3. Making systems change democratic

This chapter tackles the opportunities and approaches to integrate diverse voices into the systems change process especially when discussing alternative futures and framing problems. Systems change and innovation in the public realm is increasingly dependent on the ability to engage and productively interact with stakeholders, and to coproduce solutions with a wide range of societal actors such as citizens, companies and non-governmental organisations (Bommert, 2010; Eggers and Singh, 2009). As such, the interest in citizen involvement has risen with the external environmental pressure for change in public service delivery. Government is not expected to ‘know best’ which makes co-creating with citizens crucial for positive outcomes. Thus, engaging with citizens can help include ‘real life evidence’ in the decision-making process and engage with what really matters on the ground (Rabeharisoa, Moreira et al. 2014, Smith-Merry 2012).

    

In addition to this, previous chapters have argued that systems change in the public sector has to engage with the future in new ways (in more of a dynamic, anticipatory format) and one of the ways to do that is to frame the discussion around public value. Value discussions are effective (creating common ground and buy-in for change) if they are held in a collaborative setting. This means that different – sometimes opposing values – can surface connected to the innovation process; and value trade-offs are almost impossible to avoid in the context of wicked problems. The previous chapter discussed ways in which these kinds of value trade-offs can be managed in a productive way and the roles of both civil servants and politicians in the process. Yet, as outlined before, in a rapidly changing environment, external stakeholders have to also be engaged within the process to partake in these value discussions.

At the same time, public engagement on even less complex topics is rife with problems, if designed poorly: it tends to tailor to people who have skills and time to participate or is captured by individuals with very specific interests to protect.1 Thus, even when there is a need to reach a consensus on broader systemic issues, only a narrow set of voices are heard. Consequently, new methods to involve diverse groups in discussing systems change especially considering future-oriented changes are needed. Traditional consultation mechanisms alone will not suffice: increasing complexity in public sector problems has seen the emergence of a variety of democratic practices and new forms of civic participation (Fung 2006). A forthcoming OECD report on innovative citizen participation focuses on in-depth deliberative processes for public decision-making, drawing on close to 600 international case studies to analyse what works, develop principles of good practice, and address the salient question of institutionalisation. This builds on previous work to clarify the core definitions around the concept of open government, as in the OECD Recommendation of the Council Open Government (2017). The Recommendation includes two provisions addressing innovative and inclusive stakeholder participation (Box 3.1).

Box 3.1. Key definitions in the field of open government

The Recommendation of the Council on Open Government (2017) defines the following concepts:

• Open Government: a culture of governance that promotes the principles of transparency, integrity, accountability and stakeholder participation in support of democracy and inclusive growth.

• Open State: when the executive, legislature, judiciary, independent public institutions, and all levels of government – recognising their respective roles, prerogatives, and overall independence according to their existing legal and institutional frameworks – collaborate, exploit synergies, and share good practices and lessons learned among themselves and with other stakeholders to promote transparency, integrity, accountability, and stakeholder participation, in support of democracy and inclusive growth.

• Open government strategy: a document that defines the open government agenda of the central government and/or of any of its sub-national levels, as well as that of a single public institution or thematic area, and that includes key open government initiatives, together with short, medium and long-term goals and indicators;

• Open government initiatives: actions undertaken by the government, or by a single public institution, to achieve specific objectives in the area of open government, ranging from the drafting of laws to the implementation of specific activities such as online consultations;

• The policy cycle: includes 1) identifying policy priorities 2) drafting the actual policy document, 3) policy implementation; and 4) monitoring implementation and evaluation of the policy’s impacts;

• Stakeholders: any interested and/or affected party, including: individuals, regardless of their age, gender, sexual orientation, religious and political affiliations; and institutions and organisations, whether governmental or non-governmental, from civil society, academia, the media or the private sector;

• Stakeholder participation: all the ways in which stakeholders can be involved in the policy cycle and in service design and delivery, including:

  • Information: an initial level of participation characterised by a one-way relationship in which the government produces and delivers information to stakeholders. It covers both on-demand provision of information and “proactive” measures by the government to disseminate information.

  • Consultation: a more advanced level of participation that entails a two-way relationship in which stakeholders provide feedback to the government and vice-versa. It is based on the prior definition of the issue for which views are being sought and requires the provision of relevant information, in addition to feedback on the outcomes of the process.

  • Engagement: when stakeholders are given the opportunity and the necessary resources (e.g. information, data and digital tools) to collaborate during all phases of the policy-cycle and in the service design and delivery.

• Open government literacy: the combination of awareness, knowledge, and skills that public officials and stakeholders require to engage successfully in open government strategies and initiatives.

Source: Recommendation of the Council on Open Government, 2017, C(2017)140 - C/M(2017)22.

The role of data, including open government data, and digital tools to improve public service design and facilitate citizen involvement in co-creating solutions through crowdsourcing of citizen science for pressing problems has also been the focus of recent research (OECD, 2018; (OECD, 2019[1])). These approaches are in line with the principles of the 2014 OECD Recommendation on Digital Government Strategies (OECD, 2014[2]).

