Contested meanings of public engagement - SAGE Journals

536074 research-article2014

MCS0010.1177/0163443714536074Media, Culture & SocietyColeman and Firmstone

Article

Contested meanings of public engagement: exploring discourse and practice within a British city council

Media, Culture & Society 2014, Vol. 36(6) 826–844 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0163443714536074 mcs.sagepub.com

Stephen Coleman University of Leeds, UK

Julie Firmstone University of Leeds, UK

Abstract This article explores local government engagement and communication with citizens in one of the UK’s largest cities from the perspective of a range of actors involved in the engagement process. We establish that a variety of interpretations and contested meanings of engagement exist among professionals involved in different spheres of public engagement. These meanings have different outcomes for the potential voice and influence given to citizens in the city’s democratic existence. We explore what the differing motivations behind the council’s communications and engagement strategies mean for the way that the democratic space of the city is constructed and communicated to citizens. We conclude that there is a need for closer integration of engagement and communications strategies. Integral to the success of such strategies is an empirically informed understanding of what public engagement is, and what skills and practices are necessary to engage with citizens successfully, especially in the reconfigured communication ecology to which new media adds a new dimension. Keywords communication strategies, efficacy, local government, organizational roles, political participation, public engagement

Corresponding author: Stephen Coleman, University of Leeds, Clarendon Road, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. Email: [email protected]

Coleman and Firmstone

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Governments everywhere and at every level are finding it more difficult than ever before to demonstrate that institutional power is rooted in popular sovereignty, thereby casting doubts upon their affirmations of democratic legitimacy (Moravcsik, 2004; Norris, 2011). In contrast to the highly centralized, vertical and imperative style of government that characterized early 20th-century technocratic democracies, there is a growing recognition on the part of power-holders that boundaries between state and informal social networks (civil society) have shifted, affording significant efficacy to non-elites in determining the allocation of values and shaping of policies; that voting, as the principal mode of mass political participation, is too irregular and fleeting to maintain a solid relationship between representatives and the represented; and that, in a post-deferential society, the authority of rules and policies depends upon dialogical collaboration with those most likely to be affected by them (Bang, 2005; Fischer and Gottweis, 2012). In short, contemporary governing institutions are looking to establish a new relationship with citizens (Fung, 2009; Smith, 2009). If ‘participation’ used to mean joining in with the rules of the game (by voting, joining and supporting parties and petitioning the policy-making elite), ‘engagement’ suggests a more open debate about the nature of both the rules and the game. To engage with presupposes a new kind of obligation for government not merely to act on behalf of the interests, preferences and values of the represented, but for the latter to speak for themselves in the expectation of being heard. In short, engagement implies an ethical commitment to communicative reciprocity – one that needs to be evaluated in terms of both the motivation of actors to listen to and learn from one another and the performance of this relationship in practice. How could the relationship between government and citizens be reconfigured? In recent years in the United Kingdom (UK)1 the impetus to engage citizens in the shaping of local policies has been intensified by two main factors: first, a growing complexity in the range and interconnection of challenges facing local authorities; second, as political culture has become less deferential to political hierarchies, policy solutions can no longer simply be imposed upon communities and individuals without risking disruptive resistance or political disaffection. While there does not seem to be a public appetite for direct democracy, there is an increasing sense among citizens and elites that the old terms of representative democracy are in need of refreshment. Further, the current system whereby ‘people in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace … turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face’ (Cameron, 2010) is regarded by some as more conducive to dependency than democracy. A more dialogical conception of democratic representation, it is argued, would be experienced as an ongoing communicative relationship, entailing a ‘duty’ on the part of principals to listen to and learn from agents. A range of governments have heeded the OECD’s (2001: 7) counsel to ‘adopt a new approach to policy-making – one which places greater emphasis on citizen involvement both upstream and downstream to decisionmaking’. The UK government’s 2008 Duty to Involve Act (repealed by the subsequent Coalition government in 2011) required local authorities to inform, consult and involve in other ways local citizens in both ‘routine functions’ as well as ‘significant one-off decisions’. This idea of a spectrum of public engagement, reflects a theoretical literature that goes back to Arnstein’s (1969) ‘ladder of citizen participation’, the bottom rungs of which refer to modes of pseudo-engagement labelled ‘manipulation’ and ‘therapy’, and then

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Media, Culture & Society 36(6)

ascends through the middle rungs of ‘information’ and ‘consultation’ (in which citizens are invited to discuss, supplement, challenge and offer recommendations based upon their own as well as official information) to the higher reaches of ‘partnership’ (often entailing co-production of policy formation and decision-making) and ‘citizen control’ (or empowerment of citizens to assume responsibility for decisions affecting them). Such variant conceptions of what citizen engagement might mean raise problems for evaluation of the effectiveness of strategies. Successfully imparting ‘official information’ to citizens might lead them to have a greater understanding of how government works or what experts think, but does not involve them in a two-way discussion about what needs to be done next. Consultations in which citizens are invited to express their views on a policy issue are not the same as a dialogue with elected representatives, and that in turn is not the same as a relationship in which an ‘empowered’ community is engaged in making decisions for itself. Scholars who have attempted to identify the practical benefits of citizen engagement have tended to employ a fluid use of the concept. For example, Michels (2011: 279) states that engaging citizens gives them a say in decisionmaking, contributes to the inclusion of more voices and experiences, encourages civic skills, leads to more rational public deliberation and increases the legitimacy of decisions. In reality, not all of these ends are likely to be served by policies and strategies labelled as ‘public engagement’. Politicians from different parties, council executive officers, communication strategists or street-level bureaucrats at the sharp end of service delivery bring to the table widely varying notions of what it means to engage the public and, while the outcome of their combined – or competing – norms and strategies is sometimes enriched by such conceptual diversity, it is more commonly messy and confused, turning the notion of an ‘engaged public’ into a moving target that is difficult to evaluate (Chilvers, 2008; Halpin and Thomas, 2012; Macintosh and Whyte, 2006; Rowe et al., 2008). The semantic and intentional ambiguity of much of the discourse surrounding public engagement has led to a degree of public disenchantment, probably resulting from discrepant expectations of what the experience of ‘being engaged’ is supposed to entail (Bang, 2005; Felt and Fochler, 2010; Irwin, 2006). This article aims to explore public engagement in one major British local authority (Leeds),2 focusing upon questions of motivation and practice. First, we ask why various actors within the local authority feel motivated to engage with the public and what they imagine ‘public engagement’ to entail. Second, we explore how various actors understand ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in the context of public engagement and how these performance evaluations relate to original intentions. In addressing these two research questions, we set out three arguments. First, that the ambition to engage (with) the public cannot be reduced to a single meaning or even a consistent set of meanings. The evaluation of public engagement exercises is therefore hampered by a messy uncertainty around notions of success. Second, that strategies to engage the public often reveal a gap between political intention and empirical performance. Third, that, given the dependence of public engagement exercises upon the effectiveness of dialogical (technically, polylogical) communication, there has been a remarkable lack of attention in both theory and practice to (a) the communicative skills needed to make this new form of governance work well and (b) the forces within the contemporary media ecology that could be utilized if engaged public debate is to be more than a chimera.3


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The article is set out in four sections. First we explain the research design before exploring how various actors within the local authority understood the idea of political engagement. The third section looks at the performance of public engagement and actors’ definitions and perceptions of success and failure. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the need for more robust terms of definition.

Research method The research would not have been possible without the willingness of Leeds City Council to open itself up to independent, critical scrutiny through interviews with a range of key council actors involved in efforts to engage the city’s citizens in aspects of local governance. Based on the idea that public engagement depends upon a number of actors within the council – from elected councillors and policy-making officials through to council workers who deliver local services – we constructed a typology comprising actors who represent differing functions and levels of responsibility within the council to structure our selection of interviewees. This included elected council members from all three main parties (councillors), communications and public engagement specialists, parish councillors,4 and heads of directorate and frontline workers from two areas of service delivery (youth and children’s services and leisure services). These were selected with a view to exploring how public engagement might be thought of in distinctive ways in relation to different service contexts, policy drivers and public expectations.5 In addition we interviewed a range of other key actors, including journalists from the mainstream local news media (TV, press and online) as well as producers of new forms of local digital journalism, community activists and local non-governmental organizations. These latter interviews provide alternative perceptions of engagement from people placed outside the council and with a variety of experience of the council’s engagement activities. In all, 23 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted between May and September 2012 and analysed using a constructivist approach whereby, rather than asking interviewees how they understood our predetermined conceptualizations of public engagement, we attempted to build definitions from their articulated perceptions and evaluations.

Motives to engage When asked why local government needed to engage with citizens, interviewees referred to three main reasons (although the third was mainly implicit). First, public engagement was understood as a process of public education, informing rather than interacting with citizens. Second, it was seen as being about consulting the public, either as a broad entity or as specific groups or mini-publics. Third, more commonly alluded to than advocated, public engagement was understood as a process of empowerment whereby citizens moved from being recipients of council decisions and services and became partners in their production. The elected council representatives (councillors) seemed to be of the view that public engagement entailed explaining the council to bewildered citizens. For Councillor

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B, the main benefit of public engagement is that ‘The public will hopefully have a better understanding of what the council can and cannot do.’ Asked to say what public engagement strategies should aim to achieve, Councillor A said that ‘I think our job is to explain why we do certain things and what benefits come out of it.’ In terms of Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’, these objectives seem to be confined to the lower, informational rung, with engagement conceived largely in terms of linear knowledge dissemination. Making citizens aware of how and why their representatives act in particular ways certainly accords with norms of democratic transparency, but is it engagement? Indeed, Councillor C sensed this when he responded to our question about why he thought the council needed to engage with the public by saying that ‘engage is perhaps not the right word’ and suggesting that he would prefer to think of the council’s task as being ‘to stir interest in people, to actually try and just keep them abreast of what’s going on’. Council communication strategists also placed great emphasis upon the informational aspect of public engagement, but for them there seemed to be a much clearer link between public understanding and expanding the scope for autonomous civic action. According to a communications team member, Without really effective engagement, I think we’ll continue to have people complaining about ‘Well, I didn’t know where to go and how to do it’ – that sort of thing; so, the more that we get people understanding what councils can and can’t do, what you can do yourself to help yourself … people are going to better understand the types of support, the levels of support that are available.

