Dalferthian tidbits

Public Participation

Over the past decades we have witnessed a proliferation of participatory practices at all levels of public decision-making. The emergence of Participatory Democracy reflects a combination of growing scepticism about the regulatory capacity of governments and concerns about the capability of conventional policy-making to engage the energies of ordinary citizens and other stakeholders (eg residents without rights of citizenship).

This alternative approach builds on the distinctive practical competence that citizens possess as users of public services, subjects of public policy and regulation, or residents who have contextual knowledge of their neighbourhoods and ecosystems (for example Citizen Juries, Planning Cells and Deliberative Polls, Participatory Budgeting and Virtual Town Meetings).

Public participation

Public participation, accordingly, is the process by which interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities are engaged before a decision is taken. Public participation is collaborative problem solving with the goal of achieving more legitimate policies. It minimizes disputes by creating a process for resolving contentious issues before they become polarized. Public participation facilitates citizen initiatives and contributes to political equality by increasing the role of popular mobilization. It fosters transnational learning and constructive intercultural dialogue and may support the development of common, democratic values in an integrated Europe.

However, participatory practices are often costly in terms of time and money and may thus be perceived as inefficient. Moreover, it is often suggested that citizens are not knowledgeable enough to participate. Furthermore, participative processes are criticised of lacking representativeness – and thus legitimacy – as they disproportionately involve the wealthy, well-educated and professional.

These problems can be mitigated by carefully selecting participation methods for each policy issue in a culturally sensitive way. The institutional setting has to ensure that the decision-making processes are not merely methods for efficient participation, but are able to include disadvantaged groups of citizens and develop citizens’ capabilities to partake in political processes. To this end, external facilitators must sensitively prepare consultations and intelligently decide on the methods and the selection process for the participatory process.

Here I want to discuss possibilities of new methods of participation enabled through technological developments. I present my thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of particular methods of participation and portrait initiatives, which engange in injecting participatory methods in public decision-making.

I am planning to take up blogging again. It will be less on the various things I find amusing on the web, such as The Onion or The Daily Show. Neither will it be about silly things on the net such as PhD Comics, where I found solace many times during the dark hours of finishing my PhD.

It will be mostly work related stuff, i.e. on public participation. Maybe – no hopefully – that will be interesting for you as well.

Disclaimer: I am a founding member of the European Institute for Public Participation and currently work fo it as a project leader.

In January 2009 we have founded a new institution, the European Institute for Public Participation. We have set up a website at www.participationsinstitute.org, but currently there is very little information online.

The EIPP It is the successor of the Partnership for Public Participation for which I worked as a freelancer in 2008. It is a non-profit organisation under German law (an eingetragener Verein, or e.V.).

The goal of the EIPP is to establish public participation – and by that we mean the involvement of citizens in policy-making – as a more normal practice in our democracies. We are convinced that public participation can act as a remedy for the growing dissatisfaction of citizens with politics (and policies). Public participation can give people a more direct say in issues that they care about. They can make their voice heard at the political level.

This potential, however, can only be realised when a number of conditions are met (see also my previous post). Firstly, the participation process must be well thought through and extremely well implemented. This places a high burden on the shoulders of organisers of such processes. Nonetheless, only well organised processes are able to realise their potential. Deliberation – a central element of politically-oriented public participation – needs t a clear framwork within which it can take place.

Politicians and other addressees are called for collaboration as well. Only when they pledge themselves in some way to take up the outcomes of particiaption processes, will public participation be able to fulfil its promise. Given the high requirements for the organisation of public participation processes, they place a rather high demand on the participants. Consequently, when the participants’ contribution is not taken up, they will be less or not willing to participate in future participation processes.

We at the EIPP are convinced that only the careful analysis of participation process can help us better understand the potential and limitation of participation processes. Based on these insights, we aim to advise policy-makers and participation organisers about the best way forward to attain the goals they aim at.

For this task we can draw on the varied experience of the people working for the EIPP. They are a mixed group with different backgrounds, ranging from organisational psychology to management standard development to political science and politics.

We are always looking for new people to work with, new projects to work on. If you are interested in learning more please send me an email to info(a)participationinstitute.org.

