Lobbying for Good
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
My name is Alberto, it's a pleasure to be here. We're gonna spend the next 30 minutes together.
00:22
I will present some ideas, and then hopefully we're gonna have the possibility to have a sort of conversation. Something that has been keeping me awake at night is this question, how can we as citizens have a greater impact on society? And in particular, how we can instill a culture,
00:41
a culture of impact in our society. I'm gonna spend some time on the problem, what I do consider being a problem, before looking at the solution, meaning what kind of ideas I've been developing over time in order to provide an answer to that particular problem.
01:00
And finally, we're gonna spend a few minutes on the how-to guide that was already anticipated by Jenny. So let's start from the problem. And the best way to present you the problem is to tell you a story, the story of Jamila. Jamila, she's a very successful professional who had a dream when she was a child. She really wanted to become a teacher. But now she spends most of her time
01:22
behind a computer screen, like most of us. Then we have Gerhard. Gerhard just retired from government, where he has been working as an engineer. And now he really struggled to fuse up his days. And then we have Ben. Ben is a law student. He wanted to become a graphist,
01:42
but his family decided that he should become a lawyer. He's not very happy, and he spends a lot of afternoon with his friends at the moment. What these three people have in common, in your view? Well, what they have in common is that these three individuals have much more to give to society than what society seems to be able to receive,
02:03
and to let them actually play. And I really wonder how many of you feel the same? How many of you feel that you actually have much more to give to society than what society allows you to? Well, I see that I'm in good company, because I also do feel the same. My job is a teacher.
02:22
I'm a law professor, spend a lot of time in the classroom, and only one student out of 10 will remember what I say. That's what retention rates, the learning pyramid, suggest. And what about my scientific findings? My books, they are read in average by 10 people. That's what scientific articles score is.
02:40
But I wonder how many of you do better in terms of societal impact? Of course, if you're a doctor, you probably do. You take care of people, you save their life. But for the other jobs, it's a bit more difficult to measure their success rate. And I think that we can do better as a society to leverage on our abilities and expertise to improve the overall society in which we live in.
03:04
Every morning, we wake up, we take a shower, we go to work, we meet our friends, we do our life. And this kind of routine, it is certainly screaming loud for more and more and more. We have much more to give to society than just what our job description seems to suggest.
03:22
But isn't it a paradox that being the society that has the higher expectancy, when you look at life expectancy, when we look at all the life indicators, is more educated, is safer, it doesn't seem capable
03:40
of really taking full advantage of those abilities. We are at a historical moment in which we're gonna witness the largest acceleration of people, citizens, getting into education. But at the same time, we see that the job descriptions are becoming narrower and narrower. We go towards further specialization.
04:01
And we don't build bridges between our professional life and our personal life. True, somebody might say, once in a while we show up, we organize a particular manifestation, a gathering. We might sign up for a petition. We might give to charity.
04:22
But all these forms of participation that many people call clique activism, they basically give us a sense of fulfillment. They're very virtual signaling. They make us feel better vis-a-vis our friends. But they do not really leverage on our full expertise, ability,
04:41
and what role we have to be. And provocatively, I ask you whether you ever wonder what happened after you signed up for a petition. Because most of the people who signed up for a petition, they said, well, that's what I was supposed to do. Nobody from that petition is asking me to do anything more besides signing up and perhaps giving a few euros.
05:03
In a word, we can say that online petition platforms have become, at least the big ones, certainly not the small ones, who try not to fall victim of this error, to commodify. This is a commodifying way of gathering data and turning, if you look at change.org, into a data broker, let's face it.
05:22
This might be game over. These forms of participation should be the beginning of our civic engagement, but very often are both the beginning and the end. So what can we do? We are spectators. We are not necessarily actors of our life. We are largely consumers rather than being citizens,
05:42
if you think about our daily experience of citizen's life. This might lead to a system failure, not only at the individual level, but also at the collective level. Our ability to take collective action is threatened by our inability to channel our passion, our expertise, our talents,
06:01
towards those goals who could actually make us a better society. So how can we fix that? As you might know, according to a very well-rear script, we can vote or we can run for office. These are the two major options that are offered to us, at least historically.
