Community dock: a new policy approach for altering institutions

Abstract

When community currencies (CCs) are introduced to activate local economy and community, it is vital to induce local residents to positively participate in CCs. To support spontaneous community development more effectively, we propose a new policy approach named “community dock (CD)” in which community is conceived as an association of not only local residents, but also various organizations, companies and local government. CD is a synthetic method of empowerment evaluation and improvement by which research groups periodically conduct comprehensive checkups to local socioeconomy and subjective satisfactions of residents, and encourage communities to observe the outcomes of such checkups, to evaluate and solve the shared problems by themselves. It is designed as a self-support tool for integrative development of social capitals in local communities. CD is composed of the following four phases: (1) analysis and diagnosis of current performance of socioeconomies of the community, (2) self-estimation on the performance of the community and self-reflection their own internal rules of CC participants, (3) self-alternation of their frames of cognitions, motives, values and norms of CC participants, (4) change of properties of CCs as platform media. The loop of CD is subsumed by media design of CCs. After sufficient times of repetitions of CD, external rules of CCs as platform media can be redesigned to fit the altered internal rules of participants and attain the initial goals effectively. Media design of CCs is situated on the upper level of CD in the whole picture of evolutionist institutional design.