Designing Democracy: third way political thought, public design, and the politics of uncertainty in Britain’s long 1990s

Britain has recently emerged as a global leader in public design, a creative approach to governance in which trained designers, civil servants, and citizens collaborate. This article traces the emergence of public design in Britain by returning to third way political thought. Focusing on the long 1990s (the late 1980s to early 2000s), the article shows how left critics articulated a new political epistemology centred on uncertainty and unpredictability. The new foundation challenged Thatcherism and left progressive teleology alike. Throughout the 1990s, this epistemology informed a conceptual and practical rethinking of democracy in which questions about public participation and new conceptions of state-civil society relations were taken up in three distinct themes: reflexive modernisation, communitarianism, and associationalism. As the broader third way democratic thought narrowed to questions of policy evidence and minor institutional experiments, public design inherited earlier political experimentation, albeit in diminished form. This solidification of third way democratic thought around a simpler set of narratives—both structural and informational—led to its survival beyond New Labour. Although public design represents only one possibility of implementing third way political experiments among many other roads not taken, it highlights a set of core problems of liberal democratic modernity.