Two exciting events concerning cooperation have transpired in the last three weeks: The Organization of African Unity (OAU), now called the African Union (AU), celebrated its golden jubilee and Tanzania introduced a draft for a new constitution. While these two events are grounded in different contexts, they are both a result of cooperation.
This post will define the word “cooperation” and take a deeper look at the differences between cooperation for public benefits versus cooperation for private benefits. In lieu of challenges raised in recent discussions about both the OAU golden jubilee and Tanzania’s draft constitution, this post will also suggest how information is a key driver of cooperation, particularly of cooperation for public benefits.
Definition of cooperation
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word “cooperation” is a noun meaning “the action of cooperating” or “the association of persons for common benefit”.
The verb “to cooperate” means “to act or work together with another or others” or “to associate with another or others for mutual benefit”.
Drawing from this definition, we can simplify the meaning of cooperation as being “the act of working together”. This implies that there is more than one interest at stake: One person or group meets another person or group for the specific reason of sharing their respective interests. There may be more than two people or groups coming together. The groups coming together yields some kind of value, otherwise they would not cooperate and would continue doing their respective works individually.
What is this value? The answer to this depends on whether the cooperation is public or private.
Public versus private cooperation
For the purposes of this post, we discuss “value” as something that has a benefit, a positive externality, or something good, to those who receive the value. This value can be physical (you could hold it in your hands, such as paper or metal) or something metaphysical (you know you have it, but it is invisible, such as kindness or favor).
The value that is derived from cooperation is dependent on whether the cooperation is public or private.
Public cooperation creates value for the public. Given that the word “public” is today a function of nation statehood, public cooperation is meant to create value that all citizens can enjoy, regardless of their ethnicity, age, gender or skills. As a result, cooperation for public benefit tends to align with the goods and services that governments are designed to create, guarantee and promote.
Private cooperation creates value only for the stakeholders who come together to cooperate. The terms of this kind of cooperation do not necessarily align with government goods and services. They are not restricted to any specific design of cooperation. It is completely up to the stakeholders to decide how the cooperation will take place. An example of this type of cooperation is business in the private market: An enterprising individual may decide to work with another enterprising individual to achieve more sales and benefit at a higher rate than they would if they worked individually. In fact, you enter into private cooperation every time you buy ice cream: The vendor tells you he has the ice cream you want and can give it to you for a price; you see it and agree to the price; you provide the vendor with money that gets you the ice cream in exchange. Another ice cream vendor somewhere else may sell you the same ice cream at a different price, and between the ice cream vendors, that is business as usual.
This is not so in the case of public cooperation. Governments know and indeed borrow each others’ practices because public benefits are in fact much more difficult to provide than ice cream. There are more people to provide for and the costs cannot discriminate against any one individual. One good provided to one person (eg: safety or water) must not diminish the good such that another person cannot enjoy it at the same time.
Both the African Union and the new Tanzanian constitution are based on forms of public cooperation. That is, they are both meant to result in value for citizens at large. In the case of the African Union, the stakeholders are African states and their people. The people’s representatives cooperate based on shared interests, including national as well as international interests. According to the AU website, one of the goals of the original OAU were “to coordinate and intensify cooperation for development”.
In the case of the Tanzanian constitution, the stakeholders are Tanzanians themselves, represented by a commission that has been responsible for collecting their views. The shared interest in this cooperation is creating a document that preserves all citizens’ well-being.
However, recent discussions by Vijana FM authors have raised pertinent challenges in the cooperation resulting in the AU and the Tanzanian constitution.
On the AU, one Vijana FM author recently covered the golden jubilee celebrations in Addis Ababa. In terms of the AU voicing common concerns, the author wrote on a recent post: “The AU appears unable to articulate an African position on the most pressing challenges facing the continent and beyond.”
On the Tanzanian constitution, another Vijana FM author wrote a review of the draft released last week. Comparing constitutional recommendations with Afribarometer data, this author ended their review with the following line: “One thing we can all agree that is that it still needs several iterations before it can truly be the People’s Constitution.”
