain forms of substantive change (what Sen would call improved ‘capabilities’). The contradictions between these two are not easy to resolve. It is not a surprise, therefore, that subsequent HDRs did not try to do so. Similarly, while the 2030 Agenda aims to create an overarching approach to sustainable development, in practice the various sustainable development goals were not negotiated as an integrated set and are the results of various negotiation processes (e.g., see Dodds et al. 2017). Each goal has its own logic and its own targets which have been affected by the jockeying between interests in arriving at them. At least potential contradictions exist within them, such as between the goal for decent work and economic growth (Goal 8) and climate action (Goal 13); the hope is, of course, that these tensions will be resolved in via. There are the five transversal dimensions (people, planet, prosperity, peace, partnership), and Goal 17 does focus attention on partnership towards the achievement of the goals, so there is attention to some kind of practical integration, on the operational level. At the same time, this is not the same as being able to explain the unity between the goals as part of an integral vision and mindset. These are very complex issues that cannot be resolved only by a change in mindset. Nevertheless, as Goldin suggests, our mindset influences our capacity to act and to imagine how we could change and develop. We can introduce new techniques for measuring development progress or progress towards a common good, but if we do not link those measures to a changed mindset or frame of mind, supported by a community of living that carries these ideas forward, we are doing what we have often seen before—we change the name of something, we change how we do things in some way, we may change the measurement tools and indicators, but we do not address the ultimate, underlying, fundamental question on which the name, the way of doing things and the measurement system depend—the question of what we want to do and why we want to do it. The mindset we need now should not throw out all that has been achieved using the individualistic mindset adopted during the 282 A Common Good Approach to Development Enlightenment. Much has been achieved within that philosophical approach, even if it always had limitations, limitations which have now become untenable and which are leading to an unsustainable way of life. Instead, we need to build on it, keeping what is good in it, but opening it up in two main ways. Firstly, we need to recognise a ‘bigger’ view of the human being. Our individuality is real, but so is our intrinsic relationality. Much empirical research in the field of happiness shows that we can only really achieve our goals in communion with others, not just because others provide us with economic or other goods that allow us to achieve our individual goals, but because our relationships in themselves are important.3 Loneliness and its related mental health problems are becoming some of the key problems blocking our development, particularly in more wealthy countries (McDaid et al. 2017). Our competition with each other for our individual needs demonstrates our individuality, while the happiness research demonstrates our relationality. GDP and other measures of wealth can increase, but our happiness and sense of wellbeing may not. By recognising that we have both individual (material) and relational (non-material, spiritual) dimensions—by bringing the relational/ spiritual dimension back into the picture—we can begin to imagine development in social and systemic ways, allowing us to give individual freedom its proper place within a bigger, more sustainable picture of human flourishing. Secondly, we need to bring back a sense of working towards a common goal, and creating a common good together, on the basis of which all of us can achieve our individual goals. With a shared goal or purpose, we have the chance to unite our fragmented sustainable development goals into a unified picture, each one of them being achieved as part of an overall development goal. The drive to re-introduce thinking about our overall goal or purpose is most clearly displayed today in business, where the idea that businesses need a ‘purpose’ that inspires them beyond making money and which can guide them in aligning themselves to a genuine development agenda (many of them try to show how their strategies are aligned to the sustainable development goals) is now widely discussed 3 See the series of World Happiness Reports starting in 2012, available at https:// worldhappiness.report/. See also the results taken over a lifetime from the Harvard Study of Adult Development https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/. 283 9. Do We Need a Common Good Approach to Development? and adopted.4 Achieving social and environmental goals is no longer a side activity or an optional extra for socially-aware business managers— it has become core to achieving the good of the business as a whole, as a part of the wider society. ‘Business cannot succeed in societies that have failed’ is a phrase that circulates widely in the business world today. The practical relevance of this synthesis between a renewed view of the human being, seen as a ‘duality’ of individual and relational, and of the common good, providing us with a goal towards which to work and on the basis of which individual goods can be achieved, can be demonstrated in the success of a movement known as the ‘Blueprint for Better Business’. Founded in the UK in 2012, Blueprint works with some of the leading FTSE 100 companies, helping them to define and operationalise a purpose that builds on the dignity and duality of the human person and promotes the common good.5 Focusing on mindset change—the ‘why’ and ‘what for’ of purpose—it does not aim at producing new tools for being a purposeful business—the ‘how’ of purpose—which is what many consultants and coaches do. Instead, Blueprint draws together key elements to help businesses change their mindset from two fundamental sources: firstly, key ideas from the millenarial ‘wisdom traditions’ represented by the great world religions and the great philosophical systems, like Aristotelianism and Confucianism, which have stood the test of time and which were often sidelined at the time of the Enlightenment, and secondly, modern scientific results that challenge the Enlightenment mindset but which converge in the direction of the ideas proposed by these ancient traditions of thought.6 Although Blueprint has focused on businesses, its mindset has wider significance, and could be applied in the public and nonprofit sectors, and to development as a whole. In applying this mindset, Blueprint has seen leading financial businesses ask themselves ‘what is the right level of profit for our business?’, and commit themselves to gaining economic returns from creating social value.7 It has seen others 4 See, for instance, the results of ‘The Future of the Corporation’ programme of the British Academy, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/programmes/ future-of-the-corporation/. 