Carmen Sirianni's pathbreaking book boldly explores the role of government in facilitating citizen engagement in collaborative networks. This is a terrain toward which many express skepticism, fear, resistance, indifference, and sometimes ignorance. We are indebted to Sirianni for advancing the debate and compelling us to think more carefully.

Many engaged democrats view government as a bureaucratic system hopelessly colonized by corporate capitalism in ways that render it oblivious—and often hostile—to specific conditions, knowledge, needs, and aspirations of the demos. From this perspective, civil society becomes the singular terrain for democratic initiatives that seek—in often Sisyphean ways—to pressure, resist, and make more accountable highly undemocratic institutions. Seeking to rewire government to enable citizen agency is like putting one's democratic eggs in an antidemocratic basket where they will surely be broken. Sirianni acknowledges a long, sobering history of government purposes and processes betraying democratic aspirations, yet he sees and carefully articulates transformative possibilities where others do not. One of his great achievements is to render this hopelessness questionable.

Many have long argued for government policies to democratize the economy, regulate the commons, provide public services, support the vulnerable, and so on. Yet Sirianni's distinctive and deepest spirit is expressed by a city manager and a leader of an exemplary youth civic-engagement initiative in Hampton, Virginia: “[D]on't bring me more programs; change systems” (p.118). Sirianni doesn't suggest simply changing particular systems, but rather transforming the fundamental character of systems. In the contemporary theoretical discourse that culminates in the work of theorists such as Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas, social systems are characterized as modes of organizing activity by means of media (e.g., money and bureaucratic power) that transform the world into a resource environment toward which systems are essentially exploitative. Although others have offered profound challenges to systems-theoretic claims, very few have suggested not only that governmental systems—especially at the federal level—are profoundly transformable in directions of responsive communication and reciprocal collaboration with citizens, but moreover that they can become the key agents in a process that facilitates and organizes cultural change so that citizens become proactively engaged in ways that will powerfully limit, shape, coproduce, and implement governmental behavior. This is a radical idea.

Sirianni does not develop this critique of systems theory in a direct and expressly theoretical way. But his theses on collaborative governance and his analyses of case studies offer much to support it. His discussions of how municipal governments have facilitated neighborhood empowerment in Seattle and youth civic engagement in Hampton, Virginia, and his analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to build civic capacity around environmental problems, are replete with impressive examples of governments advancing his core principals of collaborative governance: engaging citizens in coproducing public goods, enhancing their capacities to do so effectively, mobilizing community assets, enabling more inclusive and equitable public deliberations, fostering sustainable partnerships among diverse constituencies, transforming institutional cultures to view people as participants rather than consumers of services, and so on. He provides many examples of grassroots activists moving into governmental positions and making important advances to “change systems.”

Yet while all of the cases Sirianni analyzes owe profound debts to more conflictive social movements and organizing traditions that have fought for seats at more level tables, his citizen engagement paradigm heavily accents collaborative relationship building over conflict. Indeed, the focus on receptive relationship building across myriad differences is a central community-organizing motif that is relentlessly cultivated by leaders of the collaborative governance experiments that he investigates.

The democratic effects of nurturing relational cultures are profound. In contrast to bureaucracies and markets, relational cultures that are dialogical, receptive, and collaborative have proven that we can creatively respond to the world's dynamic complexities and diversities in ways that avoid the blunders of both monological governance and gridlocked multiplicity. Sirianni writes that Seattle's neighborhood empowerment planning effectively negotiates among scores of neighborhoods, agencies, nonprofits, and other constituencies in ways that lead to exemplary public work: “What kept the neighborhood planning process from becoming just another complex bureaucratic maze of technical details, participatory process requirements, and multilevel accountability mechanisms were the relational civic skills and philosophy underlying the project manager's role” (p. 98). Sheldon Wolin's provocative work on Montesquieu embraces the latter's affirmative vision of the polity as a “labyrinth,” in contrast to tyrannous sovereignties.Footnote ¹ Labyrinths can both impede such powers and give responsive articulation to social, political, and ecological complexities. What makes such a complex constitution of political processes possible and desirable—and what can in turn be nurtured by such constitution—is an infrastructure of relationality that articulates principals of receptivity, inclusiveness, equality, reciprocal accountability, and collaborative public work.

