‘The public realm can only thrive when citizens and their government are effectively engaged with each other. The vibrancy of democratic community life depends on citizens possessing the interest and capacity to influence, individually and collectively, policies which affect their lives’
Henry Tam, Civil Renewal Unit, February 2004
Having described the terms ‘community’ and ‘community engagement’ it is important to consider the perspective of Government. What does the Government want to get out of community engagement? What is the Government up to: ‘investing or saving’, ‘doing things to communities’ or ‘working with them’; ‘improving or economising or both’?
Conversely, how do communities feel when they are approached by Government? Do they feel manoeuvred and ‘done to’ or do they feel a new sense of direction and impetus?
Community engagement forms part of the Government’s civil renewal agenda. Civil renewal is the development of strong, active, and empowered communities, in which people are able to do things for themselves, define the problems they face, and tackle them in partnership with public bodies. Civil renewal requires mutual respect, trust and responsibility.
This is clearly articulated in the Home Office ‘Together We Can’ Action Plan (2005) where there is a commitment to the ethos:
‘That local communities are just better at dealing with their own problems. They have the networks, the knowledge, the sense of what is actually possible, and the ability to make solutions stick’.
The Government uses three key terms:
- Community consultation
- Community engagement
- Community involvement
These are often used interchangeably by departments to cover a whole host of civil renewal activities. Unfortunately they aren’t always used consistently!
For clarification:
Consultation can be understood as a process of research with local people, the results of which may be used to improve local services.
Involvement means meeting with communities and individuals to solve a problem or take an opportunity
Engagement, as has already been explained, is the establishment of a dynamic working relationship; where partners do not make assumptions or presume to ‘know best’; where the purpose is to shape resources around local needs.
The focal point in these three processes is the nature of the relationships created and the results they can produce. For lasting improvements to be made lasting relationships are required. This is the essence of Community Engagement.
Power Sharing
Looking inside the Community Engagement process for a moment one can see that for a lasting relationship to be effective some form of power sharing is required. Power will rarely be equal in community engagement relationships but there must be an agreement that power is managed appropriately. This requires trust. If relationships are superficial this is virtually impossible to achieve, if they have been carefully built up, then trust will almost inevitably be present.
It is from this vantage point that one can usually see how a Government is working; whether communities are being treated as active participants or passive recipients.
Experience shows that when power is managed in a creative and positive way it is soon matched by other local resources. This may be as simple as ‘goodwill’ but even that should not be underestimated. When power is clung onto and poorly managed this leads to cynicism and a lethargy that saps energy, slows progress and wastes resources.
The following table shows the range of empowerment in community consultation, involvement and engagement.
| Information Giving | Consultation | Community Involvement | Capacity Building | Collaboration |
| Central to all levels of engagement | Asking for views and opinions to identify key local issues or decide on a course of action | Involving people in the decision-making process and deciding together | Enabling groups and individuals to become involved in joint projects | Working closely together in partnership – sharing rewards and responsibility |
| ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* | ********* |
| For example, newsletter, leaflet, website | For example, questionnaire, survey | For example, a public meeting | For example through learning, skills and administrative support | For example, ‘bending’ mainstream resources to deliver locally agreed plans |
Local Performance Information
In local working arrangements, power sharing isn’t just about money! In fact finance might be quite low down the list of a community’s priorities. What may be much more important is the sharing of powerful information. An example of this is local performance management.
If local really does matter to a Government then performance information about services will be calculated to local levels. This makes the information meaningful and creates real opportunities for individuals and communities to do something about it.
More advanced power sharing involves targets being set as well as reported locally. In this way local evidence based decision-making and local performance management is established.
The recent development of ‘floor targets’, designed to help identify small pockets of deprivation that must be lifted to a defined ‘floor level’, is an important step forward in this process.
Another example to describe this point is targets to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured (KSI). There is little that a community can do about a regional KSI figure but if they have local figures they might be able to get to the real causes behind the tragedies. A community will be able to look at vital local factors rather than dots on a map or a bend in a road. They will know about patterns of life, how people come and go, what events were taking place at the time and so on.
The acid test for all performance information is whether it can make a difference to the day-to-day experience of local people and the way they live their lives. Effective Community Engagement makes this much more possible, often through the establishment of a local partnership.
A vibrant local partnership will expose poor performance indicators, espouse effective ones and ultimately make a difference to community well-being
However there is an important health warning that should be mentioned here. Where Community Engagement leads to the establishment of local partnerships, their effectiveness depends on a number of key factors. One of these is their governance arrangements.
Problems often occur where partnerships are very large. This sometimes results in governance arrangements becoming too complicated and eventually collapsing under a pile of bureaucracy.
In large partnerships it is harder to develop the relationships of trust that have been described here, simply because there are just too many involved. The consequence of this is that partners become less prepared to manage power together and as a result nothing really improves. Where possible small is beautiful!
So, ‘What is the Government up to?’The answer can usually be seen in the nature of the relationships that are established and the way that power is locally managed.