06:20
And as you know, voting is something we should do. We should do even more. We know the turnout has been going down at the global level, and it keeps going down as a trend. But at the same time, very, very few people decides to run for office, and many political parties to struggle to actually attract people with the competence,
06:42
the expertise, the integrity to run for office. And in any event, only few people can run for office, but the entry barriers remain pretty high. So is there another option for giving a contribution today? My provocative take is to say that between voting, which is probably too little as a contribution,
07:01
and running for office, which might be overwhelming for most of us, there is an opportunity in between. And that opportunity in between is to play a role between voting, meaning between elections, and the elected representatives. And that's what we call lobbying. Lobbying is a very dirty word. Most of you might recall that word.
07:21
It carries a very negative connotation. But hopefully my talk will change a little bit your perception of lobbying, because it's based on constitutional and political theory. And we'll try to go a bit further in our understanding of lobbying. I will simply reframe the debate on lobbying in a way you can understand what I mean by third option for civic engagement.
07:42
Lobbying, when done by big corporations, when done by civic society organizations, yes, they also lobby, even if they say they do advocacy, but they also lobby, is basically voicing, voicing concerns, talking to the decision makers and telling them which interest should be taken
08:01
into account in the policy process. That's something that corporations do very well, something that citizens don't really do. But why citizens should not do it? During the Wall Street movement, this image pop out. And I really challenge it, because today lobbying is no longer a prerogative of corporations
08:22
with a lot of interest, a lot of resources and capabilities. Lobbying is something that everyone can actually do if instead of spending 15, 16 hours on social media per week, this is the number in average, you can do better, you can do worse, might decide to actually step back and to say,
08:41
why don't I spend the same amount of time engaging into the policy process? Some people spend time in malls, a lot of time in malls. Here the average number of hour per week is nine hours, which basically overlap with Saturday in most of European countries. And the other good news is that we are not the elite.
09:02
Our friends, Jamila, Gerhard and Ben, and most of the people, I guess, in this room are not the elite. So it is possible for educated citizens, and for citizens who have a passion and interest well beyond the mere traditional education to get engaged into an issue they deeply care about.
09:22
Few stories, perhaps somebody knows the name of this guy. What's his name? Max Krems. Max Krems is a citizen lobbyist. He's somebody who realized very early in his life, he was still a law student, that it was possible to leverage on what he was learning to do something that society might have appreciated.
09:42
And what he did was to leverage, first of all, on crowdfunding, 25,000 people supported his challenge to Facebook in order to make sure that Facebook was treating the data that he was transferring to the United States in a way that would have been compatible with our own legal framework for data protection.
10:01
That's what Max Krems did. He didn't do it on his own. It was supported by a community of citizen lobbyists. What my students did in 2012 is something you all benefit from. They heard in a classroom that I was teaching in European law that international rooming was something that perhaps was creating further obstacle to the free movement of citizens.
10:21
And they do register the first European Citizen Initiative. This is a transnational petition that allows seven European citizens to gather one million signatures to ask the European Commission to act. That's what we call agenda setting. You tell decision makers what they should do. Unfortunately, the record of the ECI is not very positive. We didn't collect one million signature,
10:42
but the beauty of this instrument is it allows you to set the agenda, meaning to connect to citizens and tell them what they actually can do or should do in relation to elected representatives. Over the last year, we have been working with a coalition of actors in order to persuade the European Union
11:00
to protect whistleblowers. We know the name of this person, the most famous whistleblower in Europe at the moment, our Edward Snowden of Europe, Antoine Deltour. Antoine Deltour, on the very same day in which he was prosecuted by the Luxembourgish Authority for breaching a set of duties
11:23
that were linking him to PWC, Private Water School, where he was working, was also nominated the European citizen by the European Parliament, a paradox. How can you be both a hero and a culprit on the very same day? Well, what we have been doing as citizen lobbies was to put together and to draft a European directive
11:42
on whistleblowing protection. Nobody wanted to talk about this. We got the ball rolling. We forced all political parties in the European Parliament to take a stance on whistleblowing protection. What about Brexit? It was early June when European alternatives, and in particular, Nicolas Milanese,
12:01
contacted us by saying, I want to make sure that the Brexit negotiations are going to be transparent. How do we do that? We file a lot of requests for documents, the European Commission Secretary General, in order to get access to the documents that the UK government and Europe were exchanging before the actual referendum.
12:20
They were denied. We file a complaint, and that complaint pushed the European ombudsman to open an investigation, which in turn led Michel Barnier, who is the chief negotiator for Brexit, to take the commitment to pre-publish all the negotiating position that the European Union will take before meeting the UK authorities. We have been trying to make Brexit
12:40
more transparent than what it would have been. All what I'm telling you is something you can do, is something that many more people can actually do if they cut their time on social media and they try to leverage on their own expertise. What you can do, you can write to your elected representatives, but even before then, you might want to ask, who are my elected representatives? Only 20% of citizens know
13:01
some of their elected representatives. And quite frankly, I don't blame them, because I'm the first one who doesn't know all my elected representatives. Why? Because there's a local, there's a regional. If you live in more than one European country, you need to know the double of your representatives in one way or another, and then you have, of course, the national and the international level. You can also hold accountable your policymakers,
13:22
your representatives through social media, trying to track what they do and what kind of behavior they are undertaking. But I know some of you are looking at me with a lot of skepticism, and they're asking me, but shouldn't it be the job of political representatives to behave as they should?
13:40
I have a busy life. You're looking at me like, I have a busy life. This is the job of representatives. We live in a representative democracy. True, but the political atmosphere is changing. The political ecosystem is changing certainly more rapidly than what we all want, at least from a traditional political perspective, to accept.
14:02
Lobbying is, first of all, a legitimizer. What I mean by that is that policy-making today is no longer a sort of bottom-up, is no longer a top-down affair in the sense that it's becoming bottom-up. There are many more opportunities for us to engage with our representatives. Think about public consultations. Think about petitions. Think about Freedom of Information Act requests.
14:23
There are so many opportunities for us to engage with our representatives. But what is very interesting here is that lobbying today not only is legitimate, but is also encouraged, meaning that governments are pushing people like us to talk to our representatives and to feed into the policy process in order to have all the interests represented
14:43
when the public interest is identified. But the interesting element from an empirical perspective is that most of these avenues of participation, public consultation, petitions, administrative complaints, European citizen initiative, and so forth, are largely underused.
15:01
We don't use them. There's a lot of discussion about the democratic deficit of the European Union, but also many countries. There was a fantastic article challenging this idea in Malta a few days ago. But we don't use those instruments. Those instruments are available to us, but we just don't use them. So just to give you an empirical idea, there have been, since 2012,
15:21
only 55 European citizen initiative. And there are 500 million citizens, or at least there were, before Brexit, who could have actually initiated those instruments. Lobbying is also a mobilizer. It's something that allows us to go beyond slack activism. It's something that might push the new forms of participation.
15:43
And it's also an equalizer. And this is possibly the most important and promising component of lobbying. The fact that you can counter the undue influence of many actors, actors who are extremely professional in the way in which they engage with elected representatives, and you can counter that. You can push them back by bringing up other interests
16:03
that are not necessarily taken into account. Why this matters? It matters a lot because we live in one of the most unequal society ever, a society in which only, in a few years, we move from 388 individuals owning the same wealth as half the world to a world in which eight individuals
16:21
owns half the world. This comes from the Oxfam Report 2016. In 2017, the prospections looked wrong. Why? Because the inequalities, according to the Gini coefficient, show to go even faster than expected. So the difference between those individuals and you is not only that they are richer than you and us,
16:42
but they are also lobbying, and they lobby hard, and they pay hundreds and hundreds of people to actually lobbying for them. There's a further point that I think is key when looking at lobbying, is the fact that lobbying is also an element of, I would say, plays also a pedagogical function.
17:00
If you engage with your elected representatives, if you try to follow whether a particular cause, which might be to protect a park, a forest in your suburb, in your area, which might be about pushing for LGBT rights, which might be about pushing for whistleblowing. You will understand better the policy process.
