The Depoliticization of Change

I had the great pleasure of attending the 4th Canadian Forum for Social Innovation in Calgary last week. Focused on the theme of “Talent Powered Prosperity,” it sparked a vast amount of stimulating and impactful discussion. It was so much fun to take part in, especially given the large number of friends and colleagues in attendance.

There are so many threads that I could write about following it (along with other happenings in the world such as the AI strategy that I’ll dig into soon). However, I want to focus on one line of discussion that is important to reckon with: the depoliticization of social change.

By depoliticization, I mean both a de-linkage of people working for social change from party politics and democratic politics broadly, as well as a turn away from conflict that drives change and towards consensus based middle grounds. How this depoliticization manifests itself was raised by a range of different speakers, and is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about too.

I think this phenomenon is important to explore and understand if we want to use innovation (social or otherwise) to drive a more inclusive and equitable economy and society.

The first way that change has been depoliticized has been through a focus on technocratic solutions. This can be characterized by the belief that if we can provide enough evidence, or craft the right playbook/toolkit, or run a successful pilot then it will follow that policymakers will act and implement this at scale.

Yet, as various participants pointed out, that rarely, if ever, happens. Some had been working on specific topics and solutions for many years without making a dent.

It is important and necessary to develop evidence-based policy and test our assumptions before embarking on major projects. But evidence itself is not sufficient in and of itself to get politicians and policymakers to act, let alone to impact societal challenges.

Evidence is only one part of the equation, and unfortunately it is perhaps the most insignificant part. Electoral considerations, ideological priors, and fiscal constraints all often weigh more in policymakers minds than what the evidence points to.

This isn’t to say that evidence and technocratic approaches can never yield results. In the right circumstances with passionate public servants and a particularly engaged politician in the hot seat then progress can be driven forward. However, that isn’t the norm, and whatever breakthroughs have happened haven’t led to systems level change.

There was a clear awareness at the Forum of the limitations of a technocratic approach. However, that level of depoliticization is also accompanied by another at the organizational level that often blocks more proactive, politicized approach to change.

Various participants spoke of how many organizations are deeply afraid to do anything to rock the boat. Given their reliance on government grants, moving too far out of the norm risks a backlash that could compromise their funding. Short term survival outweighs long term change.

One person in particular captured how internal resistance to change works. They described how organizations have:

An inherent resistance to change. It is almost as if there are antibodies deployed to fight it.

That certainly resonated with me, and many others who heard it.

One antibody is that organizations are paralyzed by risk aversion. Instead of taking the risks necessary to achieve their core missions, they focus on whatever contortions are necessary to secure funding. That is true even when they know that the funding in amount or duration is often incompatible with achieving genuine change.

Compounding this problem is another antibody: how potential change makers within organizations burn out. Trying to push change forward is to be a modern Sisyphus, pushing the boulder to the top of the hill only to find it at the bottom once more the next day. It is exhausting. I know far too many brilliant people who have gone through that cycle and found themselves leaving to avoid the mental and physical toll that takes.

We are faced then with broken societal and economic systems that are perpetuating harm. And then we have both big “P” political systems and small “p” politics within organizations that act to minimize disruption and counter attempts at change.

If we want to drive real impact and actually disrupt broken systems then technocratic, depoliticized approaches are not the answer. We have to build power to ensure that we can’t be ignored. We have to develop theories of change around how to move the needle at the political and economic levels and how to overcome the major systemic blockers to positive progress, such as perpetuating a profoundly extractive economic system.

Getting out of the holes that we have dug ourselves into will mean taking risks. We need to embrace that.