The Future of Local Government (submitted December 2011)

Here we’ve argued that citizen participation is fundamental to the sustainable well-being of local communities, and that the democratic mandate remains central to grounding local governance in the needs of those communities. In particular:

• Citizen perspectives enrich local decision making by providing experience, insight and expertise, and contributing solutions to complex challenges.
• People, communities and local economies thrive on being inter-connected. Public participation in local governance opens up new connections that can support economic resilience.
• The democratic mandate keeps councils responsive and accountable, and facilitates community leadership. It is complemented (not undermined) by public participation, and councillors have an important role to play in connecting with citizens.

View the submission: Involve response to Commission on the Future of Local Government

The role of Elected Members (submitted March 2012)

In this response we provide some specific evidence and commentary in relation to two of the questions posed by the Commission:

• How can / should local elected members encourage participatory democracy in their local areas?
• What is the community leadership role of councillors and how can this be successfully carried out? What might councillors need?

Building on the work in Pathways through participation, we make a number of suggestions, such as:

• New skills to support the role of councillors
• Making good use of the skills and experience of young people
• Encouraging deliberation as a key part of participatory democracy

View the submission:Involve response: The role of Elected Members 

The economic potential of local government (submitted March 2012)

In this submission (authored by associate Rosalie Callway) we outline three priorities in relation to local government and economic prosperity:

• Strengthening communities – building resilience and creativity
• ‘Inclusive’ economies – promoting equality and well-being
• Stimulating sustainable economies and lifestyles

Using a series of case studies, we argue that these require policies which promote public engagement in sustainable economies, build community capital, and enable local ownership.

View the submission: Involve response: The economic potential of local government

These submissions were put together by Involve associates Clive Mitchell and Rosalie Callway.

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In this way, public engagement can complement legislative changes that force change, as well as the government’s agenda of ‘nudge’. Only by involving the public in decision-making and in the design of projects will the government be able to bring about the changes in public attitudes and behaviour of the scale that is required.

Download the paper: The use of public engagament in tackling climate change

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In this short briefing paper, Involve Associate Janice Thomson considers the example of California, whether direct democracy is to blame and what we can learn from their experience.

Download the briefing:

Direct Democracy Constructive or Destructive FINAL

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Background

The UK is committed to a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of 80% of 1990s emissions by the year 2050. This is a legally-binding target and will involve dramatic changes to the way the country, as individuals, communities, business and institutions demand and supply energy.

In order to promote public engagement with these issues DECC and its stakeholders have developed three related tools around the 2050 Pathways Calculator, which are intended as an accessible and interactive way to enable both experts and the public to understand the scale of the challenge, explore and test their own preferred solutions and translate these into action in their own lives and communities.  The related tools are: an in-depth Excel spreadsheet, the online 2050 Calculator and the ‘My 2050′ game. The three tools provide different ways into deliberating the trade-offs required for the emission reduction, making them ideal for using with audiences with different levels of knowledge and time.

Dialogue

DECC, with support from Ipsos MORI, organised three deliberative dialogue workshops aimed at engaging councillors, elected representatives, business representatives and the third sector in a climate change debate. Involve were part of the moderators team. The workshops were a test bed for dialogues around the 2050 tools and informed the development of the toolkits. The workshops (held in Ulverston, London and Nottingham) were run based on Sciencewise-ERC‘s Principles on Public Dialogue.

Toolkits

Involve, in partnership with Ipsos MORI and Think Global, supported DECC in developing a set of resources to provide community leaders, teachers and others to lead their own debate about climate change and carbon reduction.

1. The My2050 Schools Toolkit is now available. More information on the DECC website.

2. The toolkit to support community leaders to engage with the public around the 2050 carbon reduction target is forthcoming.

For more information on this project please contact ingrid@involve.org.uk

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Pathways through Participation was a two and a half year (April 2009 – November 2011) qualitative research project, which aimed to improve our understanding of how and why people participate, how their involvement changes over time, and what pathways, if any, exist between different activities.

The project was funded by the Big Lottery Fund and led by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) and Involve.

These resources were produced during the course of the Pathways through Participation project. If you have any questions or comments, please contact Tim Hughes at tim@involve.org.uk.

Project resources

Final report

This is the final report of the project, presenting findings from 101 in-depth interviews.

Download the Final report

Summary report

This report summarises the findings from the project and recommendations for future policy and practice.

Download the Summary report

Informing and influencing policy

This briefing paper summarises the findings and implications for national policy agendas.

Download this briefing paper

Local engagement in democracy

This briefing paper summarises the findings and implications for local engagement in democracy.

Download this briefing paper

Volunteering as a participation pathway

This briefing paper summarises the findings and implications for volunteer management.

Download this briefing paper

Research, engagement and impact

This briefing paper reviews the project’s approach to research and stakeholder engagement, highlights how the project set about linking research to policy and practice, and critically assesses some of the research methods and tools that were used.

Download this briefing paper

Understanding participation: A literature review

This report is a literature review exploring participation in context (historical and current), in practice (the activities and actors), and in theory (the concepts).

Download the literature review

Reviewing the literature

These briefing papers summarised the findings of the literature review:

What is participation?

What are the drivers of participation?

Who participates?

Why participate?

Project reports

These reports covered the project’s emerging findings and reflections on it’s approach:

Strengthening participation: Learning from participants

Using participatory mapping to explore participation in three communities

Situated practice: Initial reflections on the organisation of participation

This is a report of a workshop which began to identify the major components of a strategy to engage poor people in developing a new set of development goals.

We are now less than four years away from 2015, the date for achieveing the targets set by The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite their many failings, the goals have been remarkably successful at mobilising public opinion, as well framing the international debate and mobilising finance for the goals themselves. Academics, governments, intergovernmental organisations and campaigners have already begun to ask what should replace them.

Many are arguing that the voices of poor people should be heard in the formulation of whatever replaces the MDGs post-2015. With support from DFID, Involve ran a workshop with CAFOD which brought together engagement practitioners, development professionals planning to engage the poor in the debate about the post-2015 MDG framework, and funders. The workshop began to identify the major components of a strategy to engage poor people in developing a new set of development goals.

This report is not a verbatim record of the workshop but rather an attempt to capture areas of broad consensus and key unanswered questions in order to provide workshop participants with a basis for further action. It may also be useful for others interested in participation in the post-2015 framework or more generally in the areas of engagement with poor people, participation in development or participation on a global level.

View: A global development framework after 2015 – Workshop Report

If you have any questions contact annie@involve.org.uk

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There is a substantial amount of anecdotal evidence in support of public engagement and some case study evidence showing that the value of engagement, if done well, is more than the upfront costs. But there is little hard data to effectively express the benefits of engagement in cash terms.

It has never been more important to be able to make this business case. The UK has recently experienced the most severe recession since the 1930s and public spending will continue to be cut heavily in the years to come, and engagement professionals will need to articulate the value of their work in economic terms.

This practical Toolkit will help users understand and make the business case for engagement and present it to internal and external audiences. It can be used for all kinds of engagement from small scale ‘one off’ projects to major exercises across an entire town or wider local authority area.

It is aimed at those who manage, design, deliver, plan or commission public engagement projects. It does not require the reader to have detailed knowledge of economics.

Download the toolkit:

Making the Case for Public Engagement

The Toolkit also links to two spreadsheets:

Calculating costs and benefits with comparator

Calculating costs and benefits without comparator

The aim of this document is to encourage and support good quality deliberative public engagement activities. Deliberative public engagement is a distinctive approach to involving people in decision-making. It is different from other forms of engagement in that it is about giving participants time to consider and discuss an issue in depth before they come to a considered view.

Deliberation itself – where a range of people learn, discuss and work out solutions together – is not new. Forums, advisory groups, partnerships and some forms of consultation have done this for years and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. More recently, citizens’ juries and large-scale citizens’ summits have found favour with government and public service providers at both local and national levels.

The authors believe that when done well, deliberative public engagement can help to create better public services, promote social cohesion and foster a thriving democracy.

The book has been produced by Involve, the National Consumer Council and Diane Warburton at Shared Practice as the lead author. The production of the principles was informed by a series of stakeholder discussions held between November 2007 and April 2008.

English: Deliberative Public Engagement: Nine Principles

In Turkish:

Türkçe: Müzakereci Halk Katılımı: Dokuz Ilke

In French:

Français: Participation publique délibérative: 9 principes

These documents are the result of Involve’s work with the OECD to develop indicators for measuring open government.

There is a growing movement to promote more openness in governments across the world. As a result there has been an increase in the number of laws devoted to giving citizens greater rights to access the documents and proceedings of government, as well as more say over decisions.

In 2009, Involve developed a set of draft indicators for measuring open government for the OECD. The indicators sought to complement the OECD’s existing indicators for measuring legal and institutional mechanisms for transparency, accessibility and responsiveness in governments worldwide. They did so by focusing on the implementation, use and enforcement of these mechanisms.

These draft indicators can be found here: Open Government – beyond static measures (PDF)

In 2010, Involve worked with Essex University’s Department of Government to expand this work. Specifically we developed a sub-set of these indicators related to transparency in government into survey for OECD member states. The results of this survey are included in the OECD’s biennial publication, Government at a Glance 2011 (see section VIII).

For more information about Involve’s Open Government work with the OECD please contact Simon Burall at: simon@involve.org.uk

Read the case study:

Case Study Open Government Indicators (PDF document)

Image by: Catherin Hadler

This document sets out Involve’s response to the Government’s plan to repeal the Duty to Involve.

In April the government announced its plans to repeal the Duty to Involve. Given the lack of evidence about how and whether the Duty to Involve is working, we asked you, our network, to provide your own thoughts and experiences. Thank you to all those who emailed, tweeted and filled out our survey. We have now written these up and submitted the response to CLG.

Summary of findings

View the full submission:

Involve response to Best Value Statutory Guidance Consultation

We have also collected together some of the blogs on the issue in this bitly bundle.