06/08/2024
As well as being very well organised, I found The Good Lobby Summer Academy in Bilbao a fascinating and stimulating event. It was energising to meet so many people motivated by examining further, and trying to improve, the processes around the influencing of public policy.
It seems to me that two threads were explored throughout the days spent together. Two threads that are related but separate and, in my view, need to be kept more separate than, at times, they seemed to be.
The first thread concerns what I shall call ‘good lobbying’. By this I mean greater transparency around lobbying efforts by all parties – including NGOs – and some set of rules that allow for such transparency to emerge.
We know that one of the weaknesses of our political systems is our inability to separate money from influence. Realistically, such a separation will never totally happen. It has been a feature of our societies since time immemorial. It is part of human nature.
Yet, it is also true that we have made significant progress over the years, decades and centuries. The time when only the wealthy (aristocracy and landowners) had an institutionalised voice are largely gone. Modern digital technologies, despite all their faults, have given a voice to many. Mounting influencing campaigns of all sorts is, today, much easier and more possible for more people and groups than it was only a couple of decades ago.
Yet, influencing activities still continue in the shadows; shielded from the sanitising effect of being in full sunshine. Here again, progress has been made though there is much still to improve upon. Of course, defining rules of the game is, as always, a challenge. And we should expect any rules to be gamed whenever possible.
That said, there are opportunities for improvement and The Good Lobby is doing important work in this regard.
The second thread that emerged throughout the Academy was the idea of ‘lobbying for good’. This, in my view, is quite different from ‘good lobbying’ as defined above.
Lobbying for good implies some sort of position being taken as to what constitutes ‘good’ for society. As we know, and as we should welcome, on that there will be endlessly different views. Views that need to be debated in the public sphere and from which some kind of broadly acceptable social mores will emerge.
In that regard I would caution about trying to impose one’s own personal views and judgements as to what constitutes the public good. That takes us into the province of populists and demagogues who preach that they, and only they, know what is good for ‘the people’.
I suggest that it is vitally important that these two different threads are kept separate. Why?
If efforts to increase transparency in lobbying and influencing become co-mingled with personal judgements on what constitutes ‘lobbying for good’, it will lead many to resist transparency initiatives because they feel they will be judged on whether what they are lobbying for is ‘good’ or not. In other words, ‘lobbying for good’ efforts risk slowing down progress on ‘good lobbying’ if the two are seen to travel together.
Much better to focus on lobbying transparency – where there is much lifting still to be done – and keep that separate from the more difficult, more contentious discussion of what constitutes the public good. After all, until we get some more transparency, it will remain difficult to move to a discussion about lobbying content.
Two threads. Both important. But to be kept separate if one is not to undermine the other.
Written by Joe Zammit Lucia