Open Government - public participation strategy: advice

Effective and proportionate engagement

Participation and engagement activities have taken place all round Scotland. Some problems worth noting were created by the Covid-19 response and not Covid itself. These include:

• Consultation fatigue which was exacerbated by online delivery.
• Exacerbated existing inequalities – digital exclusion, mental health, poverty, and lack of key resources: time, confidence, language, knowledge, information.
• Increased burden on women has resulted in many women, especially carers/parents, being unable to engage in any sort of consultative process.
• People losing jobs, in precarious work, living in poverty, childcare issues, disabled people, older people, black and minority ethnic groups unequally getting the virus but also impacted economically, socially and mentally.
• Place based grants – Coutts (2020) report that funding which is limited to particular geo-spaces means the scope of the response in some areas has been limited.
• Linking up groups undertaking similar processes/volunteers has been difficult due to the difference in language used to describe what they are doing – community action, community engagement, community development, voluntary, social action, democratic and social innovations - people do not necessarily know what these are and what they mean for them.

While there is a need to engage the public more widely in thinking about how they understand Covid, not just in terms of public health but also the wider long-term implications, much work already exists. A huge amount of data has been generated by the third sector, research centres, local government, ScotGov and community groups – the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Corra Foundation, GDA, Inclusion Scotland, Enable, the Poverty Alliance, Edinburgh Poverty Commission, Child Poverty Action Group, Carnegie Trust, Scottish Community Development Centre, Scottish Poverty and Inequality Research Unit, the WISE Centre and Engender, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers have gathered people’s lived experiences, sent out surveys, consulted, gathered and analysed. There is rich and varied sources of evidence on how peoples’ experiences of Covid and importantly, it is being told in people’s own voices^[4].

The Scottish Government has itself gathered 4,000 ideas and 18,000 comments (Webster 2020)^[5] over Summer 2020. This consultation, combined and supported with what has been gathered by ‘people on the ground’ means that they the government is well prepared to co-produce and collectively work with communities to inform and feedback suitable solutions for gaps in their areas.

Participation is not always required or appropriate. Tokenistic, tick boxing exercises are to be avoided if there is not a strategy for taking the findings from that consultation or process further. There needs to be a plan and an understanding that something will come from taking part – not necessarily that everything that was recommended will be implemented, but that people’s time is valued.