The abovementioned new ways of working together with stakeholders have become very important in the innovation space (Tõnurist, 2018; Winickoff and Pfotenhauer, 2018), to not only canvas the needs and values that development has to follow, but also to spur on creativity and cognitive variance in ideation. Policy instruments that show promise here as a means of addressing societal goals, challenges and values during the innovation process are connected to participatory agenda-setting, co-creation (e.g. in the form of test beds, experimentation), and value-based design and standardisation. A lot of the new participatory tools and methods are now digital and allow to reach people much more widely. Even so, this is not always easy as these technologies can impact citizen participation in a variety of ways (Lember, Brandsen and Tõnurist, 2019), sometimes empowering citizens to partake in decision making and value discussions, but not always (Surva and Tõnurist, 2017; Kattel, Lember and Tõnurist, 2019). Therefore, to make these value discussions effective we need to look at how governments engage with citizens around the future, how governments have dialogue (two- or multi-way) discussions with stakeholders about these issues, and how to integrate public value as a central topic to this systems change process.

Engaging citizens in futures

Expertise versus dialogic participatory processes

Participatory processes in public decision-making have become widespread over the last four decades (OECD, 2016a) and, as outlined in Box 3.1, there are different levels of stakeholder participation. Different levels of stakeholder participation from information sharing, consultation, and more developed forms of engagement have taken root in government. For instance, participatory budgeting (PB) is now almost commonplace (PB’s history stretches back to 1980s Brazil) in many local governments in the US and Europe (Speer, 2012). Participatory budgeting empowers citizens to make specific allocation decisions in municipal or national budgets by allowing them to identify local problems that usually fall outside official priorities. Working with public officials and other experts, citizens develop a solution that is then subject to a popular vote alongside other competing proposals. In other instances, stakeholder participation takes the form of one-way consultations (where the state extracts information and asks opinions about already established plans). This has been the case for many first generation digital participation tools, especially using social media platforms (e.g., Mergel 2012). As such, “citizen participation can take a variety of forms and may be understood as the interaction, either formal or informal, between governments, citizens and stakeholders (civil society organisations [CSOs], academia, the private sector, etc.) at the initiative of either, that is used to inform a specific policy outcome in a manner that ensures well-informed decision making and avoids policy capture” (OECD, 2016a). Hence, the participatory processes are characterised as methods used to actively engage all members of a group in a decision making process, with equal opportunities to participate. As such, participatory processes are also not necessarily characterised by the presentation of expertise.2 Nevertheless, there are important dimensions to take into account to make stakeholder participation productive. For example, in contemporary participation theory the latter dimensions have been deemed important to the process (Kelty et al. 2015): (1) the educative dividend of participation; (2) access to decision-making and goal setting in addition to task completion; (3) the control or ownership of resources produced by participation; (4) its voluntary character and the capacity for exit; (5) the effectiveness of voice; (6) the use of metrics for understanding or evaluating participation; (7) the collective, affective experience of participation.

While participatory processes such as participatory budgeting are increasingly visible and (rightly) celebrated (Talpin 2012; Gonçalves, 2014), by and large they remain at the margins of public sector decision making and evidence for large scale benefits to mobilising politically inactive citizens, efficient and effective budgetary policy as well as positive effects on citizens (e.g., civic education, democratic attitudes) is scarce, in western countries in particular (see discussion in Schneider and Busse, 2019). Public participation efforts in government are also often focused on specific issues where public interest is already high (e.g., environment or consumer protection) (OECD, 2001). It is rare that government involves itself in a dialogic process, although, a variety of channels are available to engage in dialogue with citizens (OECD, 2016a). Nevertheless, participatory efforts aim to increase government transparency and motivate citizens to take greater ownership in political processes (Skelcher and Torfing, 2010; Kim and Lee, 2016; Carlo Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes, 2012), and have not supplanted the principal form of decision making in democratic societies: decision making by experts.

The primacy of decision making by experts likely has its origins in the Enlightenment and the empirical search for truth. Certainty was an objective for which expertise was the solution. The full history of experts and political decision-making is explored elsewhere (see various perspectives in Edelenbos, Van Buuren, and van Schie, 2011; Christiano, 2012; Font, Wojcieszak, and Navarro, 2015; Tellmann, 2017; Ingold, and Gschwend, 2014), but suffice to say that a legacy of 20th century democracies is the interknit edifices of science and politics. However, as one senior Finnish civil servant recently said when reflecting on the complexity of today’s challenges, “Perhaps the Enlightenment project of certainty is over”. This does not mean that science and other forms of expertise have no role to play in informing public decisions about complex challenges such as climate change or aging societies, but what it does suggest is that expertise alone is not enough; that the public must be engaged in a dialogic public process.

A dialogic process starts with the assumption that various interpersonal communication features (e.g., risk, trust, positive regard, empathy, etc.) are necessary in order for people to have rewarding, honest, and meaningful interactions (Kent, 2017; Kent and Lane 2017). Dialogue, then, is an interaction between the state and stakeholders that can be facilitated, but also experiential and open-ended in a sense that the government does not engage in a one-way communication process or consultation, it joins within an open-ended dialogue. It is relational in principle and can be most easily described in two-way social media use that many public organisations have now adopted (Navarro, Moreno and Zerfass, 2018).

Stakeholder involvement in the decision-making process can have a positive influence on the policy perceptions of citizens, which contributed to resilience of the policy change process (Blackstock et al., 2012). Involving a variety of stakeholders can produce shared, socially constructed perceptions about policy alternatives (see Chapter 2.1 on the importance of problem framing). What then happens to those alternatives? Should citizens get a say? Policymaking results from the exercise of power. If doors are open to citizen input, there has to be room for exchange – dialogue – making the distribution of power polyarchic (i.e., invested in multiple parties) (Dunlop 2015). This also means citizens should be able to provide input into the action chosen. The more personalised government interactions become, the more government is reliant on direct collaboration with the citizen, and the power to make choices on policy is shared rather than imposed (see Box 3.1).

Sometimes citizens are invited to have a dialogic participatory process based on their experience-based knowledge (Lehoux, Daudelin and Abelson, 2012), but are asked to go beyond their personal views during the process, to be objective (ibid.), and to help frame futures that they do not even know. Participation does not take away from the uncertainty, but it may introduce a common understanding of what kind of futures a community would like to see. This does not necessarily mean these futures will emerge, but it can start directing both the governments’ and societies’ actions towards the desired futures. Yet, dialogic processes do not only deliver positive results: poly-centricity and actor diversity can also make the process less flexible and adaptable as more time has to be spent on consensus making, and more rigid rules established to make discussions possible (Capano and Woo 2017).

When decisions are time bound, it may be difficult to reach common ground in time. So, what would help – more information, better-framed questions, and facilitation? The answer is contextual, specific to the systemic issue at hand. Different levels of government may create different opportunities to experiment with how to construct dialogic processes that balance expert knowledge with public knowledge.

Deliberative Process

Another form of engaging citizens in value debates is through deliberative processes, where deliberation around evidence is central to decision making. They are a form in which public value can be discussed with citizens in depth (for example, what might the future of our community look like, in terms of transportation, housing etc). Shared values can be one of the key outcomes of a deliberation process (Kenter et al., 2016) and thus, the approaches role in value-based systems change should be explored. Case 1 in Chapter 4 on citizen assemblies and citizen reference panels in Canada highlights how deliberation can help tackle some of the toughest and most divisive issues in public policy, in which complex ‘values conflict’ or ingrained political self-interest is involved (for example amalgamating municipalities, infrastructure projects, housing legislation).

Figure 3.1. Potential outcomes of a deliberative process

Source: Kenter et al. 2016.

There are many design elements of deliberative processes that are technical in nature, such as whether or not sortition should be used (i.e. a lottery) to select participants, which was the case in ancient Athens (Dowlen, 2008). How and when participants interact with subject matter experts and specific kinds of materials such as budgets or forecasts is another important consideration. Also significant is how outcomes are prioritised, vetted and acted upon by the relevant authorities (including political leadership) and how the results of such a process are communicated to the public, especially those with a direct stake in what is decided (e.g., Schiavo, Villafiorita, and Zancanaro, 2019). The mechanisms by which the equality of all voices to be recognised, especially among the disenfranchised, marginalised or otherwise not conditioned to participating in a public forum must be established and carefully followed. Trust is a key factor in ensuring equal participation, as discussed in Lafont (2015). Deliberation depends on participants having a shared understanding about what the nature of the challenge is and what is at stake by working to solve it (source). Deliberation becomes a distinct activity from conversation when all participants are deeply invested in the outcome of the process and actively working to ensure its integrity. Most definitions refer to four features which distinguish deliberation: (1) encountering diverse viewpoints; (2) drawing on external evidence or expertise; (3) engaging in public reasoning and; (4) reaching informed and considered, collective, judgements (Bächtiger et al. 2018). Another approach to deliberation is defined by Stanford and the University of Texas academics, James Fishkin and Robert Luskin (2005, 285) who provide an instructive framework for identifying a deliberative process. For them, the root of deliberation is ‘weighing,’ which could be collective, individual, or both, involving discussion, rumination, or both. For the present purposes, we take deliberation to be a weighing of competing considerations through a discussion that is:

• informed (and thus informative). Arguments should be supported by appropriate and reasonably accurate factual claims.

• balanced. Arguments should be met by contrary arguments.

• conscientious. The participants should be willing to talk and listen, with civility and respect.

• substantive. Arguments should be considered sincerely on their merits, not how they are made or who is making them.

• comprehensive. All points of view held by significant portions of the population should receive attention.

This framework describes how an exchange of information should happen in a deliberative process, but not what that process should look like. The design of a deliberative process must be contextual; it must respond to the peculiarities of the stakeholders involved and be “sized” appropriately for the specific task. There are also numerous models of deliberative processes, some of which are more appropriate for certain types of policy problems and for certain points of the policy cycle than others. Despite the variety of approaches, there are nonetheless core principles of good practice and a minimum set of criteria which defines deliberative processes. The models and principles are detailed in the forthcoming OECD report on deliberative processes. Case study 4.1. on citizen reference panels and assemblies gives an example of how deliberation has worked.