Public participation exercises are getting more numerous. There are a huge number of citizen budgets all over Europe and online Pep-Net keeps an eye on what is happening. There are sites where practitioners can exchange best practice, such as ePractice, or projects which provide help in designing public particpiaton processes. The best one of the latter – as far as I know, and as always I am open for recommendations – is peopleandparticiipation.net, a project by Involve. (I’ll talk about p+p.net in a later post.)

These tools and projects have been extremely helpful for me to get a better understanding of what is going on in the participation scene and what characteristics a good participation process ought to have. This is only one side of the coin, however.

What is missing in this area is a systematic approach to the evaluation of participation. Most participation projects are evaluated, that is true. This evaluation – in my view – receives not enough attention. If you want to make current politics more democratic, a close look, a critical weighting of costs and benefits is necessary to reap the benefits theory promises for public participation. Without a look at participation which is open to find that participation is not working or too costly, we have only little support our conviction.

Unfortunately, still most participation processes do not factor in evaluation. They might internally evaluate the perceived success and/or problem. But most of this evaluation is either focussed on whether the methods used in a particular exercise worked. This is fine as long as indicators for what counts as ‘working’ were developed beforehand on the basis of expectations of all parties involved. However, that is rarely the case. Or evaluation is done in an ad hoc manner, where little methodological rigour is devoted to data collection and analysis. The reason is often the lack of resources available, as much of the evaluation ought to take place after the participation process has finished.

Therefore I have taken a close look at evaluation with the help of the Partnership for Public Participation (website is still being developed). We believe that a professional approach to the evaluation of public participation is necessary.

Our approach still is in development, but there are core principles which have been hinted at already:

• evaluation criteria ought to be developed before the process in cooperation with the
  • organisers of participation
  • the participants and
  • possibly a set of pre-defined criteria of the evaluators.

  This will allow a comprehensive assessment of the success of the participation process and aviod the use of a possibly inadequate framework.

• Indicators for the analysis ought ot focus on the
  • Values of the process and the organisers
  • The contens of the process
  • And the impact of the participatory processes
• The evaluation ought to make use of multiple methods. Relying on either qualitative or quantitative methods alone is unable to produce meaningful results. The methods could involve, among others, in-depth interviews, participant observation, preliminary questionnaires, focus group interviews and statistical analyses of attitudes.

If you have any recommendations for the development of a useful and flexible evaluation approach, please comment below or drop me a line. I am more than happy to discuss with you.

I have to write a project report on the uses of public participation in Europe. While I have done my reserach on western Europe, in particular Germany, the UK and Italy (with a bit of France thrown in), I have not looked very hard at central and eastern Europe.

This is what I am up to now. So I thought I could use my blog to note down some of my findings and make them hopefully accessible to a broader audience. Because it seems to me that the focus of participatoin practitioners is very much on the western democracies and those in the central and eastern part of Europe are often overlooked.

The Czech Republic
One interesting organisation is the Via Foundation, an offspring of the Foundation for a Civil Society in NY. It supports philantrophy, acts as a community organiser and in generally fosters citizens engagement.

They also have produced a small video about their work:

Another organisation is Agora Central Europe, who are very acitve in organising debate and participation processes in the Czech Republic. They seem to be more active in the field that I am interested in compared to Via Foundation, namely public participation in policy-making. Changing politics to a more democratic nature is definitely more in line with what I have been looking for.

They did a lot on community regeneration and planning. Their debate series, however, focuses on more explicitly political issues, as well.

Thirdly, I have stumbled upon CPKP, a community organising NGO in the Czech Republic. For some background on community organizing check out Wikipedia. It is all about getting people in a neighbourhood to act in their common interest. This can involve planning, but also economic development and political decisions (as long as they can be taken at the local/communal level).

Fourthly, and lastly for today, there is the Nadace rozvoje občanské společnosti, the foundataion for the development of a citizens’ society. They mainly fund and support third parties in the field of public participation.

It got a little short at the end there. But there will be more to come in the next days, when I do more in depth research.

Mr Bruns-Berenteig, CEO of Hafencity GmbH,  gave a very interesting presentation at the Hertie School of Government about the potential of private ownership in urban planning to produce public spaces. Talking about the development of Hafencity in Hamburg, he argued that it is possible to structure private law contracts in a manner that allows individuals to express their public rights.

This is an interesting notion, as this gives the public authorities a strong role in economically dominated developments. This is a welcome stand on the side of a city planner, and if it works, even better.

But for public authorities to have such a strong role, the spaces to be designed
in such a way must be economically so attractive and the public authorities must find themselves in a situation, which allows them to seriously negotiate with investors. In addition they must be very clear from the outset about their goals.

If these conditions are met you may be able to guarantee political activities and the right to demonstrate.Unfortunately, it seems that these conditions are rarely met. And, in addition, the eventual outcomes will only appear in practice. When the first cases go to court, only then will we
see whether a private law basis to guarantee the expression of civil rights is sufficient. But the formal idea seems at first sight a good approach to at least inserts some rights protections into the planning of new economic urban
spaces.

btw This is my first post from my iPod using the WordPress app. seems to work.

The European parliament in Strasbourg launched its very own internet TV station today. At EuroparlTV the European parliament will broadcast committee and plenary sessions as well as pre-produced pieces on current affairs.

The station will broadcast four channels:

• Your Parliament will provide information for people with a particular interest in th e EP – whatever that may be.
• Your Voice will present soundbites from ‘real’ EU citizens on current affairs.
• Young Europe is supposed to help children and young persons to better understand the EU.
• Parliament Live – I guess the title says it best: CSPAN for the EU. Plenary sessions and some committee meetings.

The last channel will be most likely for aficionados of long debates and might be very intersting to watch in all 23 languages. All of which will be provided either by dubbing or by subtitling the videos. I am not quite sure what the first channel will add to that but it started with broadcasting a piece on the ceiling that fell down in the parliament building in August, postponing the session there and making MEPs happy for not having to travel to Brussels.

EuroparlTV is a very welcome addition to the net, because it may help people to understand the workings of EU institutions a little bit better. At the same time it certainly will serve the EU as a information instrument – with a slight touch of propaganda. But that would probably take the intention too far.

I hope the expectations realise and citizens will at least furtively glance at EuroparlTV and maybe even then go and vote next June.

PS. Unfortunately, there seem to be some glitches on the technical side. Despite having reinstalled Flip4Mac several times, I cannot really get the site to work.

I have recently been talking about ideas for the graphical representation of debates. This seems a prefect application for the interactive web moving towards the semantic web and even further.

Now Tim has produced a Wordle cloud of Barack Obama’s Berlin speech . To keep the debate going, David Price of Debategraph illustrated the application of his tool to the same text on OpenToPersuation.

These examples show the different degrees of complexity in making debates more easily acessible. (On a personal side note, I have quickly thrown together a Wordle cloud of my PhD.) This is no novel undertaking as the info page of the Global Collaborative shows with a view to network analysis.

An easily to understand tool would need to be located somewhere between debategraph and Wordle in terms of complexity. It would be very helpful in encouraging public debate, as it could be used to inform citizens more broadly about current debates, the different arguments and their relationship, while keeping the resources necessary to undertstand key issues at a minimum. This would reduce the costs for public participation and thus hold the potential to lower the obstacles to getting involved in the debates.

These are not merely design issues, but it seems to me that there are numerous attempts to visualise information to make it more accessible. If the intuitive approach of (good) social media tools was to be combined with the substantive power of content mapping tools out there, the results would be highly useful in political and business deliberations.

There is a new entry by Steffan Höffken of Zebralog at Pep-Net praising the potential of mParticiaption as the logical next step after eParticipation:

Mobile Participation (mParticipation) seems to be the next step in ePartizipation. With the rising of the iPhone and other smart phones and combined with other features like GPS and Location Based Services the expectations for new applications for are high. Consequently mobile applications amplify eParticipation in an spatial and temporal dimension.

While reading this, I was wondering whether mParticipation is really that different from eParticipation. New devices, such as smartphones, and ubiquituous online access certainly add possibilities to engage in political processes while you are travelling. But how far does this  go beyond optimising existing eParticipation tools to be used with mobile devices?