17:21
You will understand the trade-offs that our politicians face every single day. You're gonna become a bit more humbler when interacting with them. And this might be an element of trust, a trust builder into the process. But lobbying is also a happiness booster. What do I mean by that? If you look at happiness studies, and there are a lot of very interesting happiness studies,
17:41
you all know that what really make us happy in society is not only financial resources, making money, making profit. What make us happy is certainly our status, so educational background and status in society. But what really make us happy in the long term is our ability to bond with society
18:00
and to contribute to society. And lobbying, when done by citizens, may attain that objective. As you might know, Amartya Sen has theorized this idea, which is theoretically proven, by saying that participation can be seen as having an intrinsic value for the quality of life. Last but not least, all these elements feed into research
18:20
suggesting that today lobbying is actually good for democracy, meaning that societies which are inhabited by assertive citizens, not allegiance citizens, but citizens who actually make noise, stand up and tell their policymakers, their representatives what they think, are in the long term, significantly more transparent and accountable,
18:42
and these might also be correlated to their level of happiness. So we know that to be a happier individual, but also a happier society. How to guide, how can you become a citizen lobbyist from a realistic perspective? We have many things to do in life, right?
19:01
We have to stick to our 14 hours of social media every week. How can we add a further task to this? What I've been developing in this book that just came out last Monday, is a set of steps that each of us can take in order to mobilize a particular issue you care about. It might be something that has an impact
19:21
at the very local level in your city. It can be about your regions, it can be about your state, it can be a transnational issue. But what you have to do is pretty much always the same. You have to pick your battle, choose a topic, choose a team that really makes your heart tilt,
19:40
you are deeply passionate about, and then do your homework, trying to figure out which are the issues, what's been working on this issue in the past, and therefore to map your lobbying environment, meaning who are the actors you might want to work with, your allies or potential allies? Who are your enemies? Who are the people who can actually help you reach the particular objective?
20:01
And then you're gonna draw up a lobbying plan, you're gonna build your coalition, and perhaps you might need some funding, so how can you get the funding? Then you're gonna communicate about what you do because your best allies will be journalists, people who wanna talk about what you're doing, by amplifying the impact you might want to have. And then finally, if you're successful, you're gonna be allowed to meet your decision-making,
20:22
meaning the people, the person, the individual, who will decide for you, will decide whether the particular issue you care about is actually worth part of its time. And in these very political, turbulent days, we have a lot of politicians who are extremely entrepreneurial in the way in which they look for ideas.
20:41
And many politicians need you as much as you need them in order to have your message passed across. Then you keep monitoring and implementation, and then you need to stick to the rules, so the rules that govern your relationship with the policymakers. So here, I've been developing a lot of tips based on my stories, based on what I experienced myself,
21:01
but also by collecting a bunch of stories coming from all of the world, stories of individuals who actually made a difference for their communities in Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, in emerging economies, in very wealthy economies all across the world. What's the toolbox? The toolbox is what each of us should learn about.
21:22
I already mentioned a few tools, but the overall idea in the tools is that it's not the interest of the many which are overrepresented today, but is the interest of the few, meaning basically of us, that tend to be underrepresented. So which are the tools there? We have an issue we wanna pick,
21:41
we wanna ban fracking, or we wanna reduce smoking because we don't like outdoor smoking, which is threatening for most of us who do not smoke. What do you do? Well, you start your action. You're trying to figuring out which kind of policy option allow you to do that, and then you pick your way. You can go judicial, you go to court,
22:01
you go to a politician, you go through a campaign system, and depending on the box you choose, you might meet your political representative, you might file for a request of access to document, you might introduce a petition. So you have an entire box of instruments that are available to you, and again, the good news is that most of the tools
22:23
are underused, most of the people don't use them, why? Not because they don't wanna use them, but because most of them, they don't know them. You are not necessarily familiar with those tools. And if you are, you need to be very committed to using them and trying to make the most out of them. So the question for you is, are you ready?
22:41
How many of you feel that you might wanna give it a try? You might wanna give it a try, yes, yes, yes, I see some people are intrigued about the idea. Well, if you're gonna do it, the good thing is that the process might matters more than the outcome, meaning you're gonna benefit from the whole idea of acting rather than being passive,
23:02
being an actor rather than being a spectator, being a citizen rather than a consumer. And I think, again, the process matters more than the outcome. The process is gonna be more important than what you will finally achieve. I'm gonna leave you with this quote, which has been my driving force over the last two years with writing this book. And the quote is from a very famous US psychologist,
23:24
anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who said that you never believe that a few caring people can change the world, for indeed, that's all whoever have. Thank you.