Informing citizens in this sense becomes a means of enabling them to know what the council can do for them and how they might organize to do things for themselves. Asked to reflect upon the value of public engagement to citizens, a consultation team member expressed a hope that it would contribute to greater confidence: Confidence that you understand what a service does … that if things need challenging or you’re worried about something, that it’ll be treated properly and that you’ll get a reasonable answer; that you can do things for yourself or be supported to do that.

This link between an informed and confident citizenry is an important one, but we wonder how clearly it is articulated to citizens. When asked to talk about what successful public engagement might look like, a member of the communications team explained that ‘it manifests itself in people feeling in control of important aspects of their lives’. This raises the important question of how such feelings might be assessed; a challenge to which we return in our conclusion. A second articulation of the need for public engagement moved beyond merely disseminating or sharing information and focused upon listening to and learning from the experiences and expertise of local citizens. As Councillor B put it: There are occasions when I think you’ve got to start listening more to local opinion. There are too many decisions made by officers who do not live in an area, nor totally understand the area, or the consequences of some of the decisions that are made that affect an area.


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The recommendation to ‘start listening’ is significant, for it suggests that communication between representatives and the represented has yet to reach the most basic level of communicative reciprocity. Local governments are under increasing pressure to ensure that citizens have an opportunity to comment on policies and strategies before they are agreed and implemented. Failure to do so can result in expensive legal challenges and political embarrassment. One motivation to consult, therefore, is to avoid the negative consequences of failing to do so, and in these circumstances public engagement can often seem like a tickbox activity. There was a widespread acknowledgement by interviewees that much of what has passed as public engagement in previous years comprised little more than tokenistic exercises intended to give an appearance of consulting citizens. Beyond this, two other motives became apparent. The first was to extend democratic accountability beyond the electoral mandate, so that preferences are not simply stated at the ballot box and presented to the council as a blank cheque for legitimacy, but are re-articulated and revised through an ongoing conversation. Councillor C explained, ‘In the good old days councillors would say, “Well, you elected me and that’s it; just go away and I’ll sort it out” And we make a decision based on what I think, but not necessarily what you think’. For Councillor B: In an ideal situation [effective consultation] means that we’ve given people the opportunity to engage with us; we have listened to the comments that they have made; we then reflect back on those comments and then issue a revised document … highlighting which areas changed as a result of the consultation, but also pointing out which areas haven’t changed, and the reasons why it wasn’t deemed feasible.

In this sense, consulting with citizens becomes a way of redefining the representative relationship; of rooting local democracy in something closer to an ongoing conversation than a fleeting and sweeping mandate.6 As a council’s web team member put it: I think it’s having that two-way conversation with residents and stakeholders on what we’re doing. We’re quite a faceless organization, with us being so big, and I think that it’s really important that we understand how well we’re doing and what we feel we’re doing right and what’s wrong, and how we can improve and where people can get involved with influencing how we run services …

Managing such a communicative relationship is difficult. It entails more than having a council Facebook page or an email address at the end of policy documents. A member of the directorate in charge of running the council’s museums and galleries described how, for him, effective public consultation means recognizing that the users of a service should be encouraged to define its resource priorities and cultural rationale and this involves a fine balance between offering people ‘a completely blank sheet, where they haven’t got the faintest idea what might be possible’ and ‘some options or some guidance, without actually controlling’. The value of making this work is that a new kind of relationship emerges between people and public institutions: ‘The public gains from this because it actually feels it’s having a say … and people are taking notice, and it’s a relationship, not a one-off meeting-type consultation.’

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As we shall see in our evaluation of public engagement in practice, there is often a glaring chasm between the notion of consultation as a two-way conversation and the somewhat lifeless, process-driven character of many such exercises. A member of the consultation team offered some valuable thoughts about the design and management of public consultations. First, those running them need to be ‘very clear about what their objectives are’. In some cases, consultations are run even though there is a more or less predetermined policy outcome; in others, those managing the consultation fail to state clearly what they hope to learn from the public. Second, consultations need to be ‘linked into the council’s actual decision-making and project management processes’. The timing of consultations is important here, in that public input needs to be received at the right moment in the policy cycle. Third, consultation organizers need to ‘really understand’ the communities they hope to consult. This entails moving beyond a narrowly geographical notion of communities and trying to understand how communities of interest and practice think and operate. At the same time as wanting to strengthen the council’s representative accountability to citizens who are willing to engage with it, several interviewees expressed concerns about the most disengaged and under-represented people and communities. These tend to be least likely to benefit from the dissemination of council information or to participate in official consultations. Often referred to as ‘hard to reach’, this large and diverse section of the population, which includes the young, the old, ethnic minorities and the disenfranchised, can be all too easily ignored. Councillor A spoke of there being ‘significant swathes of the city where we don’t engage: the hard-to-reach groups’. One group likely to fall into the ‘hard-to-reach’ category is youth. A member of the Children’s Services’ team responsible for youth ‘voice and influence’ described his job as being ‘to come up with ways for children and young people to have their voices heard’ and explained that this task depended upon both ‘mouths and ears’; he could help ‘to get mouths to open’, but the greatest challenge was to get powerful ears to hear. Another ‘voice and influence’ worker pointed to ‘a mismatch of power that arises when young people and adults are put together’ and saw his role as enabling ‘young people to build confidence’, while at the same time ‘changing the mindset of adults … to actually respect young people and not necessarily be judgemental, as if they’re not able to come up with suggestions that would make a real difference’. This sensitive and creative approach towards voice and influence struck us as being relevant to wider disparities of communicative power between political/administrative elites and lay citizens. By starting out with the principle that a traditionally unheard group (in their case, young people) probably have much that is worth hearing, and that the challenge is to build bridges between divergent modes of expression and value systems, they offer a model for an approach to intersubjective dialogue beyond the adult–youth relationship. We were struck by the ways in which several interviewees regarded ‘the general public’ per se as a hard-to-reach group. Whereas a confident, vociferous and active minority of the city’s population – several times referred to as ‘the usual suspects’ – could be relied upon to have their say whenever asked – and often unasked – the majority of local citizens were seen as being too busy, unconfident and uninterested to become actively involved in most of the consultation exercises run by the council. As one senior council official put it, ‘the usual suspects’ are ‘the people who turn up to every public meeting,


