John Watters – Citizen Power: Re-imagining what it means to be a Citizen in a time of rupture. A vital contribution to the weave of right relationality. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_citizen-power-activity-7476320104725708800-xczH What would it mean for you to reclaim your power as a citizen right now?
I’m really pleased to see John Watters’ paper, Citizen Power: Re-imagining what it means to be a Citizen in a time of rupture, now published.
I’m also proud to have been one of the people who supported John and commented as the thinking developed, but more importantly I think this paper is doing a piece of the work I think we badly need.
For me, it sits in the supporting weave that will help us build and sustain right relationality (including relational public services), alongside lots of of other great work (where I also place Jane Searles and Roger Duck’s Thriving Together – as yet unpublished – can we get a reference document like this?)… a braided history, as has been mentioned, lots of rich origins and controbutions.
John’s paper adds something important: it insists that ‘citizen’ isn’t just a legal category, a voter, a service user, a customer, a stakeholder, or someone to be consulted once the decision has already been framed elsewhere.
Citizen is a role, a practice, a source of power, and responsibility; to be yourself in relation to others.
There’s a trap in some relational public service thinking. We can rightly challenge transactional, service-led, bureaucratic models. We can rightly say that people’s lives don’t fit our boxes, pathways, eligibility rules, dashboards and contracts.
But if we’re not careful, we replace one imbalance with another – we either make public services the heroic fixer of everything, or ‘community’ and ‘citizen power’ get used as cover for state withdrawal.
Public services have duties, resources, statutory powers, reach, continuity, and obligations of fairness. Citizens have lives, relationships, judgement, gifts, local knowledge, love, anger, memory, commitment, and forms of mutual action that institutions can’t manufacture.
Relational public services shouldn’t absorb citizen action into service delivery. And citizen action should not be used to excuse weak, absent, or careless public service.
So John’s question is a good one:
What would it mean for me to reclaim my power as a citizen right now?
My answer is probably to stop treating citizenship as something that happens through opinion, complaint, consumption, voting, reposting, or waiting for someone senior to sort it out, to notice where I’m acting only as observer or critic, to put more effort into the small, real associations where life is actually made, to share my actual vision, and to support public services to become better guests and allies in civic life, not substitute parents, vending machines, or gatekeepers.
And to keep asking, in any piece of public service design:
– What is the citizen’s part in this?
– Are we increasing agency, connection and capability?
Or are we training people to become more dependent, more compliant, more cynical, and more alone?
Do read, do comment, share, and do think what it means for you!
chosen path 