Models for Greater Citizen Involvement in Public Services

Krems.
We’re now starting the final round of keynotes here at CeDEM 2011. The first presenter is Elke Löffler of Governance International, whose interest is in facilitating the greater involvement of citizens in decision-making – a move from big government to the big society. How far have we come to date? We’ve moved, at least in some countries or some regions, from law and order approaches in the 1980s through new public management models in the 1990s to collaborative governance initiatives in the early 2000s; the latter stages of this process are very unevenly distributed, however.

Even public servants pursuing these latter, more advanced models feel that they have not yet been implemented in any significant way; where new approaches are attempted, awareness of the also still remains quite low. On a scale from 0 to 100, EU citizens generally rate the level of user involvement in their countries at around 50, with the UK and Germany slightly more advanced than other countries – the glass is half full, at best.

The more complex such user involvement ends up being, though, the less prepared are they to engage; at the same time, some 70% of people say they are willing to do more than they are at present. Such greater involvement would need to include co-design, co-commissioning (which includes participatory budgeting), co-delivery of services, and co-assessment of service quality (including the design of benchmark metrics).

The Strada Nove Website for, with, and by young people in Modena is an interesting example for this: young people have been involved in the design of the Website, and it covers topics of direct interest to them (sex, drugs, rock’n’roll); it has led to a reduction in issues related to these topics – teenage pregnancies, drug problems, etc. Similar projects are now being developed in the social care area in the UK,and the benefits of such sites also lead to budget savings.

Co-commissioning can be seen for example in the Berlin-Lichtenberg district in Germany, which has employed a multi-channel interface (online and offline) for sourcing and voting on citizen suggesting; this process prioritises specific public policy initiatives, and generates service co-production opportunities for citizens (pensioners in the area have volunteered in a local public library which had been threatened with closure, for example). It also reduces the divide – especially also the jargon divide – between citizens and public servants.

The community speed watcher project in Somerset is an example of co-delivery: police and (often elderly) citizens work together in policing speed limits – pensioners have received training in handling speed guns, for example, and while they are not allowed to issue speeding fines, just the warnings themselves have had an obvious effect on motorists’ behaviour.

Finally, tools such as Twitter have been used in the co-assessment of service delivery; citizen feedback for public services is received via Twitter, and staff tweet back with further information on the current status of services (and such communication is then also disseminated beyond that platform itself).

Additionally, co-finance has also emerged as a phenomenon: citizens have come together to raise funds to supplement services which have had their public budgets cut, and in the process citizen involvement and ownership has also increased.

Overall, these are examples of co-production: citizens are not just regarded as passive consumers, but as active stakeholders, and are working directly with professional public service staff. This draws on the knowledge available from the wider citizenry, beyond the knowledge available amongst public servants. Social media and similar tools play an important role here, lowering barriers to participation, increasing connectivity, increasing citizens’ expectations of government, and giving a voice to the silent majority.

But knowledge of how and where social media may be applied is still limited; worries about a loss of control are still prevalent (but full control is no longer possible anyway).  There’s still a significant learning curve ahead of citizens as well as public service professionals.