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no matter what the topic is’. Difficulties in engaging with the general public relate both to the perceived lack of desire of the public to get involved and the focus of many engagement activities on the ‘hard to reach’ or those with a vested interest: Maybe the ordinary public are a little bit taken for granted, I suppose. Maybe there’s a lot of emphasis on the people who we have to really work at engaging and there’s just maybe a sort of assumption that everybody else will know. (Communications team)

So, as with the desire to demonstrate to young people that they should not be deterred from speaking up for fear that they would not be taken seriously, a similar message needs to be conveyed to large parts of the adult population. There were rare moments when interviewees alluded to a third sense of public engagement – as a form of empowerment that shifts traditional relationships between government and citizens – and distinguished between this reconfiguration of the terms of governance and more traditional forms of information dissemination and consultation. Citizen empowerment was hardly ever raised as a direct aspiration, but as a potential outcome of other political changes, such as the need to persuade communities to take on responsibilities once resourced and managed by government or the central government’s drive towards ‘localism’. One interviewee suggested that some councillors felt uncomfortable with any notion of engagement that resulted in a diminution of politicians’ authority: ‘When it starts to shift – potentially, on some of the localism stuff, about who makes decisions – then it will be interesting to see what councillors want out of engagement.’ At least one of the councillors we interviewed (C), said that he was beginning to change his mind about devolving decision-making to citizens: If you’d have asked me 20 years ago I might have said I’m not sure whether citizens – this is going to sound terrible on the tape – are fit to take power. As I’ve got older, I’ve got more relaxed … and, in some ways, I now say to people ‘Well look, if you really, really, really want to do this, and you’ve actually thought through what you want, then are you prepared to accept the consequences?’

In one sense, this rhetorical question goes to the core of democratic theory. Are citizens fit to make autonomous decisions about matters most likely to affect them? Are there appropriate mechanisms for thinking things through? Our interviewees were consistently silent about the potential of public deliberation, despite this being a major theme in the theoretical literature about democratic engagement (Carpini, 2004; Fung, 2009; Hajer, 2005; Coleman and Blumler, 2009). And are people willing to face the consequences of their own decisions? These might seem like rather abstract, philosophical questions, but they are ones that need to be fully rehearsed, both within local government and between it and citizens, if there is to be clarity about what public engagement means and how it might be evaluated.

Evaluating engagement in practice To what extent does the council attempt to evaluate the success or otherwise of engagement activities? What indicators are used to assess the performance of engagement

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strategies? How are successful strategies and techniques embedded in institutional memory and how does the council learn from failed attempts to engage with the public? Not surprisingly, there was an intimate linkage between conceptions of success and failure and original definitions of what public engagement means. As meanings shifted, so did notions of success and failure, often resulting in a messy, unclear evaluation of performance. Several interviewees found it almost impossible to define success: ‘It’s hard to know what it [successful engagement] actually looks like’ said one communications team member; and a BBC journalist, commented that ‘it’s difficult to talk about successes because you only see there’s been a failure when things go wrong’. But that raises a further question: how does one know that public engagement has ‘gone wrong’ without a clear, shared sense of what ‘going right’ looks like? Despite this lack of clarity and substantial definition, there was a widespread perception among interviewees, including those outside the council, that the council had expanded and improved its methods of engagement with the public over the last decade. While consultation has long been a statutory requirement for councils, in the past this was often addressed in an entirely reactive fashion by announcing plans in the local newspaper, holding public meetings, and responding to complaints and protests. The council considers that it now routinely consults citizens likely to be affected by forthcoming decisions that will affect them; has plans for public engagement built into all proposals for change; and sees its website and emerging social media strategy as a crucial part of its new proactive approach to relationship-building with citizens. The council’s relatively recent reorganization of its structure of service provision into local area committees is seen as an important means of opening up opportunities for citizens to become engaged close to their homes and workplaces. A member of the consultation team told us that ‘There’s a lot of thinking about how and where we deliver locally based engagement.’ The shift from a centripetal notion of engagement, in which the council buildings, elected representatives and permanent officials were at the centre and citizens came to them, to a centrifugal notion of engagement taking place within the communities and networks (virtual as well as physical) in which people feel most at home and problems are actually experienced, is an important step in the reconceptualization of public engagement. Anecdotal accounts from interviewees suggested that citizens feel much more comfortable and efficacious when they are asked to engage with the council within their own spaces than when expected to enter the alien orbit of institutionalized politics. The effects of engagement activities are regarded as difficult to evaluate and there was an overall appreciation by interviewees that the council does not place sufficient emphasis upon engagement outcomes: ‘One of our weaknesses is that we don’t evaluate particularly well, if at all in some cases … I think we should get a hell of lot better at doing that’ (consultation team). Evaluation techniques ranged from a subjective sense of short-term changes in citizens’ behaviour to assessment of public opinion based on news coverage. In many cases, the council did not seem to distinguish between attempts to measure the reach and reception of its messages (essentially, a public relations question) and the extent to which it had succeeded in changing the quality of its relationship with citizens. For example, a member of the communications team spoke about a targeted campaign to encourage students to ‘engage’ with the council’s recycling agenda


