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.