Engaged radical democratic scholarship has made many important advances in the past dozen years or so. Along with Sirianni's work on collaborative governance, one might note the rich literature that is developing around community-based organizing, and the fascinating work on widely emergent modes of democratic economic practice in municipalities and states.Footnote ² Yet most often, those who would democratize and pluralize the antidemocratic powers of our polity focus on particular sectors (e.g., civil society, governmental bureaucracies, corporate markets) of radical reform in ways that do not sufficiently investigate the elemental relationships between these transformations and transformations in other sectors that are conditions of each other's (im)possibility. Gar Alperovitz, for example, in America Beyond Capitalism, brilliantly analyzes important initiatives for democratizing economics in ways that have important implications for Sirianni's discussion of democratizing governance (and vice versa). Yet Alperovitz does not sufficiently address the importance of collaborative governance and ongoing transformative social movements for sustaining the democratic directions of the economic initiatives he analyzes. Similarly, though many scholars and practitioners of community-based organizing have made indispensable contributions to our ethical and political tool kit for cultivating relational power that maintains a vital tension between idealist and pragmatic sensibilities, most ignore the possibilities for transforming both governance and corporate markets. Such sector-focused scholarship is useful in order to open and probe possibilities in particular domains; yet if we are to “change systems,” it is crucial that democratic scholarship push these limits and focus more on larger configurations—the interrelationships between multiple sectors that must be engaged and transformed in tandem because unresponsive “systems” are co-engendered in multiple locations.Footnote ³ Underemphasizing the relationships among different sectors can diminish the critical vision and voice necessary for radical democratic transformation.

Unfortunately, Sirianni focuses on governance in ways that significantly diminish our attention to the manner in which profound transformations in corporate capitalism and intensifications of independent democratic organizing are indispensable conditions for developing the very directions in governance he affirms. Radical democratic theory and practice that focus on changing the broad interrelationships of power necessary for more expansive and durable democratization can now be more than an empty gesture, precisely because of the many experimental initiatives undertaken in recent decades. Sirriani's avoidance of such a radical democratic focus is problematic. Consider three examples related to global capitalist political economy that are deeply important for collaborative governance: As David Bacon compellingly suggests, contemporary global capitalism engenders the migration of millions of people and yet simultaneously criminalizes immigrants.Footnote ⁴ While Sirianni points to vital ways in which immigrants are drawn into collaborative public work around neighborhood gardens, community centers, and so on, such engagement largely fails to respond to this greater systemic problem of global migration and immigrant rights—unless it is linked to organizing that begins to address it. Similarly, while Sirianni points to many inspiring collaborations around environmental problems, such collaboration takes place in a context in which nearly all evidence suggests that we are racing ever more quickly toward catastrophe from global warming (and myriad other problems) that is engendered by the degradation of the planetary commons by global capitalism. Finally, in spite of all the excellent collaborative engagement in Seattle, the level of income inequality has increased significantly there during the period he discusses, in ways that are corrosive of democracy.Footnote ⁵

These problems put pressure on Sirianni's framework in some key ways. First, his sectoral focus diminishes our critical attention to intersectoral relationships of power in ways that marginalize important broader concerns from our understanding of engaged citizenship. Evidence of this is discernable in the absence of an indispensable critical vocabulary, voice, and vision regarding these monumental problems that greatly undermine and limit what he affirms. Sirianni mentions at the end of every case study that the initiatives described have suffered significantly from budget cuts and the persistence of technocratic frames (to which we might also add narrowing consumerism, hypermobility, and antidemocratic workplaces). Yet he offers no discussion of, for example, the ways in which the global economy shapes and constrains the processes, priorities, and fiscal crises of governments.

Second, this lack in turn de-emphasizes (and de-energizes) the crucial work of imagining and experimenting toward political economic transformations that might extend a web of initiatives more capable of furthering and supporting deep democratization. While Sirianni is not inattentive to the concerns of organizers and scholars about ways in which independent initiatives can be assimilated and domesticated by governmental and corporate powers, his own framework risks inadvertently nurturing such assimilation in the absence of links to more transformational initiatives.

Third, these two issues raise questions concerning the extent of Sirianni's accent on collaborative citizenship and suggest that initiatives of robust conflictive politics are also a more necessary part of the mix than he acknowledges. Megapowers deeply invested in patterns of damage do not like to be named and never change without movements that directly contest them. My point is not simply to suggest that Sirianni leaves to the side one kind of politics as he studies collaborative modes. Conflictive politics, as he acknowledges, have been central for enabling the zones of collaboration he brilliantly explores. Moreover, many central problems of our day call for dimensions of intense conflict now and in the foreseeable future. Thus, we must cultivate the possibility for mutually enabling relationships between the collaborative ethos and practices at the center of Sirianni's normative and empirical vision, on the one hand, and an ethos that summons up courage for—as well as affirmation of—arts that enable, and knowledge that informs, intense levels of contestation as part of a vibrant democratic political ecology in the face of catastrophe. Collaborative citizenship engaged in public work is an absolutely indispensable element of the needed ecology. (I spend dozens of hours a week thus engaged as a scholar and organizer.)

Yet if the centrality of this mode is overplayed, it can deplete democratic awareness of the importance of more agonistic modalities. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) has a motto, “no permanent enemies, no permanent friends,” which they take to mean that conflict and cooperation, polarization and depolarization, are both necessary for democratic empowerment. To reify politics and theoretical frames in one direction or the other is to misunderstand that democratic politics flourishes in the tension between these modes. Sirianni notes, for example, that cultivating a common language was essential for enabling the youth engagement initiatives in Hampton, Virginia. My worry is that the most salient and repeated concepts in his political lexicon tend to underplay key terms (like “conflict”) needed to envision, inform, and empower modes of democratic engagement without which we are going nowhere fast.

I suggest that democratic scholarship ought to take a lesson from the IAF motto and offer a frame for understanding “the political” that ceases to slant toward conflict or collaboration, and instead focuses on the the ways in which conflict and collaboration are entwined, at once enabling, and in tension with, each other. We need to enliven both modes in order to empower democracy. This capacity in turn requires carefully cultivating robust associations that are jealous of their independence and highly attentive to the possible negative (as well as positive) implications of deep collaborative relations with governments. If we ignore this, we risk instituting a democratic vision that disciplines citizens into collaborative activity at the expense of more contestational politics that engage monumental and deeply entrenched patterns of subjugative power. When this happens, the problem under discussion can enter a vicious circle with the first two: An overly collaborative focus creates pressures to be silent about and not encroach upon powers with which one seeks collaboration. In contexts where these pressures are consistently heeded, collaborative engagement can become a key strategy of governmentality in Michel Foucault's sense: constituting subjects and communities whose counterconducts enable—more than they dislodge—a subjugative order.Footnote ⁶

Investing in Democracy makes an unparalleled contribution to citizen engagement in collaborative governance. In order to sustain and further such initiatives, we must interweave them in a broader web of political critique, experimentation, and contestation. And most of the agency for this will have to come from an attentive, imaginative, energetic, and supple demos transforming many sectors and utilizing many tools. Sirianni (an advisor to the Obama 2008 campaign) ends his book with an appeal to Barack Obama to “ensure that federal agencies enable the collaborative ‘we’ in ‘Yes we can’” (p. 240). That Obama's “we” often appears to tilt toward Wall Street, that his rhetoric and practice of “we can” has shifted to a technocratic “I can,”Footnote ⁷ and that Sirianni's call has been marginalized is significantly due to the fact that the political discourse of collaboration endorsed by Obama and many of his supporters lacks a systemic critique of economic power and a place for conflictive modes of political engagement. Lacking a demos born/e in a complex confidence that “we can,” no president can carry a movement of democracy forward. Such a demos does not yet exist. Democratic theory can contribute to its emergence by calling attention to this absence, and the reasons for it, and the forms of contestation that might better empower ordinary citizens and social movements. At the same time, we are indebted to Sirianni for his sharp illumination of the many ways in which we are already becoming far more than the nothing to which technocratic power would consign us.