Rethinking Public Engagement: Why we need to rethink public engagement and how to promote a culture of active citizenship.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION

The budget is the most important policy document that a local government produces because it outlines resources for a community's policy priorities. As such, it has been recognized for decades that local governments should do a better job engaging citizens in the budget process. The standard avenue for citizen engagement in the budget process is often limited to a public hearing or two, which typically happens after important decisions have already been made and often amounts to little more than a chance for citizens to air their grievances at a microphone.

[right arrow] About the word "citizen"

By "citizen," we mean people who share a civic identity. This is the "self" in self-government. It also means participation in the creation and receipt of public goods. This is the "government" in self-government.

New forces have emerged that suggest local governments need to consider public engagement in a new light. Before we examine these forces and their implications, we must recognize that public engagement is the most difficult part of planning and budgeting. To take on a difficult problem, we should first define the problem before attempting to solve it. In that spirit, this special section will first reexamine the reasons for public engagement--because knowing why we do public engagement sets us up to understand how to do public engagement.

We will also strive to "think like a chef and not a cook." A cook follows a prescribed recipe but runs into problems when the recipe does not fit the situation. A chef, however, has deeper understanding and knowledge that they can adapt to the situation.

In this special four-part feature, we take on the monumental challenge of rethinking current models of public engagement. We'll examine the "why" behind public engagement to understand how crucial it is, especially in our age of polarization. We'll also offer insight into how and when to engage the public, especially with co-creation, which can dissolve divides.

[right arrow] Public engagement defined

"Public engagement" refers to the activities by which people's concerns, needs, interests, and values are incorporated into decisions and actions regarding public matters and issues. This usually includes a combination of providing access to relevant information, gathering input, discussing and connecting, identifying and providing choices, and deliberation on major decisions.

(Tina Nabatchi and Matt Leighninger, Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy. Jossey-Bass: 2015.)

RETHINKING BUDGETING ABOUT GFOA'S RETHINKING BUDGETING INITIATIVE

Local governments have long relied on incremental line-item budgeting, in which last year's budget becomes next year's with changes around the margins. In a world defined by uncertainty, this form of budgeting puts local governments at a disadvantage, hampering their ability to adapt to changing circumstances. As we all know so well, the ability to adapt has become essential over the last two years--and will certainly remain so for some time. The premise of the Rethinking Budgeting initiative is that the public finance profession has an opportunity to update local government budgeting practices with new ways of thinking and new technologies to help communities better meet changing needs and circumstances. The Rethinking Budgeting initiative seeks out and shares unconventional but promising methods for local governments to improve how they budget, and how they embrace the defining issues of our time.

PART 1

Why Public Engagement is Important

A good place to start rethinking public engagement is to first consider why it's important. If we know why local governments need public input, we can design public engagement accordingly. Traditional reasons for public engagement in planning and budgeting include building trust in the decisionmaking process, defining community priorities, improving the quality of outcomes, improving relationships between the public and public officials, and building stronger support for the resulting decisions. While these reasons are still valid, we contend that they are incomplete. In this section, we examine four reasons why public engagement is important today in a way that is distinct from decades past, and what conditions give rise to these reasons. (1)

(Re)Establish legitimacy of local government as an institution

In most decades after World War II, the legitimacy of government was taken for granted. A government needs legitimacy to function, but today, the legitimacy of government is in question. (2) Many people, especially young people, feel they need to disrupt institutions in order to be heard.

An important contributor to this loss of legitimacy is a loss of public trust in governing institutions. Many people do not believe public officials will act on behalf of the entire community and that the voices of low-income, Black, Indigenous, and people of color will continue to be unheard and marginalized. For an increasing number of families, the American dream seems unattainable, with income disparities as high as they have been in our recent history. (3) People look to government for solutions that are not forthcoming. People also look to government to be a partner with them in recognizing and addressing shared community problems, and to be seen as a co-producer of public goods with government rather than a passive bystander, customer, or client. Since 2020, we have seen numerous public protests demanding more responsive government on topics as diverse as racial justice, COVID restrictions, reproductive rights, and school curriculums. These protests have become a movement, and they demand an affirmative response from local government--one that puts citizens at the center of public problem-solving--if our democracy is to work as it should.

The loss of public trust is accompanied by increased divisiveness or polarization, making it difficult for people to bridge the divides that separate them. Yet when given the opportunity to name the issues they're concerned about, frame the context of the issue, deliberate, and act together to address the issues, most people are willing to work through tensions and trade-offs to find common ground and solutions they can live with. Engaging citizens in democratic and complementary ways helps them build relationships of trust with other citizens and with public officials, gain confidence in our governing institutions through shared work and responsibility, and become owners of the solutions or co-producers of public goods with government.

Another contributor to government's loss of legitimacy is the "information tsunami" in which society now finds itself. We live in an age of an extreme--and exponentially increasing--volume of available information. (4) Before, citizens had limited information about government, and that information was intermediated by government itself or perhaps one or two media outlets [such as, the local newspaper]. Today, citizens have more information sources like Facebook, NextDoor, and Twitter. To make matters worse, the incentives faced by these platforms encourage sensationalism, provoking outrage, and presenting users with information that confirms their preexisting beliefs. This is especially true of social media, which is the most important source of information for many people. (5)

The sheer volume of information available means that citizens are likely to downgrade the authoritativeness of any sole source and cherry-pick sources that feed them their preferred narratives. This creates a negative feedback loop. Sources that provide simple narratives catering to current biases get more attention, thus creating an incentive for them to do more. Sources that try to provide quality information are at a disadvantage because they can't compete as well for the public's attention. Citizens become less certain that they can believe what government officials [or experts in general] say and question the legitimacy of institutions like government.

This is not the only way the information tsunami brings legitimacy into question. The missteps of local government are laid bare as never before. Some missteps may be exaggerated [or fabricated] and others are real, but either way it creates a gap between the perceived performance of government and government's claims of competence. The problem is not that the people who make up the institutions of local government are corrupt or incompetent, but that the issues local government deals with are often complex, and institutions' ability to deal with them are finite.

Align public expectations with what government can realistically accomplish

It has become a truism among public managers that the public expects more from the government than they are willing to pay for. But there is scant research on the public's expectations versus reality. Survey results supplied to GFOA by Polco suggest that public managers' observations may be accurate. A majority [approximately 76 percent] of residents across American cities report that the quality of services from their local government is "good" or "excellent." Yet the same respondents also rate the value of services for the taxes paid to the local government poorly--a 49 on a 0 to 100 scale, where 100 is "excellent" and 0 is "poor." This may imply that although day-to-day services are satisfactory, citizens are looking for more from their government than they are getting.

Part of the problem is that the rhetoric of democratic politics has become misaligned with what local governments can achieve. Failure occurs when the public's expectations and the government's claims of what it can accomplish diverge from reality. Elections often incentivize attacks on current officeholders [blaming them for problems] or big promises of how new candidates will solve problems [which rarely come to pass]--both of which tend to undermine faith in government. This divergence between public expectations of government and government's...