Ready to engage?

Over 50% of citizens want to be involved in major policy decisions, but only 7% feel their voices are heard.  If government can engage citizens more effectively, it can secure more effective and arguably less divisive outcomes. The Institute for Government and PwC recently collaborated on a research project looking at how citizens can be more effectively engaged in these tough decisions facing government. Our report identified the following insights for how to foster more effective engagement:

• be transparent about the terms of engagement – citizens need to be clear about what they can achieve through participation, otherwise they can feel alienated if outcomes do not meet their expectations – a lesson from the PwC Citizens’ Juries.
• demonstrate impact – citizens want to see that their involvement has been influential. Of 69 public debates organised by the consultative Commission Nationale du Débat Public in France since 2002, about one-third of the underlying projects have been abandoned or deeply modified; another third have been significantly modified.
• engage early – at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, two years of engagement led citizens to approve the expansion of the airport, subject to controls on noise and pollution.
• involve the right people – in Thurrock, consultation on the reconfiguration of adult social services was careful to target groups of users, rather than citizens generally.
• use the right channels – engaging citizens means tailoring engagement to their needs and interests. This might involve government making use of citizen-generated platforms, as with Oregon’s Kitchen Table.

Building on these insights, the Institute and PwC went on to convene a roundtable with a group of public sector officials and engagement professionals, to discuss their responses to our work. The wide-ranging discussion included the following points:

• There was a widespread feeling that the Government’s current approach to engagement could be improved. The existing focus on one-off consultations attaches too little value to listening – citizens can be frustrated not to be involved more deeply, and could be deterred from further engagement.

• The mind sets of decision-makers on the value of engagement need to change. There was perceived to be a risk that officials viewed engagement as "an act of benevolence" from which only the public might benefit. But our research highlighted a number of cases in which citizen input had helped officials to reach better solutions. These included Thurrock, where citizens proposed a new model of user-administered adult social care services. In this example, policy makers engaged directly with citizens, establishing an ongoing dialogue. Engagement supplemented, rather than undermined, the expertise of officials.

• Participants suggested that a false equation is sometimes drawn in which greater engagement is seen to erode the power of elected politicians. But power is not a finite commodity - engagement complements rather than bypasses the political process. Participants felt that politicians should be explicit in sponsoring engagement exercises, creating security for officials who are anxious about ‘speculating’ in public.

• Participants felt that more use could be made of engagement as an ongoing feature of public services. This would make services more responsive to user preferences and would develop networks of citizens (and understandings of their perspectives) that could be mobilised when difficult decisions had to be made. As one participant observed of a particular public service: “they cannot engage optimally because they do not engage continuously”.

• There may also be a mismatch between public and official timelines. As demonstrated by the examples of Lewisham A&E and hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in Lancashire, the public interest will not always constrain itself to the formal windows of consultation. In responding to this, service designers may recognise that dedicating more time to engagement could disrupt individual milestones, but benefit the project as a whole.

• This discussion about ongoing engagement led into a debate about access to independent evidence. One participant spoke about how the independence of an engagement exercise can help establish legitimacy. The importance of providing citizens with recourse to independent sources of evidence was clear from the case studies: at Schiphol, the consultative body the Alders Table was able to commission work from analysts, whilst PwC’s Citizens’ Juries brought in external experts to provide different evidence, insights and opinions to move on the debate.

These are topics to which the Institute for Government plans to return in 2016.