Relational Culture: Beyond Prefigurative Politics

Abstract

Social movements have been identified as a source of learning for collaborative governance network models, prefiguring “integrative governance” through their commitment to radical democracy. The nonprofit training institute Relational Uprising works directly with social movements and finds that despite their shared values and struggles, most movements are deeply challenged with sustaining these radical commitments within their own group interactions over time. Within movement communities, a culture of trusting relationships is needed to ensure resilience to the complexities of diversity and interdependency, without collapsing into suspicion, exclusion, and power struggles. Relational Uprising offers movements 1) a deconstruction of meta-narratives and embodied social behaviors they unwittingly inherit from the dominant culture; and 2) practices for generating a relational culture, which is characterized by the presence of key relational resources: sensitivity to connection, interdependence, and sustained inclusion. In this essay, we offer an explanation of our Relational Culture training framework and explore strengths and challenges within a specific movement example. We conclude that movements need a commitment to and a strategy for 1) uprooting dominant cultural values and behaviors and 2) replacing them with a relational culture that centers and protects relationships. Ultimately the Relational Culture framework helps movements undertake an ontological shift, which is necessary to avoid the inevitable pitfalls of operating within the habits and habitat of the dominant culture.