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through Facebook. Although the council achieved a high number of ‘likes’, it was unclear whether this had translated into behavioural change (an increased level of recycling among the student population) or a changed quality of relationship between students and the council. Likewise, the web team measure the success of their role in the engagement process through higher traffic on the council’s website and the number of online comments that can be passed on to specific service providers, but this is not tied to an attempt to discover whether such interaction leads to greater dialogue between citizens and service providers. The key questions that are not currently being asked are whether these online interactions result in new approaches to service delivery on the part of the council; whether citizens involved in such interactions feel themselves to be somehow closer to the council and its decision-making; and how these isolated, issuebased interactions are built upon to create a more enduring relationship between representatives and represented. The council monitors coverage about it in the news and attempts to keep abreast of trends in public opinion. On the basis of this analysis, performance indicators are packaged into reports which are passed on to services to support their understanding of people’s responses to their area of service delivery (communications team). Two questions arise. Does the council then go on to monitor the extent to which service deliverers learn from and act upon this feedback? Is such responsive monitoring applied to engagement exercises themselves; in other words, as well as seeking public feedback about service delivery, does the council pursue the same tracking to assess its own attempts to build new relationships with engaged citizens? Both of these exercises would seem to be crucial to the success of any effective evaluation of public engagement. One interviewee from the communications team talked about measuring the success of service delivery based on ‘noise’: if citizens and/or journalists contact the council with lots of questions, there is an assumption that it has failed to communicate effectively: ‘If we reviewed the bin service and we felt that we’d told people about it quite well, we’d probably have fewer people ringing up saying “I don’t understand the new system. When are my bins being emptied?”’ While it is certainly the case that inadequate communication by the council can generate considerable confused public reaction, there are other circumstances in which ‘noise’ is an indicator of vibrant engagement rather than raucous frustration. In short, the monitoring of public ‘noise’ should be conducted qualitatively as well as quantitatively; as well as asking how much noise poor service delivery and bad communication generates, the council should develop a clear sense of the kind of constructive noise it considers to be consistent with active democracy. In order to arrive at our constructivist understanding of public engagement, we asked interviewees which factors they thought most commonly contributed to the success or failure of attempts to engage local citizens. In order to make this question less abstract, all interviewees were asked to begin by giving an example of a successful and a failed attempt to engage with citizens – and to say why they think these outcomes came about. While all actors were able to give examples of what they perceived to be successful engagement strategies, several were reluctant to provide examples of failed attempts. The ways in which interviewees perceived success related closely to the differing conceptions of public engagement outlined earlier. Where they regarded engagement as a means of nurturing public understanding of the council, its policies and its constraints,

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they tended to evaluate success in informational terms. Engaged citizens, in this sense, were conspicuous when they understood what the council did and why they had to do it: ‘The more you engage with people and the more you make them understand what you’re actually about, the less likely they are to knee-jerk in their reactions’ (communications team). A key means of developing such understanding seemed to involve managing public expectations. As one member of a service directorate put it: I think that’s one of the big problems that I think sometimes the council has, that it’s not very good at managing expectations. It’s like if you [citizens] want to get anything done in the council, all you’ve got to do is contact your local councillor, preferably a couple of local councillors, and they will ensure that, whether it makes any sense or not, whether it’s a priority or not, it will get dealt with.

The desire to ensure that citizens do not hope for more from the council than it can possibly deliver was linked to a growing recognition (strongly expressed in several interviews) that the relationship between local state and citizens is changing as a result of budgetary pressures and that the public is going to have to take responsibility for aspects of its wellbeing about which it had hitherto looked for state support. Successful engagement in this sense was expressed in terms of citizens learning to be ‘self-sufficient’: We now very commonly transfer assets to local organizations … these resources are really expensive. We can’t continue to operate them and … the solution is that we give up something, which is giving up an asset, and they [the public] take on the responsibility to run the resource. (Communications team)

If successful public engagement amounts to little more than teaching citizens to understand and accept the new constraints facing local government, what is the difference between this and public relations? Interviewees from the communications team were aware that what most of what they were doing could hardly be called public engagement: Engagement is really only engagement if it’s a two-way process. You can’t just tell people stuff and assume you’ve.… Our team isn’t really set up for public engagement; it is set up for media. Although we recognize there is this wider role in the public, our role is actually specifically with the media.

Interestingly, they point out that other people within the council do not always recognize this and sometimes think that sending out a message through the press office constitutes engaging with the public. One member of the press office commented that people use the service we provide in the press office to sort of tell people stuff, but they can’t just assume that’s engagement.… what we do relies on people actually reading the newspaper or watching the TV or whatever, so you can’t replace local, direct engagement with what we do.