From engaging citizens in co-creation to citizen self-organisation

New initiatives also aim to deepen community engagement and co-create or co-produce solutions directly with citizens. Co-creation refers to the active involvement of end-users in various stages of the production process and thus, the term is more specific than the broad concept of participation, which could also refer to passive involvement (OECD (2011; Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers, 2015). For example, in Italy, Laboratori di Quartiere (Neighbourhood Labs) aim to shift away from the paradigm of “smart governance” towards a collaborative approach, requiring citizens not just to collaborate on the use of urban spaces, but to also become part of the ongoing transformation. In Canada, reference panels, citizen assemblies and commissions (see Case Study 1) have been used to address complex problems, where different values can be in conflict or the self-interest of decision makers may undermine the legitimacy of their decisions. This is an in-depth, time-intensive format of engagement that can unearth new perspectives to policy problems and make clear what communities actually value. And, if what they value is ignored by government, in many cases citizens take control of service development as part of a community-based initiative, self-organisation (Boonstra and Boelens, 2011; van Meerkerk, Boonstra, and Edelenbos, 2013) or because of retreating government (Tõnurist and De Tavernier 2017). This is a form of local resilience and can be seen in a variety of community-based initiatives, social enterprises, citizen initiatives, cooperative movements, etc. (Edelenbos, van Meerkerk, and Schenk, 2016). To a degree, we can see self-organisation emerging “that is not imposed or determined by one single actor, but is rather the result of a multitude of complex and non-linear interactions between various elements” (Van Meerkerk et al. 2013, 1632). Various aspects of this are described in Case Study 7 concerning the Knowledge Action Program of the water governance system in Amsterdam coordinated by AGV/Waternet. The program and supporting activities encompass both publicly lead actions and citizen self-organisation to benefit the transition towards a more sustainable and resilient city by integrating knowledge development into co-creation projects in a multi-stakeholder fashion.

Box 3.2. Co-designing services with citizens

Asker Welfare Lab – Norway

Asker Welfare Lab is a new concept for service delivery centred solely on the citizen, in which all relevant municipal services, together with external partners – the Investment Team – invest together in a person’s welfare.

In 2013, the Asker municipality participated in a project with the Norwegian Centre of Design and Architecture (DOGA) and LiveWork Studio on service design as a method to reshape social housing. The purpose of the project was to create a new direction for social housing services under the Head

ing “Housing Office of the Future”. It quickly became clear to the municipality that citizens’ needs in complex housing and living situations were not adequately met and the problem was too narrowly defined, focusing on just housing. Municipal workers found they could not achieve their objective within the traditional service model in an adequate manner. The partners reframed the project and agreed future services should have a citizen-centric focus and the public sector should adopt an investor-like mind-set. Before launching the lab, the investment thinking was piloted in 2014 by a new department established within the municipality: the “Citizen Square”. With the new principles in place, the municipality developed the model for the service concept of the Asker Welfare Lab.

This is a de facto redefinition of the ‘value’ of a person’s welfare as a stake in their future outcomes. Thus, the lab takes an investment mind-set and treats citizens as co-investors. The aim is to improve the living standards of vulnerable individuals, thereby bettering the quality of life of each person and family in the programme. Most importantly, experts have to partner with the citizens whose lives they want to change, and the programme uses the motto, “No decision about me shall be taken without me”. Public sector investment is closely monitored through a new form of reporting, focusing on the realisation of outcomes.

The lab empowers frontline civil servants, as investors, to work across silos to map and identify citizens’ comprehensive needs. To this end, a new planning matrix was designed to allow for structured conversations between the citizen and the investment team. This approach helps to uncover the real nature of the problem. For example, in one case civil servants were working on a more stable housing situation, while the citizen’s needs stemmed from the immediate threat of losing a driving licence. While this was not a “municipal responsibility”, it was clear that the person’s overall situation would greatly benefit from more targeted help. Investors therefore need an overview of the issues citizens face and must sometimes take risks and go beyond their usual remits, in the hope of attaining greater rewards. For this, the lab uses innovative tools.

Source: OECD 2018.

As suggested above, citizen engagement at the level of shared decision-making invites a reflection on a shifting profile of citizen. Citizens should no longer act rationally in their own self-interest (as is the current assumption behind policymaking guided by classical economics), but be expected to take care of the interests of all other citizens in their community. Voting and paying taxes will not be the predominant expressions of citizen engagement. Citizens could address public concerns as part of their regular activities.

Citizens might begin to think of a portfolio of activities in which they take part outside the home. One would be work, the other would be policy making and others could include more traditional forms of engagement, such as volunteering. Seen this way, governments might begin to reconsider how they support citizen engagement and self-organisation. For instance, childcare, elderly care and transport are obvious needs. Borrowing from academia, honoraria (i.e. small monetary considerations) could be offered to citizens, not as a form of payment for services rendered, but as a way to demonstrate the value of active and productive engagement.

