A Bottom-Up Approach to Building Balanced Societies Together
Citizens & Societies uses a bottom-up approach to build balanced societies.
Contrary to a top down approach, where leaders decide how societies develop, a bottom-up approach starts with citizens.
This is, of course, compatible with the process of delegation of authority and responsibilities which starts with:
1. citizens, who delegate some of their authority and responsibilities to
2. elected officials, who delegate some of theirs to
3. legislative assemblies, who delegate to
4. public administrators who delegate to
5. front-line workers who serve
6. citizens.
while remembering that we are all citizens and that we are all co-owners of the societies we live in.
Direction and Guidelines
Citizens & Societies‘ motto includes the term “balanced society.” Societalogically speaking, a balanced society is a “good society” which is a society where most of our individual, group and collective actions facilitate the:
• development and societal integration of citizens
• functioning and development of their collectivities
• functioning and development of their governments
as well as compatible with the notion of freedom1 and liberty2.
This definition gives us a direction:
build balanced societies
as well as guidelines to evaluate how
our individual, group or collective actions affect our fellow citizens, our collectivities, our governments, our state of freedom and our capacity to respect the liberty of others.
This direction and these guidelines are the strength of Citizens & Societies. is that it gives directions and guidelines.
Including Citizens in the Process
Each society is different. To achieve a “balanced society” it is important that citizens be included. First because societies belong to citizens and second it increase the quality of the solutions found and speeds up the implementation process by reducing the resistance level.
1 – Freedom refers to the domain where one can be free. The size of the domain varies from one species to another and depends on the solitary or social nature of the species. Since humans are social animals, freedom is created by the collective management processes that create the conditions where citizens can be free to develop themselves as they see fit.
2 – Liberty is the actual space that we can claim to be ours. This space is dynamic since the space increases or decreases depending on the presence or absence of our fellow citizens. Liberty is “the result” of the mutual self-restraining management processes used by citizens, individually and in groups, that allow our fellow citizens to be free.