Although the traditional media remains their primary target, the press office’s relationship with the public has been evolving in recent times and direct, unmediated


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communication with citizens is increasingly part of their social media strategy. The communications team recognize that engaging with citizens via social media such as Facebook and Twitter requires a different set of skills. As one of them explained: it kind of makes us have a much greater eye for how things are directly received by the public rather than through the filter of the media. You have to be really clear about stuff because it’s easier for people to misinterpret it.

The communications team’s current approach to using social media has centred on general publicity and reputation management rather than embracing the potential for dialogue: The use [of social media] within the council is growing. Has it yet resulted in improved engagement? On the edges it must have done, because we have 7000 or 8000 followers on Twitter for our council and for our press team account, so there are, in theory, that many people out there looking at all the press releases and the news, and if they’re, in any way, looking at it, they’re getting a feel for what’s happening in the council.

This is not to say that the potential of social media as a valuable tool of engagement is not recognized, but it has yet to be fully embraced and integrated into engagement strategies. While both the consultation and communications teams within the council were closely involved in an overall attempt to bring local government closer to people, make its work and decisions better understood, and help citizens to do make a difference in a variety of ways, the very organizational distinction between ‘communication’ and ‘consultation’ suggests that two agendas are at work, guided by not entirely consistent normative ambitions. The council staff in the consultation team, charged with making public engagement work, saw citizens as their immediate targets and conceived of their task in terms of relationship-building. The communications team saw its primary task as public relations-based message dissemination, reconfigured by a new set of challenges presented by digital media networks and the possibility of not only addressing citizens but also interacting with them. As we shall argue in the conclusion, there is a need to more closely integrate the norms, skills, practices and objectives of the communication and consultation teams as they are increasingly operating in an environment that creates a rationale for a synthesis of their approaches. Engaging with the public in a media-saturated society must involve a strategy for ensuring that the main local media are involved in all such conversations. Communicating with the public in an age of networked social media must move beyond the public relations paradigm in which effective message transmission to institutional mediators matters more than direct communication with active publics. As outlined in the previous section, many of our interviewees assumed that engaging with citizens entailed placing them in some kind of consultative role. There was a widespread feeling that engaging with the general public around broad political and administrative questions issues rarely worked. One member of the communications team was sceptical about inviting members of the general public to engage in broad policy exercises, such as the council’s Citizens’ Panel:

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I just think people just don’t want to be part of it. And you can kind of understand why, because I know when I retreat home, probably the last thing that I want to do is be part of a Citizen’s Panel, because I don’t really have a strong enough opinion about stuff, and I think most people probably are like that.

In contrast to such forms of ongoing engagement about general council values and policies, it was felt by several interviewees that citizens are most likely to be open to engaging with the council when ‘something in your life forces you to get interested’ (communications team). For the majority of citizens, communication with the council only happens when something goes wrong in their own lives: when they felt disappointed that an anticipated level of service has been reduced or when faced with a new situation calling for institutional support. Some of the most concrete examples of successful engagement related to specific issues of service provision, where engagement was focused on citizens who had a vested interest in a particular service. For example, the process around the closure of adult care facilities for the elderly and disabled was deemed to have been successful because the council ‘took its time to do more than consultation, to engage with local people and get them involved in discussing the solutions.… People really had the opportunity to be heard and voice their opinion’ (communications team). Similarly, a member of a council directorate described the success of engaging disabled children in decisions to award contracts to companies to provide services for them. The most common examples of successful public engagement involved efforts by the council to communicate directly with specific groups of people, particularly those regarded as excluded, marginalized or without a strong political voice. More than one interviewee spoke of the ‘Vision for Leeds’ project as a model exercise because of the way that it ‘broadened the amount of engagement and voice’ by successfully connecting target groups. Councillor A explained how he was involved in a ‘state of the city’ exercise ‘where all the partners come and talk to the councillors. And we had one section where the youth came and talked about their aspirations and visions for the future. Wow, did that really go down well.’ A member of the web communications team explained how they had sent out lots of questionnaires and surveys that went out to different groups, right from schools to ethnic minorities to staff members and the public in general, to … try and get an idea of what they think the priorities are for us to resolve over the next ten, fifteen, whatever it was, years.

Clearly, the more specifically targeted and resource-intensive engagement exercises were more likely to be deemed successful than more general attempts to involve the mass of represented citizens in discussions of the kind of broad political and cultural questions that shape top-line policies and determine overall council priorities.

Why public engagement failed Many of the examples of failure stemmed from exercises in which the council only began to involve citizens at a point when policy proposals had already been formulated or, worse still, agreed upon. In these cases, citizens often felt that the main decisions had already been made and their contribution to the engagement process would not make any


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difference. A parish councillor gave the example of an exercise in which parish councils were invited to contribute to local neighbourhood plans, but the city council ‘steamed ahead, regardless of the plans that it had asked local parish councils to come up with’. Her concern was that the council lacked integrity in asking for people’s views and then going ahead with its own plans without leaving adequate time for such input to be considered. With regard to changes to a local park, one member of a service directorate described how a lack of dialogue with the public has resulted in: an awful lot of ill-feeling flying around about ‘how disgraceful it is, why isn’t it a free park?’ … But that whole campaign was very much a traditional council sort of consultation, which didn’t really give the chance to get across all the positives, the advantages this would bring, that money was going to be invested to improve things, that there would be more events and activities going on, and that as long as you bought a season ticket it was marginally more expensive than it would have been as a car park season ticket.

