Originally published 22 August 2011. This article is retained from the tCI archive. Law, policy or practice may have changed since publication.
We can all count the commentators queuing up to demand that we have more dialogue with the thousands of the greedy or disaffected who took part in last week’s destructive riots. There is little room for disagreement there.
But it begs the question – what will these dialogues be about?
The principle of having a conversation is rarely challenged, and is trotted out by politicians as if it were a panacea. This is why so much legislation in recent years has demanded greater public involvement – and required officials to undertake consultations where they have struggled to find an agenda that makes for a meaningful dialogue. This in turn has undermined genuinely participative decision-making and brought some consultations into disrepute.
The other predominant theme of the week was the obvious use of social media as an instrument of mass organisation – for both good and evil purposes. Along with recent evidence of online campaigning tools and the growing use of e-petitions, we are seeing a rapid transformation in the ability of communities (geographic as well as communities of interest) to highlight issues that matter to them. “This is what we want to talk about”. This is bottom-up agenda-setting, and will become even more powerful as the mainstream media taps into what it finds on Twitter-feeds, Facebook pages and suchlike.
Contrast this with the established pattern of scoping a public consultation. We are about to witness one of the most important Court cases on public engagement for years. In September, the Royal Brompton Hospital brings forward an application for judicial review against a decision to exclude it from options for rationalising NHS paediatric cardiac services in England. The case will turn on the way that Managers developed a range of options and then prevented some of those from being included in the formal consultation. This top-down agenda-setting dictates the nature of the debate – something that public bodies have to do all the time, and it is quite instructive to compare the two approaches.
| Top-down | Bottom-up |
|---|---|
| • Few involved | • Many involved |
| • Secretive | • Transparent |
| • Mechanistic | • Responsive |
| • Producer-minded | • Customer-minded |
| • Planned | • Spontaneous |
| • Slow | • Rapid |
Both are needed of course.
So when the cry goes out that we must start listening more to groups that feel unheard, we all look to see what it is they wish to discuss. But someone somewhere has to convert general subject areas into practical proposals for change. In the light of what happened in our Cities, one might expect Community Safety Partnerships to take the lead. But all agencies will be involved in this, and this is where the two approaches should complement each other. Bottom-up social media can articulate people’s wishes, desires, fears, inhibitions. And top-down expert interventions can help figure out what’s possible, or how much it might cost.
What the Royal Brompton case may reveal, however, is that the days may be over when the development of contentious alternatives can be shrouded in mystery, with allegations of bias and arguments about what is and isn’t viable. There are new techniques on offer. One of them is called co-production, where the differing interests of those who deliver and those who receive services can be examined jointly and where an attempt can be made to design future provision through a measure of consensus.
If the Government’s latest blueprint for public services (Open public services – published last month) is anything to go by, there will be increased flexibility for local authorities and service delivery partners to exercise imagination and work out truly localist solutions to problems. What this week may have shown is that there is no shortage of challenges, and that high-quality public dialogues – whilst not of themselves an answer – may be an essential pre-requisite for finding the answers
Trigger points
- Is your organisation monitoring relevant social media? Whose role is it to identify and analyse what key stakeholders and others are saying?
- Is your local Community Safety Partnership actively engaging stakeholders and constructively setting the agenda?
- Learn more about the use of Social Media for consultation & public engagement.
- Issues raised in this Topic will feature in the Roundtables planned on Community Engagement Issues for Public Safety
- The Royal Brompton case will be considered at Legal Challenges to Consultation
This is the 193rd Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement