A year and a half ago I was on the inside of a Dutch government think tank. The think tank, Infodrome, had as its mandate to inform and inspire governmental and parliamentary officials to take up information society issues. What does government do with the Internet (that it wasn’t already doing)?
My position was that the Internet, amongst its other popular manifestions as e-commerce marketplace, library, rumour mill, music swap meet, den of software pirates and paedophiles, and the great conversation ongoing on email and chat rooms – apart from all that, it could also be thought of as a debate space around important social issues. If, however, you entered a social issue into a search engine, including a Dutch search engine – issues like climate change, xenotransplantation, or gm food -the government was absent in the returns. The places people would go to find out about important social issues was not the government, if one considers a search engine a main entry point to the Web. If you wanted the government’s view, you’d have to surf government. And who, after all, surfs government, apart from government itself and a previous Dutch Minister without portfolio, called van Boxtel?
I thought that if the government wanted to be more visible in the information society it had to become more present in relevant web spaces.
At the same time government was beginning to learn some insights. It decided to create independent portals, like the health kiosk – gezondheidskiosk.nl. With the health kiosk initiative, government, via a specially created NGO – perhaps better called a GONGO, a government-organized NGO –was trying to make a popular portal. They wanted to enter the health space on the Internet, because they held the view that the Web was dangerous, or more drastically, that the Web could kill you.
The problem with the health kiosk, however, was that it was run by strict editors. They hardly let anyone post information to the site. And nobody went there anyway, apart from the few folks that were allowed to post.
My view was that the government, instead of authoring these sorts of spaces that disappoint, better first find out what’s going on in other more relevant spaces on the Web.
Around the time of this discussion, a ‘real’ public debate was about to take place, on food safety, with the emphasis on gm food. I was approached by one of the Infodrome staff who said that the issue was heating up. She pointed me to an AVRO TV news program where a number of important Dutch folks came on the show, and put forward their views. The newspapers also were saying that the issue was heating up, indeed that there was a debate underway.
So Infodrome asked me to find that debate, and tell them what it was about. They knew I’d check the stories as well as the Internet. Here is what I found.
1) TV news and newspaper journalists interviewed a number of people in the issue area, took their statements, and juxtaposed them against one another. Statement juxtaposition in the media was called a debate. Statement juxtaposition, I thought, could also be masking the absence of a debate.
2) Next I went to see what organic farmers were saying. They were inviting people to go to agro-tourism events, buy their produce, subscribe to a magazine, look in the supermarkets for their carefully codified labels. Only one of them in this space – the alternative consumers’ union – alternatieve consumenten bond - was taking positions, trying to debate something – labels. All others were not in any debate at all.
3) The NRC Handelsblad had a dossier – a file – on their site with all the organizations they thought were in the ‘debate’. The debate dossier pointed to particular pages on each of these organizations’ websites, where statements are made about their views. Of these sites only 4 of the 20 organizations actually had views. And only two taking positions were Dutch. The Dutch consumers’ union argued that gm food requires labels, and those labels should be on all gm food products. And the government had no other position than saying that there should be a debate.
4) Intriguingly, two other actors showed up in this Dutch establishment newspaper’s space – the EU and the Codex Alimentarius. The Codex, based in Washington, DC, puts forward proposed standards and regulations. They put forward that only those GM products known to cause allergies should be labelled. No other gm products should be labelled. The EU said that that was the policy that would be followed.
So, most importantly – number five - the Dutch food safety debate was taking place outside the Netherlands. Of the establishment parties, only the Consumers’ Union, and of the organic folks, only the alternative consumers’ union, seemed to be aware of the debate.
Then came the real government-organized public debate – months of it. I’d just like to point to one crucial event in this debate to make an overall point. During the public debate, 15 key Dutch NGOs left it, citing distrust in the process and pre-mediated outcomes. Among them was the Alternative Consumers Union.
Many commentators have called these NGOs bad sports, asocial, even anti-democratic. Studies also were commissioned by government to find out what was going on with these NGOs – studies that also found them to be a potential threat to democracy because of their lack of accountability. As Tony Blair and George Bush also said, safely within the red zone at the Genoa G8 summit, these people protesting here are unelected. The real people are at home, in front of the television sets, getting our messages. I would like to argue that the NGOs were not so much leaving the debate, as leading us to it, bringing us back to where the debate is taking place, if we are willing enough to want to locate it. The debate was not going on in the Netherlands, and if we would like the debate to be going on here, we would have to import it. Interestingly, the 15 Dutch NGOs that left the debate did just that. They set up their own counter-debate in the Netherlands, discussing the issues being debated outside of the Netherlands.
In conclusion I have a methodological point as well as a normative one. Methodologically, if one is to hold a public debate on an important social issue in the Netherlands, one should locate where the debate on this social issue is taking place, and who is in it. What I am saying is that if government wishes to ‘author’ a national public debate, it should make sure that the terms of the debate are germane to those national actors already in the debate. If the terms are not interesting to them, government comes across as a newbie, as someone who has not read the FAQs, the frequently asked questions.
Normatively, I would like to ask whether government ought to ever ‘author’ debate? The advice eventually given to the think tank was that government should capture and put on display ongoing social debate. It should subsequently strive to position itself in this ongoing debate, instead of authoring its own.
Finally, instead of inviting the organic farmers to the government building, I proposed that we see them instead at the Saturday farmers’ market.