Public engagement and hard policy evidence

by Kent Aitken

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Last week I pressed send on my dissertation, on which I'll blame my lack of posting. The topic was public engagement in Canada, and particularly, the role of economic analysis. My plan is to reduce the interesting parts of that research into a readable length, but I thought I might share six points that fell out of my conclusion.

1. Public engagement on policy, program, and service development is a thing. There's always a slate of ongoing public consultations in Canada, but the pace has picked up in the last year and the major difference is that there are far more that are intended for a broad public audience, rather than niche stakeholder groups. There are pros and cons to this.

2. As a general rule, government consultations are designed to understand what citizens value, but in a qualitative, rather than quantitative, way. That is, public input is viewed as a source of ideas and general feedback, not as empirically rigourous data. As currently practiced, public engagement is better suited for generating general insights, achieving social licence for policies, and avoiding major pitfalls than it is for systematically adding to the evidence base for policy options.

3. Each public engagement activity is important. Each represents an experience through which citizens' trust in government, and their willingness to participate in future engagement, can rise or fall. Public perception of the value of these engagements is crucial. The major variables here are the extent to which public input can theoretically influence policy, and the extent to which governments can prove that input was meaningfully considered. 

4. While it can be appropriate for governments to seek public input for general ideas and feedback, there's a massive downside. The greater the extent to which public input can be considered hard evidence, the easier it is for governments to incorporate that input in policy decisions, and the easier it is for governments to demonstrate how it influenced policy. There are many goals to engagement, including education, consensus-building, and legitimacy, but insofar as better policy is a central goal, engagement should be designed to produce data.

5. Public engagement is complex. There are hundreds of studied formats, each requiring a set of detailed design decisions, to align governments' needs with citizen satisfaction while producing the required data and insights. However, the way public engagement is governed, most of these design decisions are lost. If I may be blunt, it's essentially like a first-time homeowner overruling an architect on how their plumbing and electrical will work.

6. Governments need to build capacity for public engagement, particularly digital, but as per the above they may already have more capacity than they realize. So they must also develop governance that prioritizes expertise and good practices over ad hoc goals. The strongest version of this would be governance that includes public input and oversight on how engagement is designed and evaluated.

Government, Citizens, and Power

by Kent Aitken

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A fairly basic element of our entire governance model is changing. Governments have decision-making power, and they're increasingly called upon to share it with citizens. 

Albeit in a range of ways, some more comfortable and certain than others. One way of conceptualizing this is the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Spectrum of Engagement:

I'll draw your attention to the Empower idea, where final decision-making authority rests with the citizen. I'd like to make a case that, while empowering citizens seems uncertain or risky, it's likely often the best approach and actually solves several systemic issues that we talk about on CPSRenewal.

The experimentation problem

When the system is that government listens, considers, then decides, it's responsible and accountable for the process, the accepted ideas, the rejected ideas, and the outcomes - with all the limitations and scrutiny of government. If the system is, instead, that final decision-making power is in citizens' hands - in well-defined and inclusively agreed-upon parameters - the risk calculation is very different. Government is held to account for the decision-making system, not the outcomes.

The recommendation problem

Along most of the IAP2 Spectrum the problem is that citizens' role is relegated to that of recommender, and I'll argue that this is, more often than we think, a bad deal for both governments and the citizens themselves.

A while back I argued against potentially polarizing systems based everyone getting an opportunity to make recommendations (see: How Organizations Plan). Alternatively, making stakeholders responsible for the final decision does a number of things:

1. Forces recommenders to think through the implementation of their recommendation, not just the goal
2. Makes recommenders accountable for the outcomes, not just the conspicuous promotion of the agenda they represent
3. Removes recommenders' safety net of knowing that someone else is going to further study and assess their recommendation, motivating diligence
4. Encourages compromise and consensus

An aside: I think the above applies internally, as well: I suspect most employees would submit markedly better work if it went straight into production, instead of being reviewed by a half-dozen others.

In both cases we have a vicious cycle of X (government or an executive) having to keep control because they don't know what would happen otherwise, and they'll never know what would happen otherwise because they keep control.

Assumptions about power

Lastly, I want note that empowering stakeholders is likely less risky than it seems, partially because we misunderstand the level of risk in the status quo because of our assumptions about power. I opened with a believable line: "Governments have decision-making power, and they're increasingly called upon to share it with citizens", but it's actually far less ironclad than it seems.

An IAP2 Canada member, Steph Roy McCallum, put it nicely in a post on Re-imagining the IAP2 Spectrum, and I'll leave it at that (emphasis mine):

“The IAP2 spectrum needs to be re-thought because it is presented as if the decision-maker has the control, and that the Inform and Consult levels are irrelevant at best in our complex, controversial world, and at worst are part of the problem by contributing to polarization and conflict through suggestion that those levels are acceptable in situations where there may be an outcry to be heard, but that the organization doesn’t want or is unable to meet the demands. I think I probably also said that the “empower” level suggests that the organization or decision-maker has the ability to empower others, without considering that communities and individuals have power of their own that is not conferred on them by the decision-maker.”

What Blueprint 2020 Proves Thus Far

by Nick Charney

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While the exercise is ongoing, Blueprint 2020 has already done something very important: it has clearly shown that the Civil Service can benefit from - or dare I say desperately needs - a reliable, universally accessible, and focused outlet for its cognitive surplus. Moreover, the combination of GCPedia and GCconnex have proven best suited to the task of soliciting widespread participation as neither impose significant barriers to entry or traditional restraints to participation (hierarchy, organizational boundaries, geography, etc). It is also worth noting that while the participation thus far has predominantly been via GCConnex, GCPedia could easily facilitate the co-creation of the final report and could see significant uptake should the work go in that direction.

That said, it's actually symbiotic relationship

The fact that Blueprint 2020 is driving a tremendous amount of engagement on these platforms is a god send to the platform's administrators, overseers and evangelists. In fact, Blueprint 2020 may prove to be the first truly compelling case for their more mainstream adoption. The new life blood Blueprint has injected into these tools - at a time where their future is still being decided - is a boon to a tool set whose value has been upheld and defended by early adopters despite the fact that the tools themselves continue to lack a clearly articulated focus.

This point is likely to cause a stir, and I'm open to debate on the matter, but collaboration for collaboration's sake, I would argue, isn't a compelling enough reason. If it was, there would be wider adoption, more robust support, and firmer governance all backed by a larger budget. I suppose what I am saying is that in my view Blueprint 2020 has given the tool set a more succinct raison d'etre; Blueprint is a case study that hints at its still untapped potential: a dynamic and evolving repository of the cognitive surplus of the civil service. So while the explosive growth in usage since Blueprint's launch is encouraging, I have to wonder about what happens to all that engagement after the exercise is concluded. My gut tells me that in the absence of something as equally as compelling as Blueprint, the bulk of the users and their contributions will simply fall off.

Which of course begs the question: How do we build on the momentum rather than lose it?

While the tools will likely be prominently featured in the final report as a key enabler, there is an opportunity to do considerably more with Blueprint to further ongoing collaboration. For example, we could publicly affirm that the cognitive surplus of the civil service is something that ought to be more explicitly harnessed and that centrally provided collaboration tools - GCpedia, GCconnex, and whatever evolves there from - are the de facto outlet for that surplus. That said, an affirmation of this sort only goes so far.

Who among us hasn't quoted a Clerk's report to justify a proposed approach? 

If we are truly serious about pooling our cognitive surplus to solve real problems by levering centrally accessible collaboration tools, then we ought to take more demonstrable steps to enshrine that ethos directly into the Values and Ethic Code of the Public Sector. We could achieve this by including a statement under the sub-heading of "Expected Behaviours" that read:

6. Collaboration

Public Servants shall demonstrate a commitment to collaboration by:

6.1. Exercising their professional responsibility to direct their cognitive surplus towards joint projects that further the interests of the Crown at every opportunity.

6.2. Using centrally provided collaborative platforms with a view to working openly with their colleagues to create value, put forth ideas, and posit solutions to the organization's (GOC) most pressing problems regardless of which institution they work for, what position in the hierarchy they occupy, and where they are geographically.

Not only would such a statement explicitly make collaboration the default value it would also make the code of Values and Ethics more tangible, more relevant, and more in line with the vision that Blueprint 2020 actually articulates.

My Submission to the Open Government Consultation

As you probably know the Government of Canada's consultation on Open Government has now come to a close. I submitted the following on Sunday evening.

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Re: Open Data and Proactive Disclosure of Grants and Contributions 

I have investigated how the Government of Canada currently discloses its Grants and Contributions (G&C) spending and I believe there is a significant opportunity to make this already publicly available data far more usable.

Currently:

• Each department publishes their own G&C data (i.e. there is no single repository)
• Each data point is presented uniformly in an HTML table
• Each data point has 6 variables: (1) Recipient Name; (2) Location (City, Province); (3) Date (YYYY-MM-DD); (4) Value ($123,456.78); (5) Purpose (free text), and (6) Comments (free text, often blank)
• Each data point is buried in a subset of html pages and is difficult to find; in fact many of my searches using the native web page search failed to return any results from the G&C pages

I have worked with a handful of other public servants to test whether or not the data could be crawled and assembled into a single data set, and it can. We have already compiled a complete data set for all of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) G&C spending. This data set includes every Grant and Contribution disclosed by AANDC since proactive disclosure measures came into effect in 2005. We subsequently verified the data set and cross referenced it with Google Maps to derive longitude and latitude. You can find the data set, additional information, and preliminary visualizations here: 

https://github.com/marknca/aandc-grants-and-contributions

Uniting currently fragmented data offering should be a key component of the Open Government Action Plan, as such I suggest that the Government of Canada assemble a team to undertake similar work across the entire domain. This is a low hanging yet incredibly important fruit that is well within our grasp. Given that I, and a handful of other public servants, have already initiated some of this work, we would be happy to share any resources we used (including code), provide advice, or help as needed.

I am looking forward to hearing back from you

Sincerely,

Nicholas Charney

http://www.cprenewal.ca

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect