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Book Review: Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe

Joshiah Ober, the historian of ancient Greece, said recently that there are two fundamentally different conceptions of democracy. The first is majority rule. On this conception, a society is democratic when collective decisions reflect the views of the most numerous. The second is accomplishment. On this less common view, a democratic society is one that has the power to achieve the common aims of its citizens. Xavier de Sousa Briggs’ new book, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe, embraces a deeply pragmatic version of this second view of democracy. The book offers a penetrating tour of how individuals and organizations in the far flung communities of Salt Lake City, Mumbai, Philadelphia, São Paulo, San Francisco, and Cape Town mobilize to address a range of public problems. Briggs begins with a highly practical question: why can some communities manage difficult challenges such as economic restructuring, sustainable growth, and social service provision while others cannot? His answer lies not in the wisdom of policy, the capacity of the state, nor the presence of civic organizations, nor other forms of social capital. Rather, communities solve challenges such as these if they can muster what Briggs calls civic capacity. In lucid prose describing dozens of rich examples drawn from diverse communities— rich and poor, North and South—Briggs shows that solving these wicked problems, often against the odds, is sometimes possible. Bringing to the fore these examples of social and democratic success is itself worth the price of admission. His keen empirical sense also generates several important conceptual innovations. Successful social problem solving cannot be properly understood, much less explained, with several of the conceptual categories and dichotomies now popular among social scientists and democratic theorists. First, these cases of successful problem solving result neither from pure public deliberation in which good reasons trump self-interest, nor from bare-knuckled brawls in which interest backed by superior power carries the day. When communities manage to solve problems, Briggs argues, they do so because actors and groups with diverse interests share enough in common (the problem they face) to engage in a kind of joint planning and action that involves some elements of deliberation leavened with heavy doses of negotiation. More important than the distinction between reason and power, however, is