Open Government - public participation strategy: advice

Recommendation 8

Invest in the skills necessary for the delivery of this vision

Capacity and skills building are required at all levels to ensure that opportunities available to communities can be made use of. Learning and training around facilitation techniques needs to be supported outside of government.

Support and training should also be available for organisers and facilitators who play a crucial role in driving, shaping and supporting community processes. The skillset facilitators need has widened beyond steering participation and chairing meetings to encompass different approaches to collaboration and interaction (see Bynner et al. 2017; Escobar 2011). Facilitators in formal process are inherent to creating equitable and inclusive experience. They need to support those sharing personal experiences, draw out those more reticent to getting involved and ensure that participants understand and feel part of the process.

Talat Yaqoob would like to see people becoming engaged in what is happening in Parliament in different ways, and as a consequence, becoming critically aware ‘politics is theirs to own’ but also develop an anti-fake news population that are able to recognise misinformation. Fiona McHardy too is concerned about the spread of misinformation and lack of trust in scientific evidence. The anti-expert agenda is finding its feet during Covid as people struggle to align guidelines with their lives.

Developing critical skills that allow people to review evidence, recognise false information and become politically savvy citizens along with setting higher standards for the media to do a better job of reporting news and political actors to speak a language that people understand. Again, here Fiona McHardy emphasises the need for jargon busting, policy learning, and political education. Such schemes and initiatives cost money but as Fiona Garven says, it builds a skill base which starts to become more cost effective after a while because you’ve got learning and critical skills in the public and in communities.

Action:

• provide training for civil servants and local authorities about what form of participation is appropriate, how to work with communities and join up various organisations
• provide training and signposting for community responders to develop the skills they already have by linking up their findings with the right resources and able to feed into a wider strategy
• a Scottish Centre of Participatory Governance which oversees and provides this form of training and support would be entirely appropriate. Countries like Denmark, Belgium and France invest in participatory skills in these ways.