What if most of the heavy lifting to keep us healthy and get us through tough times was done by civil society? Not the organisations of civil society, but the conversations, mutual aid and moral order we naturally create in our day to day interactions. What if civil society was the primary catalyst for social change? And what if civil society is at the heart of effective responses to natural disasters and pandemics? What would this mean for the state, services, and democracy?

Each Thursday, I talk on the Ratio Talks podcast with someone who has thought more about these issues than me, or reflect on the work of people who have given their lives to this way of thinking.

My starting point is this paper. It will get updated as I learn.

The series starts with the co-curator of the last series of the Ratio Talks podcast on community power, Pritpal S. Tamber. In this first podcast, Pritpal asks me about the paper sitting at the heart of this Substack, about the balance between civil society and state, and about the potential for a relational social policy.

You can hear in his voice that he is interested, that he sees potential in the ideas, but that they are a long way from being battened down.

If the conversation captures your imagination, check in here for another reflection next Thursday or/and subscribe to my Substack Relational Social Policy .

Show Notes

In my conversation with Pritpal we refer to:

* Relational Social Policy Paper, the basis of the new Ratio Talks series

* The early study Bringing Everything I Am Into One Place that led to the establishment of Ratio and the work described in the podcast

* Rebeca Sandu ‘s series of published papers on how a one-to-one relationship, independent of, or over and above any intervention, makes a difference to health. They are summarised in an overview called Relational Worker

* Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s book The Upswing, first published in 2020 is available from all good bookshops

* Aron Antonovsky’s work on how a sense of coherence about life contributed to better health. This idea is developed in the 1979 book Health, Stress and Coping

* Jürgen Habermas’s work has had a strong influence on my ideas. It is a wide opus but James Gordon Finlayson’s Habermas: A Very Short Introduction is a good place to start.

* Pro-bono Economics produced a valuable if narrow perspective on civil society and its economic value in Unleashing the Power of Civil Society in 2023

* The Lancet Commission on the Value of Death provides a good illustration of the effects of an imbalance between civil society and state, and a good summary of Allan Kellehear’s work on how civil society does 95 per cent of the support in the last years of life, and after death.

* Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster was published in 2009.

Subscribe to Ratio’s Newsletter here and find out more about Pritpal S Tamber’s work here.

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