The world of consultation and engagement is one of ever changing and moving pieces. People, ideas and techniques flow like water through the great sieve of the world in which we work. One year, one methodology is all the rage, the next it is forgotten, or put aside as a fad. Achieving any sort of longevity can be a big challenge. Whatever the technique however, they are all come to genuinely as part of the process of working out how we can better engage people on the decisions and forces that shape our world.

This week, DemSoc have published a new piece in which they correctly conclude that one-off deliberations cannot themselves sustain resilient democracies. It’s something that has long been an unspoken truth in our sector. We still have far too much of a tendency to just go out and consult or engage on discrete issues, without the sort of long-term thinking that can maintain trust and build relationships so as to improve our work into the future.

DemSoc’s solution to this is the concept of “democratic infrastructure”. Their article identifies several elements essential to the building of democratic infrastructure:

1. A contextualised plan for democracy
2. Capabilities
3. Networks
4. Governance systems

Which must operate, according to them in a given context with:

1. Flexibility
2. Consideration of the longer term
3. The capacity to enable democratic self-improvement

As a theory, it is sustainable and in line with much of our own thinking. For our part, we think that many of the necessary parts are in place for consultation and engagement to play a part in the boosting of this infrastructure- albeit in a nascent form and in need of further development by most institutions. But how do we get across the core problem of consultation only on discrete independent issues? Without doing that we are likely to start missing the criteria, or more crucially, the point.

The idea that consultation and engagement should go beyond a staccato “engage on this, then engage on that, then engage on the other” is of course an old one, and most people no longer start from scratch on each exercise. This is one of the things that forms part of the prototypal solutions to the DemSoc democratic infrastructure idea. Already we see networks being established that can be used as a consistent foundation on which consultation and engagement exercises can be based. Covid helped with that too. When we couldn’t go out to people directly, communities came together, and we liaised with them. Many of those connections have been maintained and continue to be used.

But maintaining a consistent network is only part of the answer. The rest of it comes with changing our approaches and attitudes towards consultation to move from discrete-but-linked consultations which draw upon collective resources to inculcating a wider, more permanent conversation with our stakeholders and communities that can run underneath specific consultations to ensure that we are constantly monitoring community wellbeing and opinion. These conversations are unlikely to have quite the same degree of detail as specific consultation, but play an important role in maintaining community trust and contact, and ultimately bolstering the democratic infrastructure.

Continuous engagement is of course something of a buzz-word for consultors in the modern era- everyone wants to be seen to be doing it, but many of the tools and techniques to enable it remain underdeveloped or the subject of debate. That’s not to say the tools aren’t there- social listening using social media is a well established part of consultation and engagement, and can be used really well- though there are sometimes still struggles with how exactly this data is effectively used.

If it is to be more than a buzz-word and to be a part of building and maintaining the democratic infrastructure, then it needs further development. We need to work out how it is best done and start putting it into practice across the different sectors in which we work. If we can work out how to take those tools and use them to constantly review the status quo, then we may find not only that we have a better appreciation of the communities that we serve, but that we’re also better placed to make longer-term decisions and plans, be forward thinking, and potentially boost public willingness to engage on specific issues in the future.