Dialectical Simplicity invites us to ask clear, grounded questions about how our lives are organised—and how they might be organised differently. It values means over abstractions, relationships over hierarchies, and everyday wisdom over bureaucratic control. Applied to local government, this philosophy offers a radically democratic reimagining: one that centres people, deepens participation, and treats the community not as a passive recipient of services but as the place where power should live.
In this context, Dialectical Simplicity asks three core questions:
- What does our local government actually do for us?
- Could ordinary people do it better, together?
- What gets in the way—and who benefits from that complexity?
Let’s walk through this dialectic.
The Alienation of Local Power
Most people experience local government as a vague force: slow to respond, overly technical, and often invisible until it says no. Whether it’s fixing a footpath, approving a housing development, funding a youth programme, or cutting back trees, councils seem distant and unaccountable—despite being geographically close.
This is no accident. Across the world, local authorities have been hollowed out by central government control, austerity, and managerialism. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, only around 10% of public revenue is controlled locally—the lowest proportion in the OECD【¹】. In the UK, central grants have been slashed over the past decade, forcing councils to privatise, cut services, or seek revenue from regressive sources like parking fines. In the US, much local authority is ceded to police departments or captured by property interests.
The result is a kind of local disenfranchisement. We elect councillors every few years, but few citizens feel they have real influence over the budget, the priorities, or the structure of power in their own neighbourhoods.
From Bureaucracy to Belonging
Dialectical Simplicity rejects the idea that complexity is always necessary. It suggests instead that complexity often serves to obscure where power really lies. In local government, that might mean:
- Obscure budget documents no ordinary person can read
- Tokenistic consultations that ignore community input
- Unelected officials wielding more power than elected representatives
- Central government laws that pre-empt local control (e.g. zoning rules, tax caps)
So what does a simple, democratic alternative look like?
Participatory Budgeting: The Budget Belongs to the People
One answer comes from participatory budgeting (PB). Originating in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, PB gives ordinary people direct control over a portion of the municipal budget. Citizens propose and vote on community priorities—whether new parks, sewer upgrades, or social services. The process is open, face-to-face, and iterative. The result is not just better policy—it is ownership.
Studies of participatory budgeting show not only improved equity in spending (more money to poor areas), but increased civic engagement and trust【²】. Importantly, PB shows that people can deliberate about complex issues—when given the time, respect, and resources to do so.
From a dialectical simplicity perspective, participatory budgeting embodies a shift from technocratic control to relational governance: budgeting becomes a shared act of care and attention, not a black-box calculation.
Bookchin’s Libertarian Municipalism: Cities as Schools of Democracy
Murray Bookchin, the political philosopher and former Marxist who coined libertarian municipalism, took this even further. In his view, the municipality—the town, neighbourhood, ward—should become the basic unit of democracy. But only if radically restructured.
In place of representative councils dominated by party machines, Bookchin proposed directly democratic popular assemblies in every neighbourhood. These assemblies would elect recallable delegates to city-wide confederal councils—not representatives with free rein, but bound mandates that reflect the popular will. These confederated municipalities could then coordinate across regions, eventually supplanting the nation-state altogether.
This may sound utopian, but elements of this vision have been trialled. The Democratic Confederalism system in Rojava (Northern Syria) is Bookchin’s thought in action, albeit in extraordinarily difficult conditions. Closer to home, Barcelona en Comú has attempted to bring horizontalism and feminist values into urban governance in Spain.
For Dialectical Simplicity, what matters is not just the form, but the ethos. Local government must be something we do together, not something done to us.
Barriers to Simple Democracy
But why is this so hard to implement?
First, there are structural barriers: restrictive legislation, underfunding, and the overreach of national governments.
Second, there are ideological barriers: a deep suspicion of the public’s capacity to govern, and a preference for managerial “experts” over citizens’ lived experience.
Third, there are economic barriers: vested interests—real estate developers, private contractors, political donors—who benefit from keeping local government opaque and unaccountable.
Dialectical Simplicity recognises that these are not technical problems. They are political problems, and their solutions begin with a reawakening of local democratic imagination.
A Dialectical Programme for Local Government
So what might a local authority guided by Dialectical Simplicity look like?
- Neighbourhood assemblies attached to every ward or community board
- A minimum percentage of the council budget allocated to participatory budgeting
- Plain-language council documents, with visual tools and multilingual access
- Rotating citizen juries to oversee major policy decisions
- Cooperatives and community trusts supported to deliver local services, rather than outsourcing to for-profit contractors
- Democratic planning processes where local residents design, vote on, and monitor housing, transport, and public space decisions
- Publicly owned digital platforms for civic coordination—free from surveillance capitalism
This vision is not anti-expert. But it places expertise in service of the people—not above them.
What We Already Know
In every country, there are glimmers of this future.
- In Reykjavik, Iceland, the Better Reykjavik platform lets citizens submit and vote on policy proposals.
- In Taiwan, the vTaiwan platform blends online deliberation with government accountability on tech and social issues.
- In New Zealand, tools like Kāinga Ora’s urban development dashboards and community board structures offer partial openings—but lack meaningful power without greater devolution and participatory redesign.
Dialectical Simplicity reminds us that all politics begins close to home. Not with policies, but with people. With a shared meal in a school hall. With a meeting in the marae or library. With a group of neighbours realising they don’t need to wait for permission to act.
Conclusion: From Citizens to Co-Governors
Local government is not just a service delivery mechanism. It is the most immediate and malleable form of public power. To apply Dialectical Simplicity here is to recover an old truth: we can govern ourselves. But only if we choose to. Only if we ask not “who will fix this?” but “how do we fix this, together?”
It begins with the simplest of things: an open door, a shared budget, a trusted voice at the table. From these seeds, a participatory, decentralised, and democratic society can grow.
References:
- OECD (2022). Fiscal Decentralisation Database
- Wampler, B. (2012). Participatory Budgeting: Core Principles and Key Impacts. Journal of Public Deliberation
- Bookchin, M. (1995). From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship