MEMORANDUM BY DR SUE GOSS, DIRECTOR OF
PUBLIC SERVICES DEVELOPMENT OFFICE FOR PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
SUMMARY
I want in my evidence to make the following
points;
(1) There is considerable learning and innovation
currently underway across the public sector at local leveladding
to but not displacing conventional approaches.
(2) There is now considerable "good
practice" and huge amounts of guidance about good practiceif
managers or civil servants choose to learn about it.
(3) However, public managers have not yet
developed a conceptual framework or a vocabulary that enables
them to "sort through" the wide range of methods and
decide how to match method to purpose.
(4) The stress over the past two decades
on the public as consumer has constrained understanding of the
real roles that citizens can play in governanceand the
range of roles they can play within "participation exercises".
(5) While organisations are learning to consult
they are failing to respond effectively to consultation and this
harms potential relationships between citizens and government.
(6) There are directional choicesbetween
consultation for decision support and the evolution of dialogue
or negotiation based democracyself-governance.
(7) The most innovative new methods of participation
are also processes of community negotiation, and of community
learningand offer the most promise for the future.
INNOVATION IN
PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
Experience of learning and innovation.
All the evidence points to a rapidly changing
map of consultation by public agencies of all kinds. Government
White Papers and legislation, new initiatives such as zones and
competitive funding arrangements all put pressure on local authorities,
health authorities and police authorities to consult the public.
While some consultation is in response to government pressure,
many of the most successful initiatives predate 1997, indeed it
is probably the case that it takes several years of trial and
error to begin to develop effective consultation.
Almost every public agency at local level is
involved in some form of consultationand the range of methods
includes sending out consultation papers, public meetings, focus
groups, panels, forums, citizen juries, open space events, planning
for real, simulations and negotiation workshops, community consensus
conferences, imagine and community discovery events etc. Appendix
A is a summary of the current methods drawn from our recent publication
Managing Working with the Public.
1. YOUNG PEOPLE'S
SURVEY
As part of an urban authority's commitment to
consulting widely with different sectors of the community, young
people aged 14-18 were surveyed through local schools and colleges.
Issues expressed were explored at a youth conference the following
year, and specific policy and service areas concerning young people
were addressed. A youth panel has also been set up as a permanent
channel through which young people can voice their concerns. Although
a considerable cost was attached to all these activities, robust
data was gathered and the consultation was take seriously by young
people, council officers and members. (Case study extract from
Cowley, C 1999).
There is some evidence that the preferred methods
are changing, and, for example, local authorities are moving away
from public meetings and consultation documents and beginning
to use more modern methods such as workshops, citizen juries and
interactive internet sites.
GROWING UNDERSTANDING
OF GOOD
PRACTICE
In the early months and years of consultation,
most public agencies make a wide range of mistakesincluding
having vague objectives, setting out on open ended consultation
without any clear sense of what they will use the answers for,
setting up a rigid process, using too much jargon, organising
dull meetings on cup final day, trying to consult in very tight
timescales, only reaching the "usual suspects" failing
to reach minorities, not involving young people, failing to involve
the public in designing the exercise, failing to offer feedback
etc. There is a considerable body of experience however now about
what constitutes good consultation practice and there are many,
many examples of successful processes. There is a tower of good
practice guidance, but the frequency with which mistakes are repeated
seems to indicate that managers and politicians in public services
don't learn easily through written guidance. Work on dissemination
that we are carrying out for the Cabinet Office has yet to report
formally, but the evidence suggests that experiential approaches
to learning about good practice are far more effective.
Over time therefore, people learn how to structure
meetings to make them interesting, how to avoid bad chairing,
how to attract people to come from different sections of the community.
Surveys are redesigned to make them more useful, panels used appropriately.
There are now many examples of successful, enjoyable, consultation.
THE NEED
FOR A
CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY
What has been missing hitherto is a strong shared
conceptual vocabulary, which enables local public managers, politicians
and civil servants to be clear about what they are trying to achieve,
and why.
There have been many attempts to create an analytical
framework for exploring the different dimensions of consultation,
beginning with Arnstein's ladder of participation (Arnstein, 11971)
I have produced a variation which attempts to link the purpose
of consultation to the techniques that are used (Goss, 1999 p
28).
Giving Information
| Consultation/Listening | Exploring/Innovating/Visioning
| Judging/
Deciding together |
Delegating/
Supporting/
Decision-making
|
Sign-posting | Surveys |
Consultative workshops | Deliberative polls
| Neighbourhood committees |
Leaflets/newsletters | Focus groups
| Visioning workshops | Citizens' juries
| Town/estate plans |
| Priority search |
| | |
Community profiles | Interactive community profiles
| Simulations
Open space events | Negotiation workshops
| Tenant management organisations |
Feedback on surveys and consultation | Public meetings forums
| | Community issue groups |
|
Annual performance reports |
| | Community workshops |
Community Development Trust |
Support/advice | Panels |
Planning for real community discovery | Consensus conferences
| Partnerships/contracts with communities |
Video/internet communication | Video boxes
| Use of theatre, arts/media |
| Referendums/
tele-voting |
(From Goss, 1999 Managing working with the Public, Kogan
Page.)
There are several versions of these diagrams, and they have
much in common. However, they have often not yet transferred from
the realms of theory to the realms of practice. A crucial part
of innovation in consultation is ability of managers and staff
(and the public) to clarify what they are trying to achieve, the
purpose of consultation, the prospective audiences for participation
and the best methods to use. Public managers involved in designing
consultation seldom have an opportunity to explore the range of
options and to thrash out the problems and dilemmas they face
in advance.
Managers and staff are often unclear about why people are
being consulted, and the role members of the public are expected
to play. Are members of the public being asked to help define
the problem, or to suggest solutions? Are they simply being told
things, or are their opinions valued? Is this process simply trying
to "take the temperature" or the beginning of a dialogue?
Are they simply invited to express preferences, or will their
decision be final? Are people being consulted as representatives,
as "typical" in some way of local people, or simply
as themselves? Processes are put in place in response to government
initiatives of local instructions, without resolving these issues.
(See Goss forthcoming)
There is often considerable confusion about the "legitimacy"
of the members of the public consulted. This results from a lack
of clarity about the "roles" that the public is being
asked to play. There are different sorts of legitimacy, by which
I mean an acknowledged "right" to be consulted on an
issue, or a sense that a perspective has a particular validity.
Legitimacy can come from a number of sources, from being particularly
knowledgeable, (professional legitimacy) from representing a large
number of people, or by being elected democratically or it can
come from having had a powerful experience, for example a chronic
illness or an accident, which has built understanding. Consultation
must take account of and balance these different sorts of legitimacies.
They all have validity, but they need to be balanced appropriately.
For example, a small focus group may have powerful "knowledge
legitimacy" about their own experiences, but be unable to
speak for a whole community. In our experience the public is very
conscious of issues of legitimacy. In citizen's juries, for example,
jury members have been perfectly happy that elected representatives
make a final decision, but want to make sure that sufficient weight
was given to their careful deliberations.
CITIZEN ROLES
More important, much of the current wave of public consultation
has limited the nature of the interaction between the government
and local communities by treating the public as customers or consumers.
This creates an artificial narrowing of the possible range of
interactions, and fails to recognise the real roles that members
of the public play in relation to public agencies. As well as
being consumers, citizens are also taxpayers, voters, "governors"
and co-producers.
The new initiative in Community Planning widen the set of
available roles, but often lead to considerable confusion. Local
authorities and other agencies are struggling to develop consultation
strategies which combine consultation with citizens as consumers
(Best Value) with consultation with citizens as "governor/authorisers"
(Community Planning) with consultation with citizens as co-producers
(Neighbourhood renewal projects).
Mark Moore has developed a helpful typology which sets out
the range of possible relationships.
