From the outside, many lycées in France are impressive: they tend to be modern buildings, perhaps self-consciously architectural but at least placing education in the present, even linking it with someone's idea of the future. But inside, lycées lack soul. This is partly because decisions about school buildings, like so much else in France, come from the top down, and partly because a pupil will only attend a lycée for three years (ages 15-18). Since the sole object of being there is to get through the baccalauréat, no effort is made to forge that lifelong bond which turns a concrete bunker into an alma mater.
So three years ago, a French region decided to replace top-down decision-making for its 93 lycées with participative budgets. The idea is simple. Everyone concerned with a particular school is invited to two meetings. At the first meeting, having had the principles explained to them, smaller groups of 20 discuss ways the school—not the quality of the education—might be improved. Their suggestions, formalised into projects, are noted by regional administrators, who then calculate the cost of each. At the second meeting, their figures are announced. Now comes the key part, which distinguishes this exercise from purely consultative forms of participation: each person is given ten votes to cast as he or she wants, weighing up real cost against likely benefit, learning on the way that public finance follows the same rules as household budgets. The votes establish a list of priorities, which the region, when it ratifies the money, promises to respect. Last year, each lycée's top three projects received finance—292 projects in total at a cost of €10m, averaging €34,000 per project. Most are now in place, so at this year's meetings, everyone sees the new minibus, the redecorated art room or the publishing facility for school authors and would-be journalists. This keeps pride and satisfaction high, and ensures further involvement, not only because the buildings and the life within them is improved, but because people suddenly become alive to la chose publique.
But is this any more than a quirky provincial school experiment? Yes, because the region in question is Poitou-Charentes and the driving force behind the scheme is the region's president, Ségolène Royal, favourite in some polls to become president of France in May. She hopes to repeat in the relative macrocosm of her country what she has done in the relative microcosm of her region.
Participative democracy is not new: as Paul Skidmore wrote in last month's Prospect, the idea has been working successfully for several years in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, not well known in Britain but a Mecca for all those in France who feel unrepresented by representative democracy. The crucial difference with participative budgets is that administrators trust ordinary people to make intelligent choices, a clear break with current French practice—indeed, it is remarkable that in this allocation of public money, many of the decision-takers are below voting age. Normally, decisions are the monopoly of graduates of the elite school of administration, for the key to republican decision-making is l'intérêt général—something thought (and taught) to be beyond the discernment of le peuple, who, like children, are generally kept at arm's length when anything important is discussed. The referendum on Europe is held up as an example of what happens when this rule is broken; that is why so many of Royal's Socialist party peers in Paris have been dragging their feet over her candidacy: they are deeply suspicious of what they scathingly call her "gadget politics."
More scorn was thrown at Royal by these same socialist "friends" when she recently reaffirmed her long-held belief in citizens' juries acting as watchdogs over the nation's elected representatives. That goes further than the people's juries in, say, Seville or Tuscany, which are mainly consultative. Royal sees participative democracy as a way to regenerate enthusiasm for representative democracy, rather than to replace it. She is setting up a foundation to promote participative democracy, and has said that by the end of her mandate in Poitou-Charentes, 10 per cent of the regional budget must be decided by the people.
But there are, as Royal is well aware, enormous dangers: participative democracy can too easily be hijacked by the vociferous few, becoming meat for populist and extremist politicians. More immediately, it sidelines existing decision-makers; headteachers, who used to decide where the school's money went, obstruct these participatory budget meetings in any way they can. That resistance from incumbent decision-makers will only increase when the idea is transposed to national level. Another obstacle is that this form of democracy is not French—a problem that should not be underestimated in a country proud of having created a system of government that is admired and copied throughout the world. Will today's Frenchman really accept political ideas that have been forged, essentially, in the third world? Nevertheless, Royal is right and astute to harness the discontent in France, which will otherwise seek to unseat her, or at least work against her, if she becomes president. What better place to start than schools, a captive community approaching their first vote?
