A qualm about consensus

How Mandorla Cohousing will look when it is built in 2016

In my last blog, I spelled out some of the plusses and minuses of consensus, as I see them. I ended by saying that none of the minuses that I have come across in my reading quite hit the mark, in relation to my experience with Mandorla Cohousing. In this blog, I’d like to explain the main difficulty that I have come across.

That difficulty has to do with the nature of consent. In a formal consensus procedure, as I understand it, the consent of everyone involved is sought, whether given actively, or by standing aside. Now, that seems to me unnecessary. I trust my fellow members. We give issues that matter space on the agenda of our monthly meetings for several meetings before trying to decide. We have opportunities to challenge and change decisions in subsequent meetings.

The result is that I would have been quite content had I not been present, whenever the cohousing group taken a decision. As it happens, I think I’ve been fine with pretty much every decision, but I would make the same point even if I had not.

Consent, I have concluded, is important, but it does not need to be given afresh for every decision. I gave my consent when I became a full member of the group, and my experience over the last three years has reinforced that feeling.

I’m not saying that my presence was useless. The food is always excellent, and I may have contributed to the discussion, or helped it along if I was the chair, and I did my job well. But I am saying that if we had not adopted a consensus model, we might have felt more able to delegate more tasks to small working groups, and then to trust them to decide and act.

I’ve been thinking a lot about decision-making recently. There are a couple of aspects that I think are vital: building common ground between people; and looking for creative solutions that give all parties as much as possible of what they want. I don’t think consensus procedures are explicit about how to do this. I’ll make some suggestions on how I go about both aspects next time.

Advertisement

The Beginners Guide to Consent

The following came round an email list I lurk on, so I visited the website and am very glad I did so. Take a look yourselves. I’d redcommend the interview with Oxford based activist and facilitator Clare Cochrane. Any way back to the main business of this post:

“The Beginners Guide to Consent is a zine on consent, consensus and collaboration. Deadline 17 June 2013.

Text (max 150 words) & image submissions are welcomed in response to these questions or related topics:

• What is missing from current definitions of consent?
• How can agreement be produced or engineered? What about doubt?
• How does sexual consent relate to democratic decision-making?
• Beyond “yes means yes”: what would a radical theory of consent look like?

Submissions will be exhibited at News From Nowhere at V2 Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam during July 2013. They will be democratically edited into a series of print editions during workshops at the exhibition, and published online.”

I’d love to think that Rhizome would have something to say. But judging by how little we’re posting on our own blog nowadays, I have a feeling we might miss that deadline!

Matthew