Consumers | Governors
| Activist/producers |
Consumers either of public services or of services provided by activist/producers
| Citizens as owner-authorisers | Citizens producing public value themselves
|
Client/beneficiary
Obligatee
Remote beneficiary
| Voter
Taxpayer
Community member |
Providers of services
Co-producers
Self-helpers
Obliging others to act
|
(Ref Moore in CORA 1999)
Relationships of governance increasingly have to reflect,
and to recognise these roles, and to create appropriate spaces
within which these roles can be exercised.
The sorts of responses people make to consultation depends,
in part, on the roles people have been "constructed into"
and the identities they have been given. If local people are constructed
by the processes of engagement as customers, they will respond
by identifying needs and wants, and handing responsibility back
to the "provider". But as co-producers, people will
want to negotiate terms for projects, will want to take part in
deciding what is needed and how it is to be supported and funded,
and can add their own resources if there is sufficient reciprocity
to make this seem worthwhile. And as governor/authorisers local
people can begin to balance competing objectives, and to mobilize
the consent that will enable a decisive intervention to take place.
Local people invited to take part in processes of deliberation
about the future of an area learn to stop simply fighting their
corner, and look for ways to balance different needs, to negotiate
with others, to build consent for compromise. Public managers
and politicians are often surprised by the sophistication with
which complex judgments can be made by groups of ordinary people.
The surprise is as important as the sophistication. (Goss, forthcoming.)
2. IS INNOVATION
IN PUBLIC
PARTICIPATION WORKING?
Innovation is clearly improving public consultation. More
innovative methods such as citizen juries etc are more popular
and successful at engaging the public, and provide better information
about public views. Well designed events can be exciting and fun
for all participants. Experiments such as the Lewisham Community
Discovery process show that ordinary members of the public "are
able to think holistically across service boundaries and build
`big pictures of community outcomes' . . . they `have good ideas
and can offer powerful new perspectives to enrich policy debates'".
(See Parston and Cowe, 1998)
The Lewisham "Community Discovery" project engaged
65 people, broadly representative of the wider community, in a
process of working alongside managers from public agencies to
examine creative ways of providing health, learning and community
safety in the borough. The discovery process lasted a day and
a half, during which time the whole group identified the main
issues they wanted to investigate, formed small groups to discuss
different issues that interested them, mapped their ideas and
thoughts togethermaking the connections between them and
finally focussed on suggestions for change.
However, from the perspective of the public, participation
is primarily important in order the achieve changeto achieve
results. And while there is considerable evidence that learning
from consultation does inform decision making, it is not always
the case that a response can be made fast enough to demonstrate
to local people that they were listened to. Feedback and response
systems in public agencies are often poor.
3. NEWHAM BEST
VALUE PILOT
ON SERVICES
FOR PEOPLE
WITH DISABILITIES
Newham decided to set up a radical experiment as one of their
Best Value pilots. A consortium of consultants who themselves
had physical disabilities worked with the council to consult service
users. They designed and ran a much more interactive process of
consultation, based on two-way dialogue to ensure that user perspectives
were heard. As a result, they recommended radical changes to the
pattern of service delivery, many of which have been accepted
by the Council and are now being implemented.
Public managers are beginning to look outwards from their
organisations but they do so with many of their frames of reference
intact. The managers and staff who find out about consumer views
learn a lot about the failures and problems in their services.
But to put right service failure may require new systems, higher
skill levels, different attitudes, and new ways of doing things.
Things are done the way they are because of shoestring budgets,
careful compromises, old technology, and difficulties in communication.
These problems have a long history. The current way of doing things
"makes sense" from the inside of the organisation. The
mangers who meet the public on a day to day basis may not have
the authority to put things right. Long hierarchical chains, lengthy
decision making cycles, the competing pressures of operational
problems, competing claims for scarce resources all mean that
user views may be heard, but not acted upon. (Goss, forthcoming)
Public managers often talk about "consultation fatigue",
and worry that the public will be exhausted by too much consultation.