The ‘citizen/policymaker’ is a blended identity that stands in contrast to today’s largely binary system of government and the governed. While it was practiced to some extent by the ancient Greeks, the knowledge and systems that support this kind of participation have largely been forgotten. The nature of today’s challenges, marked by uncertainty and ambiguity, challenge the dominant systems of decision making currently in place. Phenomena such as misinformation and disinformation, climate change, diversifying and aging populations, declining public budgets and digitalisation are pressuring old governance models, and the fractures are showing. Citizen engagement in a deliberate, well-structured, government-wide manner is a promising approach to promoting progress.

Toward shared facts and values

Chapter 2 outlined the importance of a shared understanding of policy problems and missions, without which, it is difficult to attach values to them. What if the problems that have surfaced are based on false evidence or no evidence at all, based on perception alone? Policymaking is not only a technical exercise of attaining evidence and expertise, but also an exercise of ‘practical rationality’ – “a communicative or deliberative process within which ethical and moral concerns” emerge and are addressed (Sanderson 2009). Manipulation of truth has always existed. The challenges today are caused by the rapid and increasing spread of misinformation and disinformation, which are not discussed in this report in detail. This matters because identifying the problems can help dictate how participation can be helpful, as well as how to avoid negative consequences of increased citizen participation

Today, many democracies are struggling with diverging opinions about what is true and what is fake. For some political leaders, “fake news” has become a mantra and a weapon with which they can attack a consensus around some difficult policy challenges (e.g., climate change or immigration). Politicians’ ability to both benefit from and reinforce polarisation can help remove shared facts – in the end, changes in how information is shared is a big driver of misinformation (even if it is not politicians or governments spreading it directly). New technologies that help spread misinformation and increase polarisation, undermine the media and scientific communities, two pillars that have traditionally disseminated shared facts and consensus. It also tarnishes the authority of experts, whose information and insight can help shape a public debate.

Many who are concerned about how to stem the erosion of shared facts3 are at a loss about how to confront a phenomenon that is as diffuse as the claim of fake news itself. Governments are finding themselves in a difficult position: while the threat posed by the erosion of shared facts is certainly a relevant government concern, governance responses are not self-evident, particularly since government should not take the sole role in deciding what the “truth” is or is not. Along with a lack of shared facts, suspicion and presumption work to undermine democratic systems. Suspicion and presumption both stem from considering and treating important issues at arm’s length. For those who actively engage in a participatory process, it is hard to maintain a suspicion about the motives of others or presume that their intent is in some way malicious. Promoting civic engagement (through participatory processes and deliberative democracy) is, however, one avenue governments can pursue.

Civic engagement, specifically through robust participatory processes, may be one restorative pathway. This is because participation disrupts the echo chamber enabled by social media and partisan news sources. Under the right conditions, participatory processes can personalise contrary or contradicting points of view and force people to ponder how perspectives can become so divergent. It also situates contentious issues within a broader framework of understanding the causes, not just symptoms, of challenges facing society. A participatory process can make decision making, which has traditionally happened out of public view, much more transparent, so that everyone can see the factors that have led to decisions that affect their lives.

The most pressing questions concern the conditions necessary for participatory processes to improve the discourse. For example, the relevant factors have to do with the selection process, if applicable, of who participates (such as through sortition); how much time participants are given to discuss issues; the engagement of experts to support the process; etc. Ultimately, participatory processes are complex interactions. If the processes are not designed, communicated and carried out carefully, they may even have negative outcomes, including related to mis/disinformation. Citizen participation mechanisms should also prioritise transparency. For example, communication should not be limited to a statement of outcome, but should include a description of processes illustrating who was involved, how issues were deliberated and what compromises were reached in order to take a decision.

Again, the role of citizen engagement is to reduce the distance between the individual citizen and the broader challenges facing society. Participation asks them to take a position based on shared understanding, not just individual opinion. Deliberation alongside experts with shared evidence balances the authority of those who traditionally enjoy power and those who are commonly marginalised.

Embracing Process Uncertainty in Collectively Framing Policy Problems

Michael Mauboussin, a Managing Director at Credit Suisse and Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Sante Fe Institute once said on Bloomberg TV that risk is not knowing what will happen next, but understanding what the probability distribution (i.e. the likelihood of different scenarios actually playing out) looks like. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is not knowing what will happen next and not knowing what the probability distribution looks like. Uncertainty is increasingly rife in today’s complex world (e.g., Ahir, Bloom, and Furceri, 2018).

While it has traditionally been understood that the only source of uncertainty is a lack of scientific knowledge, scholars now acknowledge the permanent nature of uncertainty in some policy fields and also the uncertainty inherent in the framing of policy issues by different actors (Raadgever et al. 2011). When decision making happens out of sight, decision makers bear the uncertainty burden alone and are individually held accountable for failures even though it was impossible to know the probability of success or the potential for unintended consequences. Stakeholder participation in decision making, to a degree, shares the burden of uncertainty with the population. If a broad network of citizens agree, not just through voting, but through active engagement in deciding that a course of action must be taken, then they too share responsibility for the outcome. Empowered citizens cannot simply say, “politics is broken” and remove themselves from having any responsibility in the future or direction of society. This helps decision makers weigh scenarios where there is perhaps no clear good outcome or no clear beneficiary to a political process. Other than political equality, this shared burden is perhaps one of the most important effects of sortition and citizen panels: everyone is affected by, and must be aware of, uncertainty.

