Your neighbour knocks: "The tree on your lot is cracking the shared wall." A responsible reply isn't "Thanks for the feedback," but asking: who will inspect, when, what they'll do if risk is high, how to appeal if the fix fails, and what you owe if a fix is late.
Listening without acting is theatre. Acting without limits is arbitrary. Responsibility bridges the two by turning recognition into engagement with teeth — promises you can verify, contest, and revoke.
Tronto elevates responsibility as the most politically central phase of care. She reframes democratic politics itself: not "who gets what, when, and how" (Lasswell) but "who is responsible for caring for what, when, where, and how."
Privileged irresponsibility
Why must responsibility be explicit? Because power defaults to evasion. Tronto identifies five structural "passes" that excuse people from caring:
- The protection pass. Those who protect (military, security) claim exemption from other care.
- The production pass. Those who earn claim exemption from household and community care.
- The taking-care-of-my-own pass. Those who care intensely for their own children or group claim exemption from caring about others.
- The bootstrap pass. "You should have arranged your own care through the market."
- The charity pass. "Voluntary giving is enough; no collective obligation is needed."
Corporations play the same game at scale — diffusing authority until no one is answerable — which is why Tronto calls the neoliberal state itself an "irresponsibility machine" that cranks out one standard answer: "They're your own. You're on your own." These passes are the irresponsibility machine that civic AI must short-circuit. Engagement contracts exist to make passes visible and revocable.
Core ideas
- Answerability is the unit. If no answer is required, nobody is responsible.
- Authority must match duty. No duty without the powers (budget, access, pause) to fulfil it.
- Promises over preferences. Goodwill is fragile; verifiable commitments travel.
- Two lanes. Big changes follow the full contract; small, safe-to-fail bets run in a sandbox with tighter bounds and quicker cycles.
- Institutional memory. Making responsibilities fractal — mirrored from team to agency — ensures they survive leadership changes.
The Engagement Contract (core artifact)
Every significant deployment carries a published Engagement Contract — a short, legible spec anyone can audit.
Contents (one page if possible):
- Purpose & non-purpose: Needs we serve; what is out of scope.
- Inputs & outputs: Data sources, transformations, retention; who sees what; deletion on handover.
- Rights & guardrails: Rights baseline + local rights as the threshold for relational standing — rights we won't trade; red lines (e.g., no biometric expansion).
- Service levels. Severity classes — defined through community deliberation, not prescribed by the vendor — with response windows. The contract must at minimum distinguish life-and-safety harms from lower-impact ones.
- Pause/rollback triggers. Conditions, who can invoke (PO, oversight, quorum of affected people), and duration.
- Adopt-or-explain. How we adopt Assembly outcomes or explain deviations with reasons and a remedy plan.
- Remedies. Correction, rollback, compensation. Tiered by severity: escrowed funds for the highest classes; mutual insurance pools or automatic pause for lower-severity community deployments.
- Change log. Version history with hash-chained diffs and rationales (tamper-evident).
- Contacts. Accountable person(s), term, mandate, conflicts disclosed.
Oversight with teeth
- Independent board (community + domain + legal). Can pause or veto high-impact changes; must publish reasons and declare conflicts.
- Protected budget & terms. Resists capture.
- Open docket. Anyone can file a challenge; triage is public; decisions are reasoned.
- Clawbacks & penalties. Breached promises trigger automatic remedies (escrow drawdown, withheld payment, probation).
- Public attestation. Weekly contract state and diffs are digitally signed and mirrored to a public registry.
From ideas to practice
- Translate recognition into a spec. Convert attentiveness outputs into an Engagement Contract.
- Assign a Participation Officer (PO). Task the PO with running the promise loop, tracking the ledger, and escalating.
- Wire brakes before launch. Incorporate role-based pause/rollback buttons; test them.
- Pre-fund remedies. Pre-fund escrow for compensation and rollback costs at the highest severity; mutual insurance pools or automatic pause for lower tiers — tier by impact, not organisational form.
- Tie payment to proof. Keep vendor pay linked to promise delivery — SLA adherence and adopt-or-explain rate — not raw engagement.
- Run adopt-or-explain. Integrate Assembly outputs or publish a reasoned deviation + remedy.
- Attest & publish. Use independent audits to compare behaviour to contract; hash the diffs to a public mirror.
- Handover or shutdown. Hand off with full records when scope ends — or trust breaks — or switch off gracefully.
Flood-bot story: Part II
After the flood, the city's flood-bot must pay people on time and fix mistakes.
- Contract. Contract promises livelihood cases decided in 48h; pause if denials spike >25% in any district; rollback if appeals on a rule exceed 20%.
- Owner. A named PO publishes the obligation ledger and signs weekly attestations.
- Adopt-or-explain. The Assembly endorsed multiple proofs of residence. The team adopts three (utility bill, employer letter, neighbour attestations) and explains excluding bank statements (exclusion risk), offering a kiosk-notarized sworn statement as remedy.
- Pause. Night-shift district shows 31% denials in 24h — Elena's claim among them, rejected for lacking a paper lease. The oversight board hits pause; the older "30-day proof" rule rolls back; emergency disbursements use a reversible default.
- Remedies. Wrongly denied claims get automatic compensation (late fee + apology + fast-track). Escrow funds claims the same day.
- Handover clause. The contract stipulates a strict six-week sunset and handover: records and models transfer to the housing office; the switch-off is logged; the ledger is archived. The terms are now set. Execution comes when the clock runs out.
What could go wrong
- Scope creep. Bot starts "screening fraud" unrelated to relief. Fix: Enforce outer bounds; require fresh authority for scope changes.
- Responsibility ping-pong. Teams blame each other. Fix: Single named owner per promise; PO escalates stalled dependencies.
- Paper commitments. PDFs with no force. Fix: Escrow, clawbacks, attestation and audit triggers wired before launch.
- Unfunded mandates. Duties without budget. Fix: Block go-live unless authority and funding match duty.
- Quiet rollbacks. Rules change without notice. Fix: Mandatory public diffs; unlogged changes are invalid.
- Escrow gates out the grassroots. Only well-funded actors can post bonds, re-centralising AI. Fix: Tier liability by severity; mutual insurance for community deployments; pause triggers replace escrow where financial stakes are low.
Interfaces with other packs
- From Attentiveness (Pack 1): who/what/why arrives with rights flags and uncertainties.
- To Competence (Pack 3): responsibility turns needs into specs, SLAs, and brakes — safe-to-fail by default.
- To Responsiveness (Pack 4): remedies, rollbacks, and evals are routine; repair is part of delivery.
- To Solidarity (Pack 5): portability and exit rights (detailed in Pack 5) are referenced in every contract.
- To Symbiosis (Pack 6): bounded scopes, handover, and shutdown are success criteria.
A closing image: the signed work order
Picture a work order by the door: what will be fixed, by whom, by when; how to check the work; who to call if it fails. The signature is legible — and so is the penalty for not showing up. In other words, teach our systems to post their work orders, sign them, and honour them.