In several cases, citizens were more fully involved in policy consultations – and were invited to engage at a point when their views could have affected decisions – but they were left feeling that, despite their input, the council had not really listened to them. As one local political blogger put it, ‘They invite you to the door of the cave and say “Shout here” but no one’s listening or responding. The council has had to take a lot of flak for that to be honest.’ At risk here is political efficacy: people’s belief in their ability to influence their government (internal efficacy) and in the government’s willingness to be influenced by people like them (external efficacy) (Campbell et al., 1971 [1954]; Milbrath, 1965; Sullivan and Riedel, 2004). In other cases, there was a more basic failure of communication between citizens who had bothered to engage and the council itself. Where there is a lack of feedback, either in the form of clear information or policy action, citizens are left wondering why they had ever been asked to contribute their opinions. A member of a council directorate identified this as problem that had been reported several times in consultations that he had helped to run: ‘No feedback ever happens. So what we tend to hear … is “I’ve been consulted all the time, but nobody ever tells me what happens as a result of those consultations.”’ An interviewee from another council directorate reported similar citizen dissatisfaction with feedback: There was a lot of ill-feeling about the previous experiences that the groups have had with council consultation, which in their eyes consisted of … a meeting, they’d give their views, then they’d hear nothing, and five years later something would happen which the council would claim related to their views, and which usually didn’t bear any relation.

This is by no means a general picture of failed public engagement, but a series of reflections about why such exercises failed when they did. We were encouraged by the candour of interviewees who felt able to acknowledge that the most serious risk of public engagement ending badly was not those rare occasions when citizens could not be reached or persuaded to get involved, but the many occasions when citizens had accepted the invitation to engage, only to be left feeling insufficiently acknowledged and efficacious.

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Conclusion Our research was conducted during a period of great uncertainty and anxiety for local government (Lowndes and Squires, 2012; Richardson, 2011). Though sometimes framed in constructive terms of ‘the Big Society’ and the democratic devolution of powers and responsibilities to communities and citizens, current trends are mainly driven by the financial constraints of nationally imposed austerity resulting from the most far-reaching economic crisis since the 1930s. Had we conducted our interviews a few years earlier, the sense of having to engage with citizens as a way of winning consent for extraordinarily harsh decisions and of needing to persuade people to provide for themselves what had hitherto been regarded as basic state services would not have been as pronounced. We were left with a clear impression that making public engagement work has now become more important than ever before, but that the resources to make it effective and the incentives to make it appealing to citizens are more scarce than they had been in the past. The research reported here is based on one local council in one country. While we think that many of our findings would be applicable to local government more generally, we do not claim to be providing a complete picture of government–citizen relations in the UK or globally. Our more modest aim in this stage of our research has been to arrive at an understanding of how ‘the council’, as an institution, is making sense of the highly complex challenge of forging a new kind of relationship with the citizens it represents. Given these conditions of constraint and despondency, how might a city council such as the one we have been studying move towards a position in which its sense of what public engagement means is more coherently shared, effectively implemented and usefully evaluated? How might a more dialogical relationship between local government and citizens be engendered? It is clear from our research that the construction of the concept of public engagement is highly contested, reflecting a range of normative approaches to democracy that might not be compatible with one another. Where these definitions focus too much upon informing the public, the scope for two-way relationships is limited and engagement begins to seem like something that is done to people. Where engaged citizens are imagined as either a general public or a target group to be consulted, the terms of political interaction need to be made much clearer to both the initiators and consultees, to avoid either being disappointed by the inadequate reciprocity of the other. The term ‘consultation’ seems to imply that experiential and expert public input would be appreciated and acted upon, but as things stand the line between public input and political outcomes remains too unclear. To the extent that public engagement aims to ‘empower’ citizens or invite them to become ‘partners’ in the design, implementation and evaluation of policies that will affect them, the terms of such partnership and the extent of meaningful empowerment need to be thought through, articulated and accepted by all sides. At the moment, the council’s discourse around public engagement moves across all of these meanings, often without acknowledging the very different methods needed to make engagement work in one context rather than another. There are moments in the history of political institutions when it makes sense to pause and reflect upon what apparently shared terms and phrases really mean. Until local government understands how it is employing the language of public engagement and the kind of practices it hopes such language to describe, there will remain a danger of good intentions being dissipated.


