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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?

There may well be too many consultations. And they often overlap. But in truth they just reflect the reality that decision-making is itself complex with interdependencies that make it unusual for any subject to be placed in a watertight box without being influenced by or itself influencing other decisions.

The Government would like to achieve a culture-change. It feels – rightly or wrongly – that people are fed up with rather too many public servants beavering away doing bureaucratic tasks of various descriptions, whilst the rest of the private-sector economy shoulders the burden of paying for them. This is why we hear a lot

Most people won’t read the Government’s White Paper Open Public Services. And if they did, they might struggle to understand what it says! Maybe it’s because the Coalition has followed the previous administration’s habit of peppering the text of such documents with references to any and every current initiative that could just about be regarded

Experienced organisers of consultations are familiar with many caricatured groups of people. The phrase Usual Suspects is often used to describe those who can be relied upon to appear in all weathers and offer their views with enthusiasm on even the most boring subject. Many a consultor has forgiven them their foibles just because their

There are at least two interpretations to what’s going on in national politics right now. One version sees a Government having to trim its ambitions and reach all sorts of accommodations in order to keep a fragile Coalition together. Compromises and re-thinks are characterised as U-turns in the popular press and Ministerial exits are solemnly

The term ‘domain’ originally meant a piece of land – a territory. Today we use it in a very different sense. Not only do many of us have a ‘domain name’ but educationalists and others speak of different ‘knowledge domains’ to categorise various spheres of expertise and know-how.

If the Localism Bill is taken at face-value, then local Councils are going to be busy organising a lot of Referendums. It represents a radically different approach to the last Government; yet both administrations have been pursuing a similar goal – greater citizen involvement. So, what’s different? Labour legislated (but never implemented) a ‘duty to

Re-organisations have a bad name. It is easy to rail against them, and to criticise them for achieving few of their stated objectives. One of the most oft-quoted management sayings is attributed to Petronius (apparently wrongly) and sounds very real to many people:- We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning