Future Here Now: Demanding better public engagement, Part 2
Coming Soon
As I mentioned last week, I am heading to Denver next week to lead a Learning Lab on Digital Public Engagement at the National Planning Conference, and in conjunction with that I’m releasing my next book, Online Public Engagement. So this week I’m going to share a few selections from that book.
The key message of my public engagement work, over the last 20 + years, has been that no one should be settling for the antiquated, elitist, useless public engagement that we have been getting for generations. Given our technology, our information access and our expectation that our opinions matter, it’s unreasonable to think that anyone should be satisfied with a three-minute screed at a mic in a council chamber. Whether we work for a government or not, none of us should accept this status quo.
Yesterday’s selection focused on the type of public engagement I have labelled Telling — the kind that spews a lot of information and, too often, promises a voice that ends up screaming into the void. Today we will look at the flip side: the kind of public engagement that gives you lots of ways to say what you think, but not in a way that will actually make the plan or development or whatever better. And as with any broken promise, it all sounds good at first, but ruins the relationship later.
Asking public engagement turns the direction of the flow of information to the reverse. In an Asking initiative, the organization leading the project is seeking the public’s ideas, wishes, desires or recommendations. Surveys, both in-person and digital, may be used to gauge the public’s opinion, and brainstorming-type activities may generate lots of new ideas. Public participants may be asked to identify their vision for the future of their communities, to compile a list of wished-for improvements, to mark maps to indicate where they think certain land uses should go, or to work with designers to sketch development concepts. Participants often sat that Asking events were enjoyable, even fun, at least immediately afterward.
While the public is largely passive in a Telling public engagement activity, Asking usually involves silence from public officials and staff, once they have opened the initiative. Background information may or may not be provided; if it is, it may be rudimental, and understanding of it is often not required from participants. Little guidance or direction is given to the public – their statements are treated the same whether they fall within physical and legal realities or not.
As a result, Asking public engagement often creates diverging results. On one hand, participants often feel that they have done something good — they may feel energized, enthusiastic, and optimistic about the future of their community. However, participants may become discouraged later when they realize that their ideas were not incorporated into the plan, or when their vision fails to come to pass. This can lead to growing cynicism about public engagement, often manifested in statements like “all that public stuff is just for show” or “they didn’t really care what we wanted.” This also makes future public engagement harder, as people may be less willing to give new initiatives the benefit of the doubt.
From the staff and official perspective, Asking engagement may create two significant problems. In some cases, staff may find that many of the items on the public’s “wish list” are not feasible — laws will not permit it, required conditions are beyond the control of the agency, market economics will not work and funding on the scale that would be needed isn’t available. In such cases, the desires that were elicited through the Asking are quietly ignored, or consigned to an appendix and not referenced in the rest of the plan or project.
In other cases, a plan may consist of little more than a list of the public’s desires, with no mention of the fact that their “vision” may not be achievable, or the conditions that would be necessary to allow it to happen aren’t possible. And they usually provide little information on why the castles in the sky will not be coming to ground
In either case, we get the same results: (1) the final plan does not do what the public said during the Asking, and (2) this silence or uselessness is interpreted by the public as an indicator of the irrelevance of this and future Asking-style public feedback events.
And the cycle continues.