From both commentaries, one thing becomes clear about the AU, the Tanzanian constitution and other forms of public cooperation: Perfect public cooperation implies that all information involved in the planning, execution and assessment of the cooperation is available and transparent.
The significance of information
Economists have long-suggested that the availability information is a key variable in decision-making. The more information there is, the closer a decision can be to the optimal outcome. Similarly, the less information there is, the farther away the decision will be from an outcome that is best for all stakeholders involved.
In both cases – the AU and the Tanzanian constitution – information is being cited as a key driver of success. Without understanding what the African position is – that is, what each state thinks about a particular issue – how will the AU begin to articulate this position? Without understanding what Tanzanians think about a particular policy, how will the constitution articulate a coherent position on the policy?
There is a difference between these two cases, however. The Tanzanian constitution was a result of widespread consultation (clocking to the tune of more than 2,500 football matches according to this author), with both citizens and their representatives. The constitution review commission also consulted many past leaders, to understand their perspectives and advice. This is an important step that seems absent in today’s AU. While the OAU was a cooperation between many states seeking a common interest – independence and development – today states have diverging interests that are difficult to collate (listen to the views of a former OAU Secretary General here).
Suggested forms of information-sharing
In order to make information available and transparent, sustainable infrastructures need to be put in place for stakeholders to contribute and review bits of data, however big or small or however composed.
There are three ways in which institutions of public cooperation, including the AU and the Tanzanian Constitution Review Commission, can create these sustainable information infrastructures:
1. Gather short, quantitative pieces of data
When it comes to public activity, we often hear about the collection of quantitative data in the form of polls. These are usually closed-ended questions (eg: A choice between yes/no or names of people you would vote for) that are disseminated across popular and easily-accessible forms of communication. Feeding the polls is usually just as easy. In the context of Tanzania and many African countries, mobile devices are a great medium through which polls can be conducted. Mobile service providers and their friends are also becoming increasingly adept to gathering and reporting on valuable data in creative ways. If such a system were utilized in the interest of the AU, or the Tanzanian Constitution Review, or any other form of public cooperation for that matter, it may help in getting quick, repeatable feedback on closed-ended topics.
2. Gather nitty, gritty, qualitative chunks of data
Of course, life is not all about closed-ended topics. People tend to also have opinions, feelings and sentiments that are open-ended (eg: feelings towards climate change or corruption). The challenge with qualitative data is being able to store, re-read and make conclusions out of it. As challenging as this may be, the nitty gritty of peoples’ thoughts could inform public cooperation just as significantly as quantitative data. TV or radio seem like a strong medium for collecting qualitative data. While TV has the added advantage of seeing expression, which can influence how a comment is received, the audio functionality of both TV and radio allows people to literally listening to one another. Listening can save copious amounts of time and paper.
3. Show people what their thoughts are
Collecting data, drawing conclusions and then just sitting on the conclusions is no fun. In order to know whether a conclusion makes sense to others, an important step is opening up and sharing the conclusion. It is also good etiquette to involve people who contributed data in the bigger picture so they have a sense of where their data stood next to others. Depending on what form the data takes, the media is a powerful channel through which to showcase data back to people. Showcasing this information helps to build trust in public cooperation because whether some people’s views get implemented or not, the expectation that a view will be heard and considered goes a long way.
In order for institutions of public cooperation to reach optimal performance, these 3 suggestions need to be perfectly set up. We cannot expect a perfect world (otherwise posts like this would cease to exist), but we can strive for one.
Striving for perfect public cooperation implies striving for information transparency. And information transparency requires that different players – people who govern, people who mediate, and people themselves – make an effort to express themselves and ask questions where needed. Otherwise, without transparency, cooperation is really just a private gig.
Further reading:
A great synthesis piece AK.
In today’s world, information is your strongest capital. Setting up sustainable and dynamic information infrastructure, as your prescribe is exactly the direction Tanzania needs to take.
Safi kabisa hii.
Thanks for reading, Constantine. Considering that perfect information is difficult to achieve, will there always be some information lacking, even in public institutions? If so, is it worth thinking of government as a private institution?