Engage effectively or not at all

September 10, 2009 by Sam McLean
Filed under: Methods, Public Policy 

Over the last decade, public consultations have become an integral part of public policy in the UK. With the emergence of the ‘empowerment agenda’ the pressure on local public services to involve local citizens and communities in their decision-making has continued to increase. Engaging and involving citizens in local decision-making is no longer the preserve of progressive, forward-thinking government departments or public services but a statutory duty.

Situating the voices of citizen at the heart of public policy decision-making is something all public consultation and engagement should aspire to. When designed and delivered effectively, public engagement should harness and galvanise the potential and confidence of citizens and communities to solve their own problems.

Public engagement should deliver both de facto power (real power to influence change) and subjective power (increased sense of personal efficacy) – see my report Activating Empowerment (2009). This is rooted in the real demands of citizens themselves who want greater capacity to influence and actively shape their lived environment. The latest Citizenship Survey data shows that 79% of citizens consider it very important to have real influence over local decisions. The problem is that this civic energy (i.e. the desire for influence) is not been being harnessed. Indeed, the new Place Survey data shows only 22% of citizens feel they can actually influence decisions affecting the UK.

This cannot be differentiated from the way most public services tend to view public engagement and consultation. Rather than viewing it as a process of exchange in which power is redistributed from public services to citizen, public engagement is all to often viewed as an end in itself. When public engagement processes fail to ‘reward’ engagement with real decision-making capacity (a) the public consultation process is diminished (b) it deepens public cynicism and (c) devalues public engagement methods.

For the braver public services committed to redistributing power and influence to citizens the challenge is how to tackle its unequal distribution. David Halpern – Director of Research at the Institute for Government – makes this point very clearly:

“It is said that ‘liberty is power cut into small pieces’, but the pieces are by no means evenly distributed in the Britain of today, and on some measures have become less so. While levels of voting may have fallen modestly, levels of alternative political engagement have risen dramatically. These activities are strongly skewed to the more affluent and more educated”

In the UK today, one in five people have absolutely no engagement in political life at all and this minority is overwhelmingly dominated by citizens most lacking in financial and social capital. As Halpern rightly argues, the signs are that this gap is only going to increase in the future. This threatens the representative of our democratic institutions and points to the failure of public consultations (as they stand and are often carried out) to provide more than a talk-shop for citizens who already recognise and actualise their capacity to influence change.

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Comments

5 Comments on Engage effectively or not at all

  1. David Wilcox on Tue, 15th Sep 2009 11:23 am

    2. Very well said, Sam!
    After working on and off around consultation, participation engagement, empowerment etc for 30 years I remain committed to the ideal, but pretty cynical about the potential for achievements to meet the rhetoric under current practice. My colleague Drew Mackie put it well in an article “Dancing while standing still” http://www.partnerships.org.uk/articles/still.htm . It was written a few years back, but I don’t think much has changed.
    It’s really difficult for power-holding agencies to engage/empower effectively.
    First, why give up control in a culture where messy, risky processes are unlikely to be rewarded?
    Second, why do that when, in order to deliver on the results of an engagement process, you have to get other partners lined up to deliver on results they may not have anticipated?
    There are, of course, good examples of effective engagement … particularly if all interests in the project/programme work together from the start in a collaborative spirit, using a mix of methods, with mutual trust.
    The problem is, you can’t bottle the essence of that in good practice guides. It’s very much down to the commitment of people in the power-holding agencies, and a supportive culture. Ultimately engagement is about relationships, not methods, and as we know from our social lives that takes time and maybe some passion too.
    So I’m afraid turkeys and Christmas does come to mind.
    I don’t want to appear a techo-optimist, but I think we can take some lessons from what’s happened as consumer-customers use online system to review and compare products and services, and challenge the complacency of those providing them.
    I was at a meeting recently about youth engagement, when someone remarked that the boundaries between participation (respond to what we offer), volunteering (give your time to us), and activism (follow your own agenda) are blurring.
    If people don’t like the participation or volunteering offer, they’ll develop their own.
    I’m not sure how long it will be possible to continue to “plan” participation/engagement processes in which consultants take stakeholders around a previously designed course, to some uncertain goal.
    I do hope this RSA project is going to give us a fresh perspective. I like “Citizen Power”. Just not sure how well it sits with “The Public Participation Project”.

  2. Matt Grist on Thu, 17th Sep 2009 9:54 am

    3. Excellent post Sam. I agree entirely. Pointless public engagement as a statutory procedure with no influence is deeply self-defeating and corrodes public faith in democratic processes more generally. For example, I used to live in Wapping. TFL were going to upgrade the East London Line. They did a consultation with residents over whether they (the residents) wanted the line kept open while work was carried out. Residents (not surprisingly) overwhelmingly wanted the line kept open. But the final decision was to close the line. What was the point of the consultative exercise? When it was run it felt like we were deciding as residents what would be done. But we weren’t. This kind of thing just leaves people angry and cynical as you say.

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