There is no evidence to support this, nor evidence that many consultation
processes actually reach the majority of the public. What is more
evident is a process of "response fatigue". Public agencies
are able to conduct consultation processes with relative ease,
but they find it far less easy to respond to what is heard within
a timescale relevant to the citizens who take part. Since feedback
and response mechanisms are poor, the experience on all sides
is often of frustration, since there is plenty of consultation,
but little or no resulting change in policy or action. Since response
is so slow, those members of the public that did begin to engage
become disillusioned. There is anecdotal evidence that when consultation
elicits an immediate response of some kind from the public agency,
local people are far more likely to re-engageeven if that
response falls short of providing what was asked for. It is the
effectiveness of the relationship that is built that matters,
and the degree of trust that can be sustained.
FROM OPINION
TO JUDGEMENT
Engagement works most effectively when it is "deliberative"
and where consultation is not simply limited to finding out "opinions"
which can be ill-informed, but where information is shared, and
time is allowed to enable people to reach considered judgements.
(See Clarke, 1999)
Effective participation involves members of the community
not simply in stating initial opinions, but in working alongside
managers to help to diagnose and define problems, to explore possible
solutions and to decide between different solutions. It is often
a process of sustained dialogue over time.
This has tended to happen most effectively in area renewal
projects, where there is a clear locality, and usually new money
or a new project. These projects can be very successful, but they
are often pilots or experiments, and often shut down once the
funding comes to an end. The learning and approaches used are
still not usually transferred into the mainstream of public provision.
Some of the most successful mainstream consultation exercises
have been around stock transfer, (where tenants have a legal right
to vote, and therefore their views count very much!)
4. HACKNEY TENANT
CONSULTATION
The London Borough of Hackney has been involved in a series
of transfers of council housing to housing associations in order
to secure long-term investment. The process has involved sustained
consultation with tenants over several years, and a recognition
that it takes a long time for tenants to make their minds up on
an issue as important as this. The council employed independent
"tenants' friends" to give the tenants advice, and set
up estate development committees, onto which the tenants elected
representatives. Not only were tenants given a vote on the outcome,
but they were engaged in thinking through all the options, from
which estates to include, to what sort of management and ownership
structures should be created under the new landlords. Eventually
tenants on one of the estates earmarked for transfer pulled out
of the scheme, preferring to campaign for improvements with the
council, while tenants on another estate which had not been initially
considered for transfer decided to "opt in" after considering
the pros and cons.
POLICY CHOICESDECISION
SUPPORT OR
NEGOTIATED DEMOCRACY
There are fundamental choices facing government at national
and local level about what sorts of engagement it intends to pursue,
and the role it intends to create for local people in decision
making.
Consultation could continue to simply be used as "decision
support" with the real decision taken inside the public agency,
at political or managerial level.
The alternative is to see the emerging networks of governance
at local level as offering scope for "negotiated democracy"solutions
which can be negotiated with communities rather than imposed upon
them. In reality, many local solutions are already negotiated
to an extent, since several public agencies and often private
business are involved in community planning and in regeneration
schemes. Modern consultation techniques offer space for reflection,
dialogue and shared exploration, which can make it possible to
build consent for a shared decision. It may involve a series of
techniques over that time, perhaps community discovery, imagine
or open space approaches for initial "visioning"followed
by focus groups, community workshops or citizen juries to explore
options, followed by a referenda, survey of consensus conference
to gain support for the suggested option. (See Goss, 1999)
The most intractable problems, particularly in deprived neighbourhoods,
are not problems that a single agency can solve. Problems of vandalism,
long-term unemployment, crime require not simply joined up working
from public agenciesbut joined up working within communities.
Often problems are exacerbated by tensions within and between
communities, problems of racism or of intolerance, tensions between
the young and the old etc. Some of the most effective processes
of community engagement have been those which make it possible
for communities to come together and learn to understand each
other, and negotiate out solutions which may be implemented within
the communities themselves. The sorts of techniques that enable
citizens to act as "co-producers" of a solution are
those that involve time to learn, share experiences, listen carefully
to others, explore possibilities alongside others and build solutions
through dialogue. The result can be a "licence to operate"a
shared "signing off" of an agreed solution. There is
some evidence that the best Community Planning practice is heading
in this direction.
March 2000
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