5 https://www.blueprintforbusiness.org/. 6 The idea of the ‘wisdom traditions’ was taken from the book by R. J. Blomme and B. van Hoof (2014). 7 In an interesting parallel, see the comment on finding ‘how much profit is enough’ for a financial institution from the CEO of Nationwide Building Society in the 2020 284 A Common Good Approach to Development identify various options for how they could become more responsible, ranging from ‘being a follower’, to ‘being a leader’, to ‘using our position to create a coalition to change the game, to raise the standard for the whole of our sector’, and committing to being either the second or the third. In the context of the pandemic, it has seen major companies that had previously committed to paying all their workforce a living wage maintain that commitment, despite the economic shock experienced, by cutting the salaries of those higher paid in the business. Given the ever-widening impact of Blueprint, and given that the mindset change it wants to bring about focuses on resolving the social and systemic problems we face today, we will present the Blueprint mindset as an example of the direction in which we need to go, and then comment on it with regard to the problematic issues in the field of development that we highlighted above. A Changed Mindset8 Our first issue is to discuss how a human being can be both an individual and intrinsically relational at the same time, with two integral yet distinct aspects of being human. In a theory known as ‘personalism’, which is a twentieth-century development within a tradition of thought that dates back over two thousand years and is often called ‘Aristotelian- Thomistic’, we find the human being presented as two-dimensional: one dimension is ‘individual’ and the other is ‘personal’ or ‘relational’. In philosophical thought, and even in general conversation, we are used to talking about two dimensions of the human being, but we usually use terms like ‘body and soul’ or ‘matter and spirit’, distinguishing between a material and an immaterial aspect. In the personalist view, the way of thinking about the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is slightly developed, for it is this dimension which is ‘intrinsically relational’, that is, it is the dimension through which we relate to others as part of who we are, not only as useful to us in obtaining what we need as individuals. publication of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, Driving Purposeful Cultures, https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/discussion/dp20-1.pdf. 8 The mindset used in Blueprint draws on many resources, but two in particular are worth mentioning here: Maritain and Jacques (1947), and Alford and Naughton (2001). 285 9. Do We Need a Common Good Approach to Development? As physical individuals, we are needy and fragile. Other individuals, needy and fragile like we are, will be in competition with us for the scarce goods that we need to satisfy our individual needs. These are not only material goods—money, a place to live, adequate food and healthcare—but also positions in hierarchies, giving us status and social approval. If we feel that we are threatened in any of these ways—a threat to our wealth, or to our position in a social system that is important to us—we can become defensive or even aggressive. All of this is part of who we are, and is well-attested to in the scientific literature. At the same time, much scientific literature also tells us that we are relational. One of the most striking sets of scientific results on this point comes from the happiness literature, as we already mentioned. This shows us that it is in our relationships with others that we find the deepest fulfilment and satisfaction. Our relational dimension, which is the spiritual or non-material aspect, is almost the opposite of our individual dimension—instead of being fragile and needy, it has a kind of interior energy and super-abundance; instead of being threatened by others, it looks to relationships with others as gifts, as forms of enrichment; it moves outwards, constantly transcending itself, looking outside itself for relationships with others simply because they are good in themselves. It seems like these two dimensions are contradictory, especially when we think about how we relate to others. How can we be fragile and needy, in competition with others and potentially threatened by them, while, at the same time, being strong and overflowing with energy, cooperating with each other in building relationships that bring us long-lasting fulfilment? Well, the first thing to say is that the scientific results tend to show that we are like this, that we do relate to others in these two ways at the same time. The results of the games that game theorists get people to play, for instance, show that we can put more or less emphasis on our capacity to compete or to cooperate, depending on the circumstances that we are put in. For instance, if we feel that our counterpart, our player, is not trustworthy, we will tend to start protecting ourselves. If, however, we receive a gift, something that we do not feel that we deserved, we are inclined to share it with others, to pass on our good fortune, not to hoard it for ourselves.9 Secondly, 9 See an interesting discussion about the result of games in relation to our mindset in Ghoshal (2005, pp. 75–91). 