I have the impression, that real life participation faces sufficient problems as it is. Getting people to participate, choosing participants, deciding on the adequate questions, methods of particiaption and eventual impact are still insufficiently thought through. So we must do a lot more work on these preconditions for mParticiaption, before it can really get off the ground. Some of these problems might be mitigated by eParticipation tools. Especially smart cross-media participation can help to manage large group processes.

But mParticipation will invariably face problems of the composition of the participants. The use of anonymous pre-paid SIM-cards (as advocated, for example, by AK Vorrat) and the impossiblity to identify who actually participates lead to legitimacy problems, when participation takes place at the communal or regional level. While the information of citizens and the transmission of personal data for e.g. petitions has a certain potential, participation remains locked in real life problems, which in my view deserve more of our attention.

Yesterday the Bertelsmann Foundation organised a very interesting conference on better regulation. In general this is a very laudable undertaking and the experiences reported are promising in parts and less promising in others.

In the afternoon, there was a session on public participation in the German political system. Finding this panel in such a conference is surprising if the other presentation focus on the Standard Cost Model was at first sight a surprise. But thinking about it, the involvement of citizens makes real sense as regulations can only profit from a reality rain check.

There are numerous legally engrained forms of citizen participation, especially in urban planning. More recently the spread of social media and Web 2.0 in combination with the growing perception (realisation?) that citizens are increasingly discontent with politics, has led to a resurgence of participatory approaches in other policy areas. I fully welcome this development, even though the way it is being implemented shows some interesting insights.

Yesterday, Mr Heuberger of Rheinland-Pfalz presented a very demcoratic and inclusive approach using, among other methods, citizen congresses in restructuring public administration. The idea was not only to consult with citizens to add expertise to the political process, but to take up all citizens’ concerns from early on.

Mr Heuberger identified four salient points for successful citizen participation

1. The seriousness of the process: the eventual impact and role of the citizen participation process must be clear.
2. Openness: the process must in principle be open to all citizens.
3. Transparency: at all stages of the process information must be freely available.
4. Communication: active communication is cruical for any successful and useful participation.

I fully agree. So there seems to be some learning going on. But he also mentioned the fear of political decision-makers of the citizens. They are either perceived to be not knowledgeable, the administration fears to be confronted with unwanted results or of becoming superfluous, as citizens take over their tasks. All those have mitigated in the process.

But these fears were somewhat reflected in the next presentation by Ms. Hawighorst of Niedersachsen, who reported on the consultative experiment on home care regulation. Instead of opening up consultations for everyone, the intention is to increase the expertise in the process without relinquishing control of the process. Accordingly, participation is restricted to expert consultation, even though they invited all experts in home care through a website instead of a select few coming to Hannover. Participation in this case, however, remains to be merely a tool to harvest information and knowledge and not a fully participatory process. The ‘experiment’ (in the words of Ms Hawighorst) merely uses new technological means to involve traditional interest group actors in the decision-making process, citiing the lack of knowledge of citizens as a reason. This is not very convincing as the experience from Rheinland-Pfalz shows and falls into what Arnstein has called ‘tokenism‘.

What is intersting about this project is that after the consultation, the ministry of social affairs is planning to use a wiki to enable those invited to the consultation to participate in the reformulation of the new law. This idea has already been used with the Police reform act in New Zealand. From Jun 23, 2008 there should me more information available www.heimgesetz.niedersachsen.de.

The third presentation by Mr Schallbruch focussed on the use of IT for consultation on the federal level. He admitted that the German government had not yet used a lot of participation tools, but was starting to heavily look into it. An online consultation on the future strategy of the German government’s IT strategy concerning citizen participation has been closed and there will be a report published sometime soon. So there is a development to be watched.

I havee been looking into project planning software for a littel project I am managing. While ProjectPier looks good, it does not seem to like to work with my WordPress theme.

I have thus decided to try and use Basecamp by lovely 37signals.com. Very nice and intuitive user interface and sufficient complexity for me. What I would like to see now is an opportunity to link To Do lists and Milestones to each other, or simply link To Do elements to the built-in calender. Otherwise I have to add most thing twice, it seems. But maybe I am just too hard headed to understand simple and elegant Basecamp.

Beyond that slight criticism, I am very happy with basecamp and the 24 USD per month are not too bad given the current exchange rate.  So I guess, I will stick to Basecamp for now.