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The council currently has a team of people who are dedicated to ‘consultation’ (and general public engagement) and another team focused on ‘communication’. There is scope for a constructive synthesis between the skills, practices and objectives of both of these teams, as they attempt to adapt to an environment in which the public circulation of information, opinion and shared experience takes place within a reconfigured communication ecology. While the communication and engagement teams within the council are clearly respectful of and supportive to one another, there is scope for a united strategy, driven by two mutually reinforcing principles: (1) that engaging with the public increasingly depends upon connecting to people via their own spaces and networks, both in physical and online environments; and (2) that communicating with the public involves more than the dissemination of ‘good news’, but depends upon forming durable connections with communities and citizens, while helping/enabling the local media to play a facilitating role in this new political relationship. In short, engaging and communicating with the public should be seen as one activity, pursued in various ways and employing a range of skills – but shaped by common democratic values. Linked to the argument for closer integration of engagement and communication strategies is the valuable recognition by the council of the ways in which knowledge is produced and expressed locally. The rejection of a centripetal approach to gathering engaged citizens around a single institutional centre reflects the reality of how a networked city works and is less likely to attract ‘the usual suspects’. The move towards local area committees and more networked (offline as well as online) conversations about matters of general council policy has had positive effects in allowing people to set their own agendas, relate policy questions to their own experiences and speak in ways that are inflected by local knowledge rather than institutional jargon. We were struck by the honest acknowledgement from most council actors that they were not good at evaluating their attempts to engage with the public. This stems partly from a basic uncertainty surrounding the sense in which the council uses the term ‘public engagement’. But that is hardly unique to this one city council. Governments – and organizations – everywhere have paid far too little attention to assessing the impact of public engagement exercises. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods is needed to do this well. First indices of civic efficacy need to be devised. A member of the communications team spoke impressively of trying ‘to measure … how much people feel they are able to influence decisions in their local area’ and the extent to which they feel ‘in control of important aspects of their lives’. This is an excellent starting point for a longitudinal study of civic efficacy, seeking to explore how particular communities and citizens respond in different ways to different levels of engagement with the council. Second, a more common approach to determining the characteristics of successes and failures in public engagement needs to be adopted and the lessons from this need to be logged in institutional memory. Clearly, some of the reasons for failure outlined in this article have been recurrent themes and the best way to learn from them is to acknowledge their causal patterns, while accepting that failure is not always something for which the council should be held responsible. Third, a framework needs to be devised for making much more publicly visible the relationship between citizen inputs and policy outcomes. At present, a combination of uncertainty and mistrust characterizes public attitudes to

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engagement exercises. These feelings stem from a failure to let people know just how much of a difference their views and voices can make. Finally, there is a clear tension between citizens’ willingness to engage with the council regarding issues that directly affect them and the democratic need to involve the general public in determining values and priorities that exceed their direct interests or experience. This is a perennial problem of democracy, applicable also to national and transnational governance and not amenable to any quick fixes. Of course, the danger here is that citizen engagement becomes a form of permanent nimbyism that can easily degenerate into pork-barrel politics. It is here that the notion of public engagement as a central pillar of a new mode of governance becomes meaningful. Rather than asking how ‘the general public’ can be persuaded to engage with the agendas, institutional arrangements, jargon and dilemmas of the council, there is a case for thinking of public engagement as a means whereby local government embeds itself in the priorities, lifestyles, vernacular expression and micro-politics of represented communities. Rather than a means of bringing ‘them’ to ‘us’, engagement might be conceived as a way of transcending them/us boundaries. In this latter sense, public engagement predicates a new, more empowered role for citizens as partners in policy-making and neighbourhood governance (a meaning of public engagement that was conspicuous by its absence in most of our interviews) and raises far-reaching questions for the council about what representation will mean when the represented are no longer spoken for or to, but with, and how a more dialogical democracy might lead to a diminution of the council’s capacity to steer and an enhancement of its capacity to hear. Funding Funding for the interviews reported in this article was gratefully received from the EPSRC Digital Economy Communities and Culture Network.

Notes 1. This article focuses upon public engagement in one British local government area. While we feel sure that several of the observations we make would apply to other UK local councils – and much will be relevant to local government in other countries – we acknowledge from the outset the specific national and local context of this study. 2. Leeds is a large post-industrial city situated in the north of England. The city has a fastgrowing, culturally diverse population of 751,500 citizens (2011 census), and is the third largest city in both England and the UK. Leeds City Council is responsible for providing all statutory local authority services including education, housing, planning, transport and social services. The city is split into 33 electoral wards, with three councillors representing each ward. Ninety-nine councillors from each of the three main political parties in the UK (Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative) are represented, as well as smaller political parties such as UKIP, Green and local independent parties. Historically, Leeds has been a Labour region, with the party being elected to power in each election between 1980 and 2004 and again in 2010. Leeds also has 31 parish or town councils, which form the first tier of local government and work closely with the council to provide local services. 3. The two parts of this third question are addressed in two separate papers arising from this research. 4. A parish council is a type of local authority found in England which is the lowest, or first, tier of local government, responsible for areas known as civil parishes. They are elected bodies


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and have variable tax raising powers. Parish councillors tend not to be affiliated to political parties. 5. Based on advice from council officials, we focused on leisure services, which had a strong tradition of seeking to engage users as well as reaching out to its non-users, and youth and children’s services, which seek to engage people who are often vulnerable, hard to reach and have complex needs. 6. Interestingly, this was the most common reason given by non-council interviewees for the council needing a public engagement strategy. For example, one local BBC journalist told us that ‘they’ve got to have one, because the whole purpose of local authorities is not to have their views imposed upon the public. In theory we’re a democratic process, so they’ve got to engage with the electorate’ A local newspaper journalist stated: ‘It’s elected, you know, there are elected members – elected by the tax payer – and so it is accountable to people, to the public and therefore needs to engage with the public to show that it is doing its job.’

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