It also stands to reason that by engaging more stakeholders, a probability distribution (how likely different scenarios are to happen) may become clearer. The effects of decisions will be considered by a greater number of individuals in real terms (not just in the abstract of a yes/no vote) and thereby transform uncertainties into risks. Therefore uncertainty can be good because it makes processes more robust.

At the same time, the wickedness of problems is further exacerbated when the (scientific) uncertainty about the problems and/or solutions increases, but also when there are several points of conflict between many stakeholders. The variety of actors bringing different perspectives to the policy making process can be a source of uncertainty in and of itself. Uncertainty can result from an inherent unknown in the system, lack of contextual or specific knowledge or the difference in the perception or knowledge of various actors – the lack of shared facts (Brugnach and Ingman, 2011).4 As a result, the challenge for decision makers becomes two-fold: first, they must determine how to proceed when a course of action is especially unclear; and second, they must communicate to constituents in a way that still inspires confidence even when they do not know what will happen next and what the probability of success will be.

Participatory everything?

Should every political decision necessitate a collective, participatory process? Clearly not. The security and intelligence domains, diplomacy, and other sensitive policy questions are obvious areas where decision-making must reside within government.

What about governance at city level? Should stakeholder participation be present in every policy decision? This is less clear. Security, for instance might seem to be the sole domain of the executive as might immigration-related policymaking. Community policing benefits from stakeholder participation and the collective shaping of police procedures. Immigration is a domain where policymaking may be set at the state or federal level, but its impacts are realised at the municipal level; immigrants will arrive in cities looking for opportunities whether or not the state wants them to be there. Transportation (or better mobility) planning also affects everyone in multiple areas of their lives, not just how they move within the city. Housing and urban development is another area that could appear to only be of concern for wealthier individuals in the area. However, history is littered with examples of how housing and transportation policy were effectively weaponised against marginalised populations.

So, while cities may be the ideal location to connect citizens and decision makers through effective participatory processes, this suggests a very different approach to governance and the structure of government. It also demands citizens be educated not only about their duty to participate, but also how to be a productive, engaged citizen and the opportunities this affords. This suggests an urban vocational training that is more than one class in high school on civics; training that might be more akin to ongoing professional development as citizens expand the areas in which they have shared decision-making authority. Here, however the sharing of power often prompts suspicion among policy-makers which alters the dynamic.

Stakeholder participation at scale in cities also suggests a different role of the executive. Rather than seeing citizens in the most extreme case as just a source of votes, the executive will need to think of them as partners and foster ways of working that marries various departments under their control with citizens that want to shape outcomes in that policy area.

This would also affect the structure of public sector organisations. Rather than occasionally hiring an outside facilitator to tick the stakeholder participation box, they would need to bring in effective facilitators, as staff members. Yet, often external facilitators are one of the guarantors of legitimacy, as the facilitators have no vested interest in the outcome of the deliberations, which might be different for a facilitator that is a public sector staff member. Their decision-making timelines would need to account for a deliberative process. They might need to go to where the citizens are, rather than asking the citizens to come to municipal buildings to engage them on their terms. Communications would need to be thought of not as a transmissive activity (moving information from the inside to the outside), but as having a strategic capacity—being as much about shaping the work as informing about it. It is vital the public sector generates the possibility to experiment and take risks in the innovation agenda (Fernandez and Pitts, 2011; Borins, 2014). However, these risks are not only technical, but are also connected to engagement, and competing visions of how problems are defined. As such, experimentation among several competing policy options may need to be explored as a means to ultimately make an informed choice about how to proceed.

Within public sector organisations and agencies this is all possible and it is already being done in isolation. The question for cities is; to what degree do they engage stakeholders? How does the public sector begin a transition towards a more blended governance model? What are the risks and benefits, and what will it mean over the long term for how the city’s government structure evolves?

Existing efforts in stakeholder participation in cities across the globe, have not clearly demonstrated what is known about how it affects the relationship between citizens and their government, and, most importantly, whether it alters the relationship between citizens. Evidence is emerging. For instance, a new longitudinal study of the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Reviews finds that greater citizen exposure to and confidence in deliberative outputs is associated with higher levels of both internal and external efficacy (Knobloch, Barthel, and Gastil, 2019). Anecdotal evidence suggests participants reshape their political relationships and “contribute” more. However, this requires further research.

It is the position of this report that strong participatory citizenship is a hedge against the disintegrative forces of declining involvement in social and cultural institutions and the starkly finite nature of employment in the future as technology sweeps away the need for human labour. Democracy is a muscle and participation is one way to exercise it.

Nevertheless, research should be done to uncover whether participation and deliberation, or more broadly a participatory and deliberative democracy, can influence the many competing challenges to effective public discourse and public governance, especially in a value-led debate. The case studies in this report provide an outline of how that research might be structured, what questions it should ask, and what might be discovered. Furthermore, the OECD’s forthcoming in-depth report on deliberative processes will provide an overview of international case studies in the field and principles of good practice.

Using public value to guide systems change in a collaborative setting

Effective collaboration is not inherently dependent on existing consensus. In the field of innovation, different actors may choose to collaborate, especially because their diverging ideas and viewpoints will help foster innovative solutions. Innovation thrives on constructive conflicts (Crosby et al. 2017). Making use of innovation coming out of these iterative processes becomes an issue of not only communication, but also mutual persuasion and invention (Dunlop and Radaelli, 2013). Here, as previously described, participatory, dialogic, and deliberative processes can play an important role in discussing public values connected to systemic and transformative innovations.

As such, researchers have recently started to connect public value with innovation, especially due to its trade-offs and the effect of uncertainty (Crosby et al. 2017). Public value does not eradicate uncertainty. However, based on what is desirable, justifiable and feasible it becomes possible to structure ongoing learning and value-seeking within public sector organisations (de Jong et al. 2017). As innovation puts emphasis on reframing existing problem definitions, it is well-suited to the public value narrative. Nevertheless, after a new value proposition is agreed upon and innovative solutions are discussed the attention shifts to barriers in institutionalised arenas – legislative, executive, and administrative settings (Crosby et al. 2017). Collaborative innovation research (Hartley et al. 2013), informed by network governance literature, points to the many dangers of both strong and weak ties among actors, powerful actors hijacking collaborative arenas, regressive nature representation, and the need for ‘democratic anchorage’ in such governance forms (Sørensen and Torfing 2005). As such, the strength of ties and the amount of red tape can be a real barrier to collaborative innovation (Klijn and Koppenjan, 2010; Brewer and Walker 2010).

What is clear is that there is high demand for different types of leadership, roles and capabilities in the connected processes (Crosby et al. 2017) – be they boundary spanners (Williams 2012), catalysts, sponsors, champions, stewards or implementers (Ansell and Gash 2012; Crosby et al. 2017).

Box 3.3. Addressing homelessness in Hennepin, Minneapolis

In 2006 a variety of stakeholders came together in a taskforce to think about ways to eradicate homelessness rather than continue operating overburdened shelters and relying on police and emergency services in crisis situations. All key stakeholders (law enforcement agencies, people experiencing homelessness, elected city and county officials, non-profit and business representatives, philanthropists, and clergy) were included in the taskforce. The elected officials including the Mayor of Minneapolis became crucial sponsors to the process lending visibility and legitimacy. The clergy members were able to activate large networks of volunteers. Various other central actors, advocates of the cause, within the taskforce became the champions of the project convincing the county commissioner of the importance of the agenda. This required reframing the problem in an inclusive way that looked at housing first and other ills later. This made visible the various groups that were affected (not just younger, single men) and created various actors’ understanding of roles in the conditions of a re-defined public value.

The task force developed into a concrete initiative ‘Heading Home Hennepin’, a 10-year plan for ending homelessness in Minneapolis and Hennepin County which was formally adopted by the city council and the county board. The plan encompassed a variety of new ideas, combining public resources, diverse sets of organisations and networks. The plan found a champion and implementer from the initial taskforce who was able to assist various groups at risk of experiencing homelessness.

Source: Crosby, B. C. 2016. “Heading Home Hennepin, an e-Case.” http://www.hubertproject.org/hubert-material/201/

Policy makers tend to create their own discourse coalitions and authorising environments prior to making them open to broader public engagement and vice versa, civic entrepreneurs can also discuss policy changes without involving policymakers from the beginning. Sometimes, bottom-up’, civil society-driven initiatives take over the policy domain after the retreat of the government (Tõnurist and De Tavernier 2017).

Different authors have outlined the variety of public participation methods in the 21st Century and discussed the importance of hosting discussions of public value (Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015; Sandfort and Quick 2015). In traditional public participation processes, participants are presented with pre-defined problems and solutions (Quick 2015, 22), whilst newer forms of deliberation allow for multi-directional dialogue, opportunities to take up new problems, redefine work and coproduce the process. This does not mean these new forums have to be open to everybody, but the variety of perspectives is deemed important.

However, the existence of task-focused, public-service minded, politically-astute civil servants who can communicate, analyse, build coalitions, innovate – all conditions for a working public value based approach – should not be taken for granted. Public value-based approaches tend to gloss over more basic characteristics of public managers or their high-mindedness or expert-bias, but the interest of actors and their power bases are core to the approach. Will the approach work in conditions where there is no existing consensus about the value proposition, where political conditions are more adversarial, and among difficult policy trade-offs? Even when stakeholders might agree on the value connected to a complex problem (e.g. getting disadvantaged people to work), it does not mean running a programme based on the former will be easy in a setting where the outcomes have to be socially co-produced. Hence, how realistic is a public value management approach in practice? The public value model in systems change should be tested more rigorously in a ‘wicked problems’ setting (Geuijen et al. 2016). Currently, the concept of public value defined in a collaborative setting has not been used widely in practice. Yet there are some emerging participatory practices that create space for the work. For example, in Sweden, the city of Gothenburg has creates a structure – Fusion Point – to work collaboratively on large-scale projects connected to the future (Box 3.4).