286 A Common Good Approach to Development we can note that there are also examples of other theories that seem to rely on contradictory elements. Perhaps the most famous is the theory of the wave-particle duality of light. There are some experiments that physicists have done with light that they can only explain if they think of light as a particle, while there are others (such as when light bends) that they can only explain if they think of light as a wave. We cannot get to a simpler explanation of what light is: we can only say that it displays the characteristics both of a particle (or quantum) and of a wave. In his writings, Maritain uses other analogies. For instance, he uses the example of a work of art, which is at one and the same time a material object that is made up of various chemical substrates and a source of inspiration and enlightenment to us. Games are full of competition, but only work if the players cooperate with each other by keeping the rules, and the whole idea of ‘sportsmanship’ goes beyond adherence to rules. In all these examples, things that are contrary, or at least completely different, are found at one and the same time in the same object or activity. With the idea of the human being in two dimensions, individual and intrinsically relational, we are able to think differently about the common good too. We can create goods between us, as part of our intrinsically relational side, which are held in common between us. Since relationships can be intrinsically important to us, part of who we are, we can work towards genuinely shared objectives (as friends do) from which we both gain something individually, but, more fundamentally, we both gain together. Friendships either exist between friends or they do not exist at all, and only on the basis of their shared friendship do friends gain individually from their bond. This happens in the wider society too, when we are working towards a common, shared objective. When different groups cooperate together in different ways in a local community, for instance—politicians, local government officials, working people, local investors, suppliers, customers and so on—it is only on the basis of what they achieve together (the success of the life of the community itself) that they can each get something out of it individually (perhaps career advancement, or return on investment, or more secure custom, or better service, or whatever). When we are dealing with each other in a local community, therefore, we are creating a common good together, on the basis of which we can each gain some 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good Patrick Riordan S.J. This chapter provides a case study of a newly inaugurated autonomous region in the southern Philippines, in terms of its common goods. The common good is invoked in the Preamble of the Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines, and it is mentioned in Article XII dealing with national economy and patrimony, and in Article XIII dealing with social justice and human rights. Following the overthrow of the Marcos regime of martial law in 1986, the newly elected President Cory Aquino convoked a commission to draft a new constitution. The country saw itself at that time as recently liberated from an oppressive regime that many qualified as a dictatorship, in which the rule of law and the respect for human rights had been disregarded. The adoption of a new constitution expressed the desire for self-government as appropriate to a republic, in the pursuit of freedom, equality and prosperity. We, the sovereign Filipino people, imploring the aid of Almighty God, in order to build a just and humane society and establish a Government that shall embody our ideals and aspirations, promote the common good, conserve and develop our patrimony, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of independence and democracy under the rule of law and a regime of truth, justice, freedom, love, equality, and peace, do ordain and promulgate this Constitution. Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines, Preamble Typical of a republican constitution is the affirmation of the sovereignty of the people that provides for itself a constitution. It acknowledges © 2022 Patrick Riordan S.J., CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290.13 294 A Common Good Approach to Development the twin dimensions of the social and the political. These are distinguishable but not separable. Building ‘a just and humane society’ is done in tandem with establishing and maintaining a government of a state. The purpose of government is to promote the common good. This is not further explained in the text, but its meaning embraces the various other values listed, values that the people wish to secure for themselves and their posterity. Together they act to pursue the good they hold in common. Law professor Joaquin G. Bernas, a member of the Constitutional Commission, commented on the text of the Preamble in a publication issued in advance of the Constitution’s ratification. He noted the preference for the term ‘common good’: The change from ‘general welfare’ to ‘common good’ was intended to project the idea of a social order that enables every citizen to attain his or her fullest development economically, politically, culturally and spiritually. The rejection of ‘general welfare’ of the old version was based on the fear that the phrase could be interpreted as meaning ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’ even if what the greater number wants does violence to human dignity […] It was thought that the phrase ‘common good’ would guarantee that mob rule would not prevail and that the majority would not persecute the minority. (1987, p. 2 n. 8) The various occurrences of the term and cognates in the body of the Constitution reinforce the basic line formulated in the Preamble that people are attempting to secure a social and legal order and thereby assure a certain quality of life for themselves. The management of property and its use, the creation of business corporations, and the responsibility of government in relation to these, warrant the invocation of common good as the overarching value. Similarly, in the article on social justice and human rights, common good is invoked as a guiding value in relation to the equitable distribution of wealth and political power, and regarding the urgent need to provide housing for the urban poor. Subsequent attempts to legislate these matters have been controversial, with the general criticism voiced that the common good was not strong enough to prevail over established and socially integrated interests, such as those of the more powerful oligarchic families who provided the political leadership in the country, the Aquino family itself included. Article X of the 1987 Constitution, on local government, provided for the creation of two autonomous regions, in Muslim Mindanao in 295 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good the south, and in the Cordilleras, the mountainous area in Luzon in the north. As Bernas notes in his commentary, the Constitution provides for only two such regions, that have a claim to special treatment because they exhibit ‘common and distinctive historical and cultural heritage, economic and social structures, and other relevant characteristics.’ The distinctiveness warranting this autonomy is differentiation from the ‘characteristics of the dominant national communities.’ He notes also that the constitutional recognition and provision replaces measures of autonomy created ‘merely by presidential decree’ (Bernas 1987, p. 71 nn. 23–14). It should be borne in mind that while there is a recognition of the goods in common that are to be protected and promoted within the region, this is in the context of a vision of a shared national common good. 1. History and Context of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao The Philippines is an archipelago of islands, large and small. The large northern island, Luzon, is where the largest city and capital, metro Manila, including the seat of government for the country, Quezon City, is located. Between Luzon and the southern island, Mindanao, with its satellite islands, is a group of islands named the Visayas. The archipelago has had a fraught and varied history, which is not uniform across the islands (Gloria 2014). For various reasons, Mindanao, the southernmost large island of the archipelago, is different. One reason is that it is home to the large Muslim population (c. 4.2 million) that is a minority within the predominantly Catholic population of the country as a whole (c. 100 million). Another reason for its distinctiveness is that neither of the colonial powers, the Spaniards up to 1898 and the Americans subsequently until 1946, ever completely succeeded in pacifying Mindanao and incorporating the native populations into the national community. When the United States of America replaced Spain as the colonial power at the end of the Spanish American War in 1898, the Americans believed they were taking over an already pacified country, but that was far from the case. As well as having to suppress an insurgency in Luzon, the Americans also had to establish their rule as the first colonisers in Mindanao (Gloria 2014). A third element in 296 A Common Good Approach to Development the distinctiveness of Mindanao within the Philippines is that it was uniquely targeted as a territory to be colonised, not by foreigners, but by other Filipino peoples. To deal with the problems of overpopulation and the associated peasant disquiet in the northern islands, and with the problem of unrest in the south, both American and subsequently Filipino governments pursued policies of settlement, inviting people from Luzon and the Visayas to settle in Mindanao. These settlement policies including those pursued by Ferdinand Marcos as President, resulted in grave injustices to the native populations. A fourth factor in explaining the uniqueness of Mindanao concerns the internal structure of the population. While the general labels of indigenous peoples (IPs) or Muslims might give the impression of a coherent homogenous culture, the reality is very different. While there had been traditional forms of government with ruling elites, such as the Sultanates of Maguindanao and Sulu, these were not unified, and many tribes retained their independence and separate traditions. One author reports a total of thirteen different groups among the Muslim population, and in addition eighteen indigenous tribes with their own animist religious culture (Yusingco 2013, pp. 17–21). Another source identifies 179 ethnic groups in BARMM, understanding an ethnic group as sharing distinctive cultural identity. Many of these are very small in size. Three major groupings make up over 70% of the population, and a further 25% is comprised of seven groups.1 The interests of some indigenous peoples are in tension with the political agenda of the Muslim insurgency leadership, and are in danger of being neglected, possibly because their advocates have not resorted to armed violence (Alejo 2014, pp. 65–70). These four factors provide the context for both the turbulent history of the island and the attempts to provide solutions. First, a relatively large Muslim population, but not organised in a coherent unity for political effectiveness, alongside many indigenous groups who are pagan, neither Christian nor Muslim. Second, a history of independence, resistance and insurgency against colonial powers. Third, a history also of incursion with government backing by mostly Christian settlers from the north. Finally, the economic deprivation arising from the marginalisation of the area is paired with the growing exploitation of natural resources, whether through illegal or quasi-legal logging of the 1 Access Bangsamoro: Ethnic Groups in BARMM. 297 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good native forests, or mining activities encroaching on ancestral domains. Multinational economic agents, abetted by legislators in Manila, pursue their own interests in the island, often relying on private security firms both to protect and enforce their interests. The Bangsamoro Organic Law (henceforth BOL) was signed into force by President Duterte in August 2018. It is the latest in a series of attempts to provide a form of autonomy to the Muslims of Mindanao. The previous structure, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), was instituted following the adoption of the 1987 Constitution under President Cory Aquino. It was subsequently deemed to have been a failure. Its failure is seen in the years of violence perpetrated by various Muslim organisations, harnessing the frustration of young men who found themselves without educational or employment opportunities, despite the growing affluence of the country as a whole. The MNLF (Moro National Liberation Front) and the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) conducted campaigns of armed insurgency over recent decades. Peace agreements between the Government of the Philippines and the MNLF were signed in 1976 (Tripoli) and 1996. But it is from the framework peace agreement achieved between the Government of the Philippines and the MILF (October 2012) that the demand for and commitment to the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region arose. It has taken much longer than expected to produce the legislation and to have it signed into law, which finally happened in July 2018. Further steps of implementation included the plebiscite in January 2019 and the inauguration of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (henceforth BARMM) in March 2019. The commitment of both parties to this peace process and to the implementation of the Bangsamoro has remained resolute, despite serious threats arising from the violence of dissident groups (Lau 2014, pp. 260–273). At the heart of the grievances of the Muslim population leading to armed insurgency was the destruction of their traditional villages and way of life by the confiscation of their lands and the imposition of forms of rule alien to their customs (Yusingco 2013, p. 31). An initial documentation of these grievances has been achieved by the ‘Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission,’ whose report in 2016 illustrated in painful detail the typical injustices suffered by the peoples of 298 A Common Good Approach to Development Mindanao. Far from being an ideologically driven international Islamic conspiracy, as the world media sometimes like to characterise it, the insurgency has always been a response to experienced injustices at the hands of government, whether native or colonial. The challenge faced by the BARMM as a new structure of autonomous regional government is enormous. There is no unified society, given the distinction between Muslim and other indigenous tribes, and even the Muslims are divided among themselves, belonging to groups traditionally in competition with one another. The creation of this regional form of government will require shaping the shared meanings of the population with a view to fostering agreement on the worthwhileness of the project. However, despite the enormity of the challenge, the lack of a single unified society need not be a fatal flaw for the project, as some commentators have feared (Yusingco 2013, p. 26). In response, I have argued elsewhere that in terms of Aristotle’s claim that a political community presupposes a shared vision of the good, agreement on the need for such a structure to put an end to war, and to remove the causes of frustration leading to violence, can be sufficient as shared meaning to establish the Bangsamoro (Riordan 2014, pp. 35–56). This presupposes a lot of imaginative work in fostering understanding and building agreement, and that work remains to be done. The outcome of the initiative to establish the BARMM is not a foregone conclusion. The creation of the BARMM establishes an autonomous region within the Republic of the Philippines and not a separate state. Furthermore, the possibility of secession is blocked by ensuring the continuing integration of the region within the state, subject to the Constitution of 1987. National government will continue to have jurisdiction in matters of defense, external security, immigration, and international relations and treaties. However, the distinctiveness of the region as expressed in the phrase ‘asymmetrical relationship’ allows for a special position within the state, not on the same terms as other regions, but acknowledging the special characteristics that warrant the creation of an autonomous region. As noted, these include the peculiar history and composition of the region’s population. A significant feature is the incorporation of Islamic Shari’ah Law applicable to Muslims only, along with the traditional tribal justice systems of the indigenous peoples. These traditional forms of justice may not be so applied that fundamental human rights are jeopardised. 299 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good Accordingly, the Bangsamoro Organic Law attempts an integration of international human rights law, national legislation, and the local forms of justice. Anticipation of tensions between the jurisdictions leads to a mapping of norms of precedence. The attempt is to devolve as much responsibility from national government as possible, allowing for local responsibility regarding policing, protection of the environment, exploitation of national resources, and commerce. Worries have already been expressed concerning the position of women in the BARMM (Risonar-Bello 2014, pp. 87–102), the ancestral domain of indigenous peoples and their associated rights (Alejo 2014, pp. 65–70), and the position of some Muslim groups not aligned with the MILF (Arpa 2014, pp. 83–86). Viewed from the outside, the initiative of the BOL in response to the Peace Agreement is an attempt to realise the common good in the broadest sense in this region. The BOL itself does not use the language of common goods, and that is not surprising, since this language is more at home in the political discourse of concerned citizens and representatives of affected groups. While lawyers refine formulations and anticipate legal issues, the articulation of political, cultural and religious concerns in terms of the common goods at stake should be of service to the actors charged with implementing the legislation and the newly created processes and structures. However, the Preamble to the Bangsamoro Organic Law has resonances with that of the National Constitution, cited above, in which the term ‘common good’ is explicitly invoked. Imploring the aid of Almighty God, in recognition of the aspirations of the Bangsamoro people and other inhabitants in the autonomous region in Muslim Mindanao to establish an enduring peace on the basis of justice, balanced society and asserting their right to conserve and develop their patrimony, reflective of their system of life as prescribed by their faith, in harmony with their customary laws, cultures and traditions, within the framework of the Constitution and the national sovereignty as well as territorial integrity of the Republic of the Philippines, and the accepted principles of human rights, liberty, justice, democracy, and the norms and standards of international law, and affirming their distinct historical identity and birthright to their ancestral homeland and their right to chart their political future through a democratic process that will secure their identity and posterity, and allow genuine and meaningful self-governance, the Filipino people, by the act of the Congress of the 300 A Common Good Approach to Development Philippines, do hereby ordain and promulgate this Organic Law for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. (20180727-RA- 11054, Preamble.) The values enumerated here resonate with those of the 1987 Constitution but in the context of acknowledging the special circumstances of the Muslim region in Mindanao. While adverting to the legitimacy of the special claims of this region, the BOL is deliberately stated as a law enacted by the Congress of the country as a whole. Accordingly, it is possible to read in this undertaking several levels of goods in common. There is the common good of the country as a whole, in ending the violence, insecurity and drain on scarce resources linked to the instability in Mindanao. There is the common good of Mindanao, a larger entity than the BARMM, which needs a resolution of the Muslim insurgency for peace, stability and future development. There are common goods of the peoples of Bangsamoro, both the institutions now being created, and the wellbeing, prosperity, peace and stability that is their purpose. Finally, there are the goods of humanity, both those rooted in the solidarity with suffering people, and the potential to learn from the Bangsamoro experiment lessons that can be applied in other contexts of violent conflict. 