The Dependent: The 5th Participant Role [Reference Article]
Note: “Reference Articles” are more technical and provide nuanced detail on concepts that would disrupt the flow if I had to explain them every time. They are also evolving documents and may include half-baked ideas or notes for future development.
Normally, people think of “participatory governance” as being governance in which those affected get a say in defining what the rules are (e.g. it’s one of the eight design principles in Ostrom’s model).
But I think we need to make a different kind of distinction. And it’s one that is upstream of “who is affected,” because a lot of people are usually affected.
The solution is to separate “a person” from “the role they fill” or “the perspective they take.” In many cases, one person may only ever fill one particular role, in which case forcing the distinction in that situation may not be needed, but in general it allows us to understand collaborative systems with a lot more precision.
I’ve written previously about the four participant roles1 which is an important model for understanding what I mean by “participant navigability” and how I think of “participants being the primary customers of theory.”
But only recently I realized that there needs to be a fifth role: the dependent.
Dependent: The participant who is protected by the rule; i.e. they would be negatively impacted if the rule failed to do its job. The dependent is NOT the same as the agent, though in practice they may simultaneously enacted by one person (as any roles could be).
For example, you could think of a student in a classroom who is protected by a “no-bullying” rule. Since the specific distinctions matter, the point is that the child in this scenario is not the agent, i.e. the person who is making the decision to comply or defy the rule, but the person whom the rule protects.
So, Who is Affected?
Now, in most approaches the dependent is equated with the agent, but I think that is a mistake. Or at least it’s a mistake to not give yourself the option of making the distinction.
Here is how the agent is defined: The participant to whom a rule applies and who bears the obligation to follow it, primarily concerned with whether the rule is intelligible, fair, and feasible.
The difference is the agent bears the felt sense of obligation, i.e. is the focus of the structure’s normative force, but the dependent is downstream of that role. They are not an active participant, by my definition, but they are a participant nonetheless.
Making this distinction allows us to see that the scope of “participatory governance” must at some point, either consciously or practically, be constrained.
This is because there could be A LOT of dependents for a given rule. Whenever we start talking about “impacts” we open up a pandora’s box of cascading effects the boundaries of which should probably be specified.
What the dependent role does is allow us to answer a question like, “who is affected” by a rule or a governance system in a much more deliberate and useful way.
What the Distinction Helps Us Do
The first thing this distinction helps us do is recognize how “representative government” is itself a natural and necessary description of how things work. Whether you want them to or not. This is because the dependent role is NOT the one making the decisions to follow the rule (by definition)—the agent is.
Though in practice agent and dependent may be mixed and conflated (i.e. an agent is ALSO a dependent), this is not ALWAYS the case. And as such, a grammar based on that system is limited in its explanatory power.
Again, it’s not that we always need to force this level of distinction—I prefer to think of them as nested definitions, which give us optionality without taking away anything. Meaning, we can conceptualize a few permutations without contradiction:
When I need to talk about BOTH authors and enforcers (and maybe even analysts), or I just want to convey something like, “in a typical collaborative system, the people who care about stewarding the rule or regime,” I tend to use the term “official” as an umbrella.
When I am talking about BOTH agents and dependents, or just that general side of the conventional equation, I use the label “citizen” though I am not obliged to do so.
Meaning, with finer distinctions at our disposal, we can be reasonably clear in our language without having to resort to pedantism.
Note: Remember that a single person can fill multiple participant “roles” at any given time. That is, these roles are NOT equal to a person, but are more like a position in a sport. One individual can shift between being an offensive player to a defensive player at a moment’s notice, and the same is true of participants in most (but not all) systems. So it may be that I feel a tension (as dependent) and I encode a rule because I want the right to expect something from someone (as author), and in doing so, I agree to follow it myself (as agent) and agree to support others in calling them out if need be (as enforcer). And if it doesn’t work, I may need to look at the situation again to see why (as analyst).