Box 3.4. Fusion Point (Sweden)

The Fusion Point practice-based research programme brings together cutting-edge research and urban planning practice to inform the largest urban development project in northern Europe – RiverCity Gothenburg. Fusion Point is a collaboration between Älvstranden Utveckling AB (a municipal development company owned by the City of Gothenburg and put in charge of the land of RiverCity development), the Chalmers University of Technology, the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering and the Yale School of Architecture (an external collaboration partner).

For the public company Älvstranden Utveckling AB, the RiverCity project unprecedented in terms of both scale and scope. In 20 years, central Gothenburg is expected to double in size. In 2012, the City Council adopted a vision for Gothenburg that set aside vast swaths of land occupied by a former shipyard and planned for it to be converted over the upcoming decades into living areas, to be called the RiverCity. The city instructed the public company to develop the “City for Everyone” in an inclusive and sustainable way. What that entailed in terms of practical choices for how public value would be generated (social housing? open facilities and common spaces near the river?) was not identified and left to the urban planning process.

Älvstranden Utveckling AB owned most of the land in RiverCity and needed to develop it for 50,000 future inhabitants together with other developers over 10-15 years. It was “quite a formidable task.” The public company started a widespread dialogue to discuss what implementing the city’s vision really meant – “not about building, but the meaning of the vision itself.” They decided the development should become a test area for “top notch sustainability, that every project would push the limits.” Thus, they needed to find best practices and have a transparent process of considering their utility and value for the City of Gothenburg. The public company looked for partners to discuss “what it means to work in different scales, and what it means for apartments in the development”. For instance, while collaborating with the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in 2015 to develop a more detailed plan, they discovered they could benefit from a deeper, continued conversation around the overall project. As a result, they established Fusion Point together in 2016.

The aim of the programme was to strengthen the exchange between research and practice in architecture and urban design, and to create meeting spaces where different theoretical and practical perspectives fuse in productive ways. Specifically, managing urban planning problems on a much broader scale was addressed. The focus was on developing a design methodology for urban development, in which academic knowledge was more efficiently integrated into the decision-making processes of public institutions. Fusion Point tried to use academic theories to push ideas of collaboration by making it more precise and rationally underpinned.

The aim was to establish a “real vocabulary and an idea of what works” and make participants “aware of conflicts that broad notions of participatory planning are not going to solve.” For example, “you can make it possible to rent an apartment for cheap in the neighbourhood, but are you welcome on the street?” Thus, the initiative tries to position itself more directly on participatory challenges of urban planning, and to supply research about the subject matter (e.g., transport, street design, public facilities, etc.) to insert this understanding at the right stage of participatory processes. The FP also aims to bridge values between groups to solve contradictions that could become institutional conflicts, which could then degenerate over time into personal conflicts.

Thus, the FP works in facilitated workshops bringing together practitioners with different experts for a slightly different conversation around urban planning problems – a conversation that is still based around concrete projects and information for planning practice. “In one seminar we had five different offices to look at the same problem at the same time.” The discussions have turned out to be very informative, yet, the question is how to keep the dialogue relevant to the decision-making process on an ongoing basis. Some developments are very fast, they are needed to become proof-of-concept cases for the whole RiverCity. Thus, the pace of change and also the political context of the work (detailed plans are made and approved in the City) are challenges for Fusion Point.

“People have built innovation teams/platforms to help build up this kind of practice. The struggle is to remain relevant to strategic decisions. This is the ultimate sustainability hurdle. It is hard to avoid the tendency to get gradually downgraded to PR projects.” (FP Participant)

For the initiative to be successful there is a need for a deep understanding of “strategic angst” of decision makers. This approach requires the ability to reformulate problems decision makers have, so they can understand it better. In practice, this means “listening to them and repeating a version of what you heard in a way that adds to their self-understanding” (FP project consultant). This means the project is not only about the planning process, but also about the “analysis of how the city and other actors work together.”

Source: OECD interviews. City of Gothenburg, Sweden; http://alvstranden.com/stadsutveckling/fusion-point-gothenburg.

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Notes

← 1. In many cases it can lack representation and be regressive in nature (Tõnurist et al. 2015). Many do not have the resources to participate – language, skills or time, i.e., the scarcest resource of all. Thus, more deliberative processes (involving sorting and more representative practices) can lead to better results.

← 2. Cognitive diversity (Landemore, 2013; Weymark, 2015) is an important feature of this dialogue as it can lead to better decisions than just the ‘experts’ in the room (as the latter tend to have access to similar information and are more likely to confirm each other’s points of view rather than bring challenges or new ideas).

← 3. People hold personal truths, but once they are accepted by the group and upheld in joint decision-making they become shared facts. Shared facts are those which have widespread agreement, without any commitment about the evidential role they have (Lo Guercio, 2012).

← 4. Consequently, it is important for policy makers to know which type(s) of uncertainty they are dealing with, before deciding on a course of action. As such, betting on the most likely future scenario or a limited range of plausible futures may result in failure – ‘policy misfit’ (Bunce et al. 2010) – when the right degree and type of uncertainty (among other factors) are not accounted for (Walker et al. 2013; Hallegatte et al. 2012; Nair and Howlett 2014).