MORE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN MALAYSIA

What could the Anwar’s administration do to harness the power of the people to create a better society?

The recently unveiled budget proves the strong commitment that the Anwar administration is showing towards equity and social justice, including attempts at mitigating economic challenges faced not only by the bottom forty B40 but also by the middle class.

Yet despite a string of progressive policies, the new administration is failing at harnessing the untapped potential of civic engagement that, if enhanced, could create cohesion, unity while also bring people closer to the decision making.

We also should not forget how volunteerism, a key driver of civic engagement, can itself be a leadership booster to help citizens, including youths, to strengthen their skills, knowledge and attitudes.

As I wrote already in the past for this column, Malaysia does not lack initiatives at local level but instead what is weak is an overall strategy to promote civic engagement as a tool for national development and unity.

Small nations and big nations alike, from Singapore to USA to Australia, have been building, over the years, a strong volunteering infrastructure that is basically made up by policies, strategies, legislations, schemes and local and national bodies promoting volunteerism.

For example, Australia just had its National Volunteering Conference where a new 10-year National Volunteering Strategy has been launched.

The document has a simple but wonderful vision: “volunteering is the heart of Australian communities”.

Nothing more than this statement could exemplify the crucial role that volunteerism can have locally, truly transforming peoples ‘lives and not only on the side of the beneficiaries.

Some of the pillars of this strategy, the outcome of an extensive and inclusive bottom-up exercise that involved hundreds and hundreds of persons along the last few years, is centered on the importance of investing in the volunteering experience itself, valuing the volunteers as social agents of change.

It is also about upholding volunteering standards, benchmarks that Australia volunteering ecosystem has been implementing since 2015.

We are referring to key quality principles to ensure that organizations mobilizing volunteers are prepared and do their outmost to ensure that volunteering is not only impactful for local communities or for solving local problems but also becomes a life changing experience for the volunteer themselves.

The new strategy is attaches great importance on ensuring that the political leadership of the nation not only at federal level but also at provincial ones and high-ranking civil service officials can also become champions of volunteerism.

Getting not only their “buy-in” but also having them enthusiastically support initiatives and with them, funding, for the promotion and recognition of volunteerism is also essential.

Let’s not forget that in his quest to make the civil service more efficient and transparent and more diverse, Mr. Anwar should allow also people to have a major voice in the way decisions are made.

Here I am not referring to holding local elections but perhaps exactly this unusual aspect of Malaysian democracy, as I have already written, can become an opportunity to foster a form of deliberative governance based on allowing citizen, especially locally, to exercise new decision-making powers.

Having a new duty to engage and consult with them could be a first step towards a major rethinking of the social contract that could also give people tools to aggregate, listen to each other and formulate local decisions.

Volunteerism can be instrumental in this ambitious process of re-building, in a bottom-up fashion, the ways good governance is enacted.

In both 2018 and 2022 editions of the State of the World Volunteering Report, the flagship publication of United Nations Volunteers, the focus is on how volunteerism can facilitate and enable an opening of the governance process.

People who volunteer and not only through direct service delivery but also through participation in the public life and through campaigning, have an opportunity to gain a unique perspective of local problems. Moreover, they have, in most of the cases, also the solutions to them.

The Cities of Service movement, born in the USA but spreading over the world, is trying to embed volunteerism at the center of local governance.

Many city administrations, small and big alike, are even going to the extents of hiring a civic engagement director to help coordinating how volunteerism can spread and do its part in solving the most tangible issues faced by them.

While not a panacea, volunteerism, if it is well-coordinated and complementary to the governments’ efforts, can really make the difference by also offering ownership to the people.

In Singapore volunteerism is at the center of a major vision to create a more cohesive and united nation and it should be seen in a civic engagement continuum that also involves periodic interactions and consultations between the government and the citizenry.

All these are reasons for the Government of Malaysia to think about volunteerism in a strategic way, working with the states and civil society to lay the foundations for a vibrant and sustainable volunteering ecosystem throughout the nation.

The Author writes on civic engagement, youth development, the SDGs, human rights and regional integration in the context of Asia Pacific.