Open Government - public participation strategy: advice

Recommendation 2

Embed public participation and community engagement into how politics is done in Scotland

Engaging the public in politics requires deliberation, participation and community engagement to be embedded into the political landscape includes joining up participatory processes. Fiona Garven highlights the danger of starting processes then walking away to the next new shiny innovation, she says about PB: ‘Done badly they’re rubbish but done well it’s a game changer’.

Political actors need to recognise that the returns from participatory processes can benefit for longer than the process itself. Talat Yaqoob reminds us that following these processes citizens often find themselves unsure what to do with their newfound skillset next. She warns that there is two ways engagement can go: participants can become engaged and go on to do other things, or become more disillusioned with the state of political participation.

Talat and others believe that we need to invest in lifelong learning in political education. Build a network of political educators, not just at time of a vote, but invest in ongoing engagement and deliberation to develop understanding, citizens that can be critical of information and curiosity within communities.

Actions:

• Government needs to encourage COSLA to mainstream cultural orientation to participative working
• Employ community workers
• Support participants of bigger participatory processes (like CA) to utilise their skills moving forward, ie in their communities, set up their own processes, or continue in a policy shaping role.
• Continue with FM (or senior politicians and key actors) daily or weekly briefings
• Enable citizens to feed into all points of the decision making – don’t just consult, feed into implementation and evaluation stages too.
• Invest more in the local governance review and continuing participatory initiatives, as well as the need to rethink our system of power, finance and governance.
• Develop community support services: Community Development Services or in the formation of a Centre for Participatory Democracy in Scotland as recommended by the COSLA Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy (COSLA 2014). For instance, in the past the Community Empowerment Network did this or Link up programme^[8]
• Go into the communities in order to support people taking part. Do not expect citizens to want to or have time to get involved in formal and lengthy processes – but if they do, pay people for their time and work.
• Invest in a Centre for Participatory Democracy or equivalent to provide consistent and ongoing research, guidance, training, standard setting and advice. This would be supported by the government but is ultimately outwith their control.