Cultivating The Art Of Civic Associations

Social instinct of human beings prompts them to band together, interact with others and form associations to achieve collective goals that are not possible to realize on personal toil. The greatest gift of knowing self helps people to realize their connections with nature, family, community, society, the state and world community, embedded in them and find a common path forward. Digital platform, a form of association in the virtual sphere, is cost-effective and fast in generating effective and desirable outcomes through the network. The pattern of access is less hierarchical and less stratified in terms of empirical indicators and a catalyst for change. 

In the visual world, the density of civic associations is no less important for the preservation of political society, its interactive culture and orienting leaders and people to public welfare.  These civic associations are voluntarily organized to act as a voice of the people to promote their general welfare pertaining to the preservation of the environment, secure livelihood, promote education, health, infrastructure and communication to cultivate a sense of civic community. Because of their utility, civic associations outlast their members. They evolve, change, prosper and adapt as per the changing needs and challenges of society and technological evolution. 

Culture of deliberation

The culture of deliberation allows putting one’s own concern and perspective, frame choices and make the participants accountable for the costs and benefits of public action. Political society differs from economic society. The latter is deemed a utilitarian sphere of private profit, while the former is designed to promote public goods from which no one is excluded, not even the poor, the weak and the wretched. It also differs from general society as the former is marked by equality of citizenship while the latter is unevenly divided by income, wealth, class hierarchy, education and links.

In this sense, civic associations play a critical role in democracy. It restrains the passion of reckless mob action or leaders’ authoritarian infatuation animus to participatory democratic life. An upswing of civic associations in Nepal has provided social critical energy to the people to define their distinction, dignity and destiny. They have helped Nepali political parties to organize a democratic struggle when they were made irrelevant by their own deeds. But the rise of political leaders into governmental power left the social forces in the lurch, often on the edge of unrealised expectations. 

Nepal has seen the collapse of many civic associations as their leaders’ private ambition overwhelmed collective benefits to the people. Others joined political parties and business without transferring skills and wisdom to succeeding generations. Still, many of these associations have served as schools for leadership growth and leverage for social mobility.   The free spirit of the art of association can transform private Nepalis into public citizens and brace democratic constitution, institutions, practices and belief systems. It enables them to secure the functions, utilities and autonomy of the political society for the people.

 The normative boundaries of civic associations and habitual compliance to them can produce responsible public and leaders able to assume national responsibilities entrenched in the Nepali constitution. Ironically, social learning among Nepali leaders appears weak while the constitution has failed to maintain coherence and balance of the competing conceptions of good life articulated by political parties of various hues. Market institutions are high-leverage actors as they are connected more to the global regime than national space. They are effective in collective action but they lack broad-based legitimacy as they seek monopoly and syndicate, which are hostile to the competitive allocation of goods. 

The market has shaped democracy in its image. Democracy enables people to exercise sovereign choice, while money power skews this.  Nepali political parties and their backup associations also have partial interests to serve their clients, not the general pledge to the good of the entire society, to harness fellow feelings and uphold an interest to share the burden of ordinary folk. Absence of shared sacrifice has produced negative effects on the non-members of political parties. It fails to muster trust in leadership. Inter-personal and inter-institutional trust in Nepal is vital to undertake large-scale development initiatives. 

Many civil society groups and NGOs are operating under the doctrine of rational choice, not public choice and public action. The others, such as Nepal community forestry, irrigation and trade unions, have crafted shared policies and organised collective action.  But unions are concentrated in the organised sectors of the political economy. It bears no positive effects on mostly informal sectors in terms of wages, working conditions and social security. Associations of media, teachers and student unions play an outsized role in politics but they are packed with partisan lines.

 In no way does ownership pressure on them enable them to offer a range of choices for public life other than making politics an arena of delight, not a gadfly of power and educator of the Nepali public. Nepali cooperative associations have suffered from fraud and money laundering and their victims are organizing regular protests to remedy the problems. Farmers’ associations pass several resolutions but they hardly affect the government's policy. Social and cultural associations based on volunteerism, awakened the resilience of people and have demonstrated enough buoyancy but they are group-enclosed and lack the inclusive spirit of participatory democracy.

The civic associations of local governments have demonstrated their ability to influence policy culture. The associational activities of women, Dalits, ethnic groups, Madhesis and indigenous people, etc. have gained certain positive outcomes. The government has established national commissions for the protection and promotion of their interests but they have also displayed self-interested actions to outsiders of the group and failed to foster the notion of citizenship. Nation-building in Nepal requires the formation of inclusive associations to promote cross-cultural solidarity based on civic values, not biology, caste and regional concerns. 

Public action has hefty roles relative to class action despite the enormity of left parties, self-proclaimed progressive civil society and media. But class awareness no longer remains an effective tool of politics in Nepal. Many left leaders have committed class suicide - the hara-kiri.

Nepali civic associations remain weak to provide a powerful offset to authoritarianism, corporate power and geopolitical forces, confront the power structures of special interests and the deep state dominating the national political economy. In an elite-dominated structure, the power of digital space, the internet, robotics and AI cannot be undervalued as this power has produced impacts in networking. Now, netizens interacting in the virtual sphere as a dynamic sector must have to build an interface with citizens living at the grassroots level to generate a synergy of generational change. Network-based collaboration can help members actualise, assert, claim and articulate their concerns, which are shared by all. 

Gen Z has demonstrated the power of technology and emotion to change political regime but their fissiparous tendencies indicate whether they can institutionalise the change through a moral legitimacy of the high ground, harness the feeling of we Nepalis and bridge inter-generational differences in attitudes for reciprocity and engineer associational solidarity with ordinary folk. The moral stirring of youth stands above self and struggles across political parties of various spectrums, inspiring the transformation of the living conditions of people. Still, some senior leaders believe that there is no alternative to the constitutional status quo, which unnerves their psychology. 

Nepalis have learned the art of associations when they discovered their social nature, built family, community, society and the state and supported each other’s needs through cooperation. Extension of political equality of democracy into the economic sphere is central to establishing an edifice of freedom. The constitutional tradition of politics has allowed people to exercise their rights, which include freedom of self-expression and associational life, the former lays stress on a compelling vision of individual welfare while the latter on the equality of opportunity for groups, community and society. The provision of property rights in the Nepali constitution has offered an incentive for individual persons to accumulate wealth. 

Equality of opportunity can remedy the harmful effects of atomizing tendencies of individuals in selfish pursuits driven by the impulse of the free market. Modern politics deems each Nepali sovereign political actor, not just voter, consumer, client and passive cog of a political machine absorbed in a solitary, private and partisan life. The role of media becomes vital in inculcating the ethics of free flow of critical information so that young Nepalis do not succumb to fake awareness, emotional sound-bites, chatter shows, partisan acrimony and infotainment but develop cognitive gifts to craft policies, take leadership, mobilise resources and judge the performance of the state and civic institutions, thus influencing the vital issues.

Common good

 The swelling of intermediary civic associations in Nepal can set powerful checks on selfish individualism.  The nation’s classical treaties suggest that the wealthy people engage in social work to keep social harmony, engage in collective problem solving and attain the common good. The modern account of politics is rooted in public-spirited leaders to become duty-bound to Nepalis' rights and enable them to perform duties as active citizens and build interpersonal and impersonal trust and avert the depolarization of the political process.  Society cannot be entirely dissolved into class, caste, gender, ethnicity, region, religion and the image of the market.

People hold multiple identities and form corresponding social associations to realize their needs, rights and aspirations. Reducing them to one identity naturally undercuts their sane humanity and becomes a cause of vices. The essence of differentiation is the leitmotif of the instrumental politics of divide and rule of the people. In this sense, the quality of civic associations is vital for the people to organise, coordinate, communicate and effect collective action in matters of public policy and decision making beneficial to them and resolving their problematic condition.  

(Former Reader at the Department of Political Science, TU, Dahal writes on political and social issues.)