Public engagement or public participation is a concept that has recently been used to describe the practice where policy-developing institutions involve members of the public in political activities, including agenda-setting, decision making, and policy-forming. This form of engagement is focused on the participatory actions of the public to aid in policy making based on their values.
Origins "Consultation" describes the tradition of a decision-making body getting inputs from those with less power, which became popular with governments in the United Kingdom during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite most consulting governments being democratically elected, many people who became involved in these processes were surprised that the conduct was unsatisfactory in at least three respects.
Groups that already had influence were often the only ones consulted. People who did not have the resources would usually not be able to be part of a consultation, even if the decision it was meant to influence might have a major impact on them. There were no agreed safeguards against consultations being used cynically by decision-makers to make it look like they had sought to canvass other opinions, while in fact having set a new policy in place even before they asked the question.
As early as 1979, science analyst Dorothy Nelkin pointed out that much of what passed for participation in governance could best be understood as attempts by the powerful to co-opt the public.
Rationale Public engagement is a relatively new term, hardly used before the late 1990s. The existing term it has most in common with is participatory democracy, discussed by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G D H Cole.
Many see participatory democracy as complementing representative democratic systems, in that it puts decision-making powers more directly in the hands of ordinary people. Rousseau suggested that participatory approaches to democracy had the advantage of demonstrating that "no citizen is a master of another" and that, in society, "all of us are equally dependent on our fellow citizens". Rousseau suggested that participation in decision-making increases the feeling among individual citizens that they belong in their community. Perhaps the most long-standing institution of participatory democracy is the system of trial by jury.
Whilst elected governments make the laws, it is therefore juries that are able to decide the innocence or guilt of anyone charged with breaking many of those laws, making it a key instrument of participatory democracy. Over the centuries they have achieved an importance to many democracies that has had to be fiercely defended. One senior judge surveying the limiting of a government's power provided by the jury over the centuries compared the jury to: "a little parliament... No tyrant could afford to leave a subject's freedom in the hands of twelve of his countrymen.... Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives". (Patrick Devlin 1956). Today, jury trials are practised in many democracies around the world including the US, UK, Russia, Spain, Brazil and Australia. Perhaps no other institution of government rivals the jury in placing power so directly in the hands of citizens, or wagers more on the truth of democracy's core claim that the people make their own best governors. Juries are therefore argued to be the most widespread form of genuine consultation at work in society today.
The tension between the state and civil society as underscored by Public Engagement within Newly Industrialized Economies (NIE) such as Singapore is illustrated by Kenneth Paul Tan of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy: But speaking about public engagement is, of course, quite a different thing from carrying out public engagement. And this is where there seems to be a gap between rhetoric and practice in Singapore. For instance, government officials recently met selectively with concerned members of the public to discuss a controversial decision to build a road through a historically significant graveyard. When criticised for not taking the public's views seriously, the Government explained that the meeting was never meant to be a "consultation". So it is important to ask why such a gap exists and why it might be difficult to close it, assuming of course that closing it is what we want to do...
The elitist proclivities of the public sector, reinforced by top-level salaries that are comparable to the private sector, are unlikely to incentivise real public engagement, since they reinforce the sense that public sector leaders, possessing superior intellect, knowledge and insight, must defend the public interest against irrational and dangerous mass populism. The public, according to this mindset, needs to be educated to think correctly rather than present themselves as equal participants in policy formulation and implementation.
Modalities of engagement Public participation can occur at many different levels. Due to this ambiguity, modalities for public engagement have been categorized based on the types of information flow and level of involvement of the public and/or sponsor (i.e. academia, government, private sector):
Public communication is characterized by the top-down, one-way transfer of information or resources from initiators of an engagement, like government agencies, to the public and where feedback from the public is not returned. This includes mechanisms like information broadcasts, static website resources, newsletters, public service announcements, or informational outreach through legacy and social media. Traditional media functions in this way by influencing the public agenda, termed agenda-setting theory.
Public consultation is the collection of feedback and information about or from the public by the sponsor. Potential mechanisms are referendum, surveys, focus groups, or interactive websites. These mechanisms gather information from the public who are or will be affected by those decisions to shape what sponsors focus on or invest their resources into. Although public consultation involves soliciting public feedback, it is still a one-way flow of information, but in the reverse direction of public communication. The initiators of public consultation retain decision-making authority.
Public involvement is interactive and involves the transfer of fact-based information, values, and beliefs between both the public and the sponsor (i.e., typically, experts or policy makers). Deliberative opinion polls serve as a mechanism in which the public's opinions are collected before and after receiving information from the sponsor.
Social media has also become an increasingly prominent mechanism of public involvement. Social media allows for instant and on-going dialogue between sponsors and the public. Additionally, social media is flexible and allows for multiple levels of implementation depending on an organizations' needs. When implementing public involvement strategies, organizations should consider differences between social media platforms for optimal results. Social media may require a preexisting audience (ex., "followers") for proper public engagement. When considering audience, the methods of engagement (e.g., text or images) should also be considered to properly choose a social media platform. For example, three major health organizations implemented social media campaigns during the Ebola epidemic of 2013: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors without Borders). All three organizations used both Twitter and Instagram for public engagement, however Instagram was found to have increased involvement compared to Twitter, which is consistent with visual communication theory. Despite each organization using the same tools for public involvement, there were different levels of engagement with the public, with MSF garnering the highest engagement.
Public collaboration is another form of two-way dialogue, but it also involves collaboration between the public and sponsor where they actively work together to identify and create suitable solutions to the challenges under discussion. Mechanisms for public participation include action planning workshops, citizens' jury, consensus conferences, and task forces.
Public empowerment is where the decision-making authority is placed majorly, if not solely, on the public, in which they are provided with enough information from the sponsor and collectively come to a formal decision. This decision is then binding on the affected members of the public. This is the rarest modality of engagement, because typically sponsors (i.e., policy makers and regulatory actors) are not allowed to transfer their decision-making authority to the public.
Good practice Taking participatory democracy as an ideal for public engagement has significant consequences for how we apply the concept to issues with a scientific or technical element. Instead of merely receiving inputs from various interested parties, a participatory model of consultation forces decision-makers to recognize the democratic accountability of their actions not merely every few years at elections, but in a more systematic, direct sense to citizens.Bloomfield, D., Collins, K., Fry, C. and Munton, R., 2001: Deliberation and inclusion: vehicles for increasing trust in UK public governance? Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 19, 501-513
Each "experiment" in participatory democracy contains a unique mix of people and institutions. Each method must therefore select elements from a range of different approaches.There are a number of organizations, like California's Institute for Local Government, that provide public officials with analytic constructs to decide which approaches to use and evaluate the results. See, www.ca-ilg.org/publicengagement. Participation is also overtly "political" in that it is about humans, power and knowledge – all of which are inherently complex and which together make for a potent mix that requires sensitivity and careful planning. So while participatory processes can be replicated in the same way as scientific protocols, their human ingredients can differ so much that a concentration on replicating what happened elsewhere often hinders the practical application of a technique. Each consultation event needs to proceed from an understanding of its political, scientific, institutional and practical constraints.
The effectiveness of public engagement methods can be assessed by their fairness and efficiency in achieving its purpose. Fairness addresses whether the public perceives their information was collected by sponsors in a way that equally represents the affected population. Although, scholars suggest that assessing fairness of public engagement is a complexity in itself. Efficiency "refers to maximizing the relevant information (knowledge and/or opinions) from the maximum number of relevant sources and transferring this efficiently to the appropriate receivers." Much of the effectiveness of public engagement methods rely on how these methods are conducted and if they are at the will of interfering biases or confounding variables.
Researchers at the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre in Newcastle University provide working principles for public engagement: Participants should join those organising the process in setting terms of reference for the whole exercise, and framing the questions that they will discuss. The group organising, or in overall control of, the process should be broad based, including stakeholders with different interests on the subject being discussed. There should be a diversity of information sources and perspectives available to participants.