2. Operationalising the Common Good: The Pentagram The language of common goods is ancient but does not always appear relevant to modern political issues. The development of an appropriate set of tools for the application of common good to contemporary concerns, undertaken by a team of experts led by Professor Mathias Nebel of the IPBC, is documented in this volume (see Chapters 1, 2, and 3). It offers a map to sketch the nexus of the principal dimensions of the common goods of local government. This project is outlined more extensively elsewhere in this book, so it suffices here to note the key elements. Five core values of the common goods are identified (referred to as the pentagram; see Chapter 2, Figure 4), and these outline the scope of what is to be realised by local government. These values are stability, agency, governance, justice and humanity (see Chapter 2). Important social norms such as those of democracy, the rule of law, good governance, subsidiarity, participation, empowerment and human flourishing can 301 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good be read from the matrix of the combinations of the five core values. The matrix provides a total of twenty headings, with each combination of values providing a pair, one for each direction. For instance, the combination of agency and governance delivers participation, while in the opposite direction, governance and agency delivers empowerment. In what follows I apply the pentagram to the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) with a view to generating a metric for evaluating the success (or failure) of the BARMM. The BOL does not use the language of common goods, although the project is evidently an attempt to achieve and solidify goods in common. The opportunity to bring these two conversations together may prove to be mutually enriching. On the one hand, it could provide those charged with implementing the BOL with a map or outline to sketch the range of tasks involved and to evaluate performance. On the other hand, the opportunity to test the usefulness of the pentagram in the implementation of one significant project of revision of regional government may help confirm, consolidate and refine the pentagram. 3. Common Goods of the BARMM I. Justice There is no order of precedence in the five core values—they are all equally essential. But in the application of the pentagram to the situation in Mindanao, it would seem appropriate to begin with justice, given the historical context, and the element of transitional justice involved. The injustice suffered by the peoples of Mindanao in the past century belongs among the motivations for creating the autonomous region. Section 3 of Article I of the Organic Law establishing Bangsamoro declares the purpose of the law as follows: The purpose of this Organic Law is to establish a political entity, provide for its basic structure of government in recognition of the justness and legitimacy of the cause of the Bangsamoro people and the aspiration of Muslim Filipinos and all indigenous cultural communities in the autonomous region in Muslim Mindanao to secure their identity and posterity, allowing for meaningful self-governance within the framework of the Constitution and the national sovereignty as well as territorial integrity of the Republic of the Philippines.(20180727-RA- 11054, I. Sec. 3.) 302 A Common Good Approach to Development This situation of the BARMM marks it out as distinctive. The affirmation in this cited section as also in the Preamble of the legitimacy of the Muslim population’s claim to secure their distinctive identity and to exercise self-government is an expression of the BOL’s attempt to do justice. The actual historical background provides a context in which the rectification of injustice is as important as the facilitation of justice for the future. The Bangsamoro Parliament is tasked to make laws and create processes to achieve the desired ends of rectification and restoration (20180727-RA-11054, IX. Secs. 1 & 2.). The task is enormous and may prove impossible to fulfil. The issue of land is particularly problematic. The link to the land is central to the sense of identity for traditional tribes. The memory of the injustice of the manner in which they were removed from their lands motivates a demand for rectification. Historically, tribal land holdings, ancestral domains, did not rely on any form of land registration, but on the customary practices of the indigenous peoples. The introduction of a land registration system to cultures that did not understand the concept, and the requirement to submit claims within a very narrow window, meant that the settlers brought in from the north could implement claims against which the traditional occupants had no legal redress. On the one hand, the law signals the desire to right these historical wrongs, and that is an important acknowledgement of the injustice of dispossession and relocation. On the other hand, the law burdens the new regime and its government with a task that, no matter how well it is performed, inevitably will leave some people feeling badly done by. They may be indigenous people whose claims are not recognised, or they may be settlers who, in all they (or their ancestors) did, believed themselves to be acting legally with the approval and encouragement of the national government. The tragedy of Mindanao, like so many other areas of conflict, is that the past is very much present to peoples’ consciousness as it shapes their everyday experience. It seems as if the formulation of the law has tied the new regime to its past by requiring these measures of transitional justice; on the other hand, the law could not have remained silent on the historical injustices and complaints of the population in seeking their commitment to a new form of government. On this fundamental point we find the core value of justice at the heart of the BARMM. 309 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good Surveying the Bangsamoro Organic Law we find a comprehensive embrace of both dimensions of this value of humanity. The BOL signals the desire to recognise the humanity of each of the constituent tribes and cultures and to acknowledge their entitlement to pursue their fulfilment as stipulated by their own cultures and traditional values. Constraints such as compliance with international human rights law, and national legislation, may reveal challenges requiring astute and careful accommodation so that all may be satisfied. Concern for the basic needs of all its peoples is expressed in the many references to general welfare. These are to be found in the articles on the powers of government and on the structure of government in the Bangsamoro (20180727-RA- 11054, V.; VII. Sec. 5). The theme recurs in the article on basic rights (Ibid., IX. Secs. 9 & 22) and in the sections of that article dealing with special cases such as the welfare of the indigenous peoples, people with special needs, and seniors (Ibid., IX. Secs. 3 & 23). Of course, welfare need not be reduced to satisfaction of basic needs but could include also the aspirations for wellbeing and flourishing in a full sense. We find resonances of this second list in the Preamble and other statements of purpose and vision. Furthermore, several sections of the fourth article on general principles and policies reflect this spectrum, from securing the minimum to pursuit of the maximum. The former is reflected in the commitment to social justice: ‘The Bangsamoro Government shall ensure that every Filipino citizen in its territorial jurisdiction is provided the basic necessities and equal opportunities in life. Social justice shall be promoted in all aspects of life and phases of development in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region.’ (Ibid., IV. Sec. 7). The aspiration to full development in all dimensions is expressed in an earlier passage: ‘In the exercise of its right to self-governance, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region is free to pursue its political, economic, social, and cultural development as provided for in this Organic Law.’ (Ibid., IV. Sec. 2). This latter formulation refers to the flourishing of the community, but this is not to be understood as in tension with or at the cost of individual fulfilment, given the assurance of respect for individual human rights. 310 A Common Good Approach to Development 4. Indicators The ambition of the IPBC’s international research project is to generate some instrument to enable municipal and regional governments to assess their performance in relation to their common goods. Beyond the enumeration of the pentagram, the five core values, and the twenty associated relations, it should become possible to generate sets of indicators that could be applied in an evaluation. The determination of the relevant indicators should ideally be the responsibility of the political leaders themselves, based on what they find useful in the pentagram. In the following I do not wish to usurp this role, but merely to suggest how indicators might be formulated for the evaluation of the implementation of the BARMM in terms of its espoused common goods. The preceding discussion has shown that the five core values are indeed reflected in the commitments and aspirations of the Bangsamoro Organic Law. Taking these values in the order in which I have considered them—justice, stability, governance, agency and humanity—what kinds of indicators might be suggested? We begin with the value of justice. Given the emphasis on transitional justice in the BOL, it would appear unwise to make transitional justice in the sense of rectification of historical wrongs a significant indicator of the success of the BARMM. The danger with a backward looking and legally weighted approach is that a forward-looking political approach is neglected. There are enormous difficulties in resolving historical grievances particularly concerning land disputes in which there is no accepted common basis of establishing claims. If resolutions must be according to law, court cases are likely to require a lot of time and resources (Murphy 2017, Nagy 2008). Rather than risking diverting resources into legal disputes I suggest that the construction of the new political and legal structures should be given priority. The BOL sets the tasks of creating structures of government and adjudication, and these rather than historical grievances can be the basis for review. Progress in assembling the parliament and evidence of laws made and implemented can be easily reviewed. Similarly, undertakings to avoid discrimination, and to uphold basic rights, can be reviewed with evidence of the operation of the relevant structures, and timely response to accusations of violation of these high standards. Given the sensitivity concerning 311 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good the Indigenous Peoples and claims to ancestral domain, this will be a particularly important indicator for the performance of the BARMM. The common good of peace is absolutely necessary for the stability of the Bangsamoro project. Hence, an indicator of success or failure in relation to the value of stability will be the absence or occurrence of outbreaks of violence. While every society must deal with crime, including armed assault and/or robbery, such events in a fragile setting like Mindanao can reverberate and signal either a lack of acceptance or a lack of competence of the governing authority (Murphy 2017). It would be unrealistic to expect that peace and the rule of law will become established immediately—there will have to be a period of adaptation, and this is reflected in the planned transition period. Through this time, and beyond, key indicators will be the measures of violent crime. Success in dealing with private security and other armed actors will be critical for the acceptance of the BARMM Government’s authority. Commitments made in the BOL suggest other indicators. For instance, that former members of insurgent groups could be normalised and incorporated in the police force. Essential for the stability of the BARMM is that practices of collaboration between the various tribes and participant bodies should emerge and develop from the grassroots. Widespread effective engagement should lead to the growing stability of institutions and practices. It should not be difficult to find measurements for this growing density of interaction. The third value, governance, is strongly linked to stability. Local and tribal communities exhibit strong cohesiveness and fidelity to traditional values and to espoused religious worldviews. But how well are those cultural forms and practices adapted to democratic forms of deliberation and decision-making in collaboration with groups and tribes with different traditions and priorities? The necessary adaptation will be a challenge, because it can be expected to undermine traditional forms of authority and expectations of compliance. Where the cultures involved are traditionally autocratic, the practices of social authority include on the one side the expectation of being obeyed, and on the other side the expectation that obedience to strong command will be rewarded with the benefits of social cohesion. The wider Filipino experience has seen the survival of structures of patronage and sectional 312 A Common Good Approach to Development loyalty within the forms of democratic government. Similar carry-over in the BARMM is likely to undermine the whole project, since the new formal structures may simply provide new avenues for the traditional practices of domination and submission. Accordingly, the capacities of administrators and politicians to implement the new structures will be critical. The creation of the BARMM is not in a vacuum, but in a milieu that has seen an earlier attempt to create an autonomous region, ARMM, as formulated in the 1987 Constitution. However, that attempt foundered for various reasons, including corruption, failure of governance and oversight, and lack of popular participation. There is a wisdom in the IPBC prognosis about governance as an aspect of common goods: Whenever public decisions, public policies are decided elsewhere and without consultation with the people they affect, then the authority of the decision or the policy will decay in the long run. People do not obey a policy only because it brings about a utility or because they fear punishment, but because it makes sense, generating a common good we value. Hence a governance for the common good is but a federation of institutions that governs in common. Its ordinary functioning is an organic subsidiarity which brings about stability and efficiency only in the long run. (see Chapter 2, § ‘And What about Governance?’) This challenge is addressed primarily to those affected by the structures of government: their engagement at grassroots level is the precondition for the success of the structures in achieving stability and efficiency in the long run. It is not an immediate effect but will require time and patience to embed the new practices and forms of collaboration. Indicators for the success of the implementation of BARMM will measure the vibrancy of civil society as well as the transparency and accountability of local government. The key test for the institutions is whether they succeed in facilitating participation at all levels, and whether local initiatives can emerge and be sustained through the various levels of administration. Evaluators will look for evidence of practices, joint undertakings, equality of treatment and operation of measures of transparency and accountability. Governance and agency are linked in the relations of empowerment (GA) and participation (AG). While the aspiration of the BOL to allow access and to empower each of the groups and their members 313 10. Bangsamoro: A Case Study in Governing for the Common Good is unrestricted, it remains an enormous challenge to accomplish the enabling of agency on this scale. Inevitably some groups will be better placed to succeed than others, granted the inherited skills associated with the practices of trading, for instance, in comparison with the more self-sufficient and self-contained tribes, far from the main trading routes. It will not be a surprise, therefore, if the agenda of empowerment suffers setbacks in some cases. It would therefore be useful to identify key indicators for participation. Some will be easy to identify, such as voter turnout in relevant elections, but voting alone is insufficient to indicate the degree of engagement needed for the success of the BARMM. Anticipation of the groups least likely to participate could be useful, especially where a baseline can be established, to measure progress in acceptance of and identification with the BARMM. Similar indicators might be developed for the value of humanity, especially considering the list-pair suggesting the span between the minimum satisfaction of needs and the maximum realisation of fulfilment. The literature on social development can be a source for relevant indicators (Nussbaum 2000) As noted above, the exploration of possible indicators is offered here as a suggestion of what might be useful. The determination of actual criteria for evaluation of the success of the Bangsamoro project must be the responsibility of the political community and its leaders. They set the agenda for the BARMM and they undertake to deliver it in the spirit of transparency and accountability. 5. Testing the Pentagram The BARMM is a courageous initiative to make it possible that peoples of Mindanao who historically have been excluded and denied their proper place in the national story can participate in and contribute to the building of a modern, viable state. It attempts this by creating an autonomous regional administration, seeking to include Shari’ah law and tribal traditions within the procedures of the state. This venture is attempted in full consciousness of the legitimate complaints of injustices in the past. The focus is on building for the future, and in this it is appropriate to use the language of the common good. The four subjects with common goods have been identified above: the country as a whole; 314 A Common Good Approach to Development Mindanao, which is more than the Bangsamoro region; the peoples of Bangsamoro; and humanity. The Bangsamoro Organic Law does not explicitly mention the term ‘common good,’ but that does not preclude a commentary which identifies this dimension. The availability of the rhetoric of common goods can strengthen the project, as it adds a layer of meaning to what is being attempted. The IPBC analyses the common good in terms of the pentagram, the five aspects of the common goods of political communities, namely stability, governance, agency, justice, and humanity (see Chapter 2). In the review of the BOL we have seen the relevance of these aspects to what is ambitioned. The pentagram is shown to be a valuable instrument to map the values at stake in the BARMM since all five values are found to be central in the attempt to create an autonomous region. The language of common goods is valuable for expressing what is at stake, both in the instruments created and the purposes for which they are applied. The formulation of indicators to establish the achievements of the BARMM is enabled by the model. Suggested indicators are merely examples for how the participants themselves might determine the criteria they wish to apply to their efforts. While acknowledging the usefulness of the model, the particularities of the situation in Mindanao provoke reflections on possible limitations of the pentagram as articulated to date. The circumstances of the BARMM, with its historical context and the measures undertaken to generate solutions, suggest that the pentagram must be capable of adaptation to accommodate the features of different political situations. Three aspects appear on an initial review. First, religion is critical in the situation of Mindanao, but not well accommodated in the model. Second, the timeframe for implementation of new structures should be factored in and the danger of premature assessment identified. Third, the several levels involved in the realisation of common goods suggest that problems of integration of micro-mezzo-macro levels should be anticipated and points of possible tension and conflict identified. A brief comment on each of these three is offered. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]