Institutional innovation also requires bottom-up involvement
Tomorrow there will be elections in The
Netherlands. You can choose from 21
parties. Will there be some real (needed) change?
As there will not be one party to gain the
majority of the votes, there will always has to be a coalition of parties
formed. This will be extremely challenging. Out of these 21 parties there will
only be 5/6 parties who will deal the cards among themselves. This is really
nothing new. We have had these coalitions for many years now, so the expected
changes will be rather limited. There will not be a huge change in the
political and governmental landscape.
However, a huge change is required in many
different areas like education, healthcare, employment, social welfare, sustainability,
and traffic. There are some very interesting new parties who have real
innovating plans and insights, but there voice is just not being heard. They
are not featured in the big debates on TV and they don’t have the funds to run
large-scale multimedia campaigns. So, it is very likely that they will get very
few votes.
Also politics has moved away from the
interests of the citizens. In the last few weeks I did check with fiends and
nobody knows details about the respective programs, and it is even hard to
mention some of our current ministers. It looks like politics has become a game
in itself, which is played with just a few people for a few people.
Obviously this is not sustainable. The
citizens (young and old) need to be much more involved as the stakes are just
to high to leave all the major decisions to just a few professional
politicians. Also the challenges in the Dutch, European an global society
require lots of innovation for which support of all the citizens is needed.
This means that bottom-up involvement
should be standard rather than the exception. Maybe the referendum and
community model of Switzerland is a good starting point.
What do you think?
Enthusiasm drives Excellence!
