Study and Supply of Services on the Development of Eparticipation in the EU

European eParticipation

Study and supply of services on the development of eParticipation in the EU

Deliverable 1.3a

Main benefits of eParticipation

developments in the EU

First version

Simon Smith

June 2008

Available with other deliverables at: www.european-eparticipation.eu

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Unit H2, eGovernment and CIP Operations, European Commission / UNIVERSITY OF MACEDONIA

CONTENTS

1 Executive Summary 3

2 Introduction 4

3 Initial scoping of the benefits of public participation 4

4 Analytical distinctions 7

5 Participation in different modes of governance 8

6 Characterising governance trends at different spatial scales in Europe 10

7 Conclusion 16

8 Appendix 1. Three governance scenarios 18

9 Table 1. Three governance scenarios with implications for eParticipation 19

10 References 21

1 Executive Summary

Firstly, a number of previous attempts to define the benefits of both public participation in general and eParticipation in particular with respect to policy-making are reviewed, and their failure to establish reliable measures of these benefits is noted. Nevertheless there is a strong common-sense case for many of the benefits that are assumed by practitioners to occur. With regard to eParticipation, three broad types of benefit are typically assumed: reduced transaction and coordination costs in social and political relationships, greater deliberativeness due to certain qualities of the medium, and the enhanced information-processing capacity of information technology.

Secondly, three distinctions are proposed as potentially useful starting points for an analysis of the benefits of eParticipation which accrue to the various stakeholders involved: the instrumental versus the intrinsic benefits of a participation process; the public versus the private goods and values which are produced; and the long-term benefits of living in a participative political culture versus the more immediate benefits of a distinct project or initiative.

Thirdly, it is emphasised that participation and eParticipation are asked to perform different functions according to the governance context in which they occur. Ultimately, the benefits of eParticipation are value-laden and can be understood in terms of how its effects change, stabilise or improve a certain mode of governance. It is argued that whereas an essentially hierarchical mode of governance prevails at the national scale in Europe, elements of market-based and in particular network governance have become more prominent at both the local/regional and the supra-national scale in recent decades, partly in response to the challenges of the informatisation of society.

2 The genesis of a network mode of governance within the EU – focused around policy networks comprised of organised interests, but increasingly also allowing space for less organised groups to engage with policy-makers – is then described. This governance context is unlikely to foster mass democracy at the European scale, and the EU's regulatory rather than redistributive role arguably does not require this. Instead there is a demand for a deliberative participatory form of democracy, whose further democratisation could involve two processes: making the 'strong publics' of policy networks more accessible to new participants; and encouraging and protecting oppositional public enclaves where alternative discourses can emerge and develop. Two principal barriers to participation at a European level are also noted: the fragmentation of the 'European public sphere' and the linguistic diversity of Europe. eParticipation tools could have a role in both the democratisation of the EU's system of network governance and in overcoming the barriers of discursive fragmentation and linguistic diversity. This leads to some tentative suggestions about the kinds of eParticipation tools which may deliver the most significant benefits in this distinct and evolving governance context.
Introduction

This is the first draft of a deliverable about the benefits of eParticipation in policy making at the European scale. The second version is due in October 2008 and the final version in March 2009. This draft should therefore be seen as an initial step towards a more definitive statement on what are the main benefits of European eParticipation. This version could be seen as both a literature review and a scoping exercise, designed above all to properly contextualise the benefits of participation and eParticipation with reference to democratic norms associated with the governance regimes which participation activities are expected to co-exist with or to co-shape. It is stressed that the European scale of action has a number of key specificities when compared with a national or local scale, including its linguistic diversity, its fragmented public sphere and what approximates to a network mode of governance within the EU. Comparisons are drawn between eParticipation at the European, national and local scales. These have a bias towards UK experience in the latter two cases, but since our primary concern is with the European scale, and the purpose of the comparisons are essentially to illustrate the importance of context, this is adequate, although it would be useful, and may be possible, to explore some cross-national differences in governance arrangements in subsequent versions of this deliverable.

3 Initial scoping of the benefits of public participation

A review of the evidence for the benefits of community engagement for the UK Government found that “there is a strong common sense case for community engagement.” (Rogers & Robinson 2004: 51). A literature review funded by the Home Office’s Civil Renewal Unit (Involve 2005) found the following sorts of benefits cited for participation in policy-making:

tapping ‘local’ knowledge and innovation,
reducing or avoiding conflict,
increasing awareness and understanding,
mobilising new resources including voluntary labour,
making programmes more sustainable by generating community ownership,
increasing individual or community self-reliance,
reducing transaction costs,
increasing social inclusion or cohesion,
generating trust and social capital,
making policy more enforceable by embedding it in social norms,
generating new groups and organisations and strengthening existing ones.

Some of these benefits relate to service effectiveness and efficiency, others to decision-making quality and legitimacy, and others to governance and (active) citizenship (Involve 2005: 67). Not all go uncontested, and not all are even measurable, but it is noteworthy that many participation practitioners remain convinced of their occurrence, and often express frustration that attempts to measure the benefits of participation (particularly for the purposes of developing indicators then to be used for benchmarking or targeting) effectively downgrade the more intangible benefits which their experience convinces them are perhaps even more important (NEF 2000). It is also the case that whereas decision-making and/or service improvements tend to be at the forefront of concern from a government perspective, other stakeholders may perceive different benefits in the same process (Lowndes, Pratchett & Stoker 2001a and b). A broad distinction can be drawn between the general public and ‘insider’ stakeholders, insofar as engagement with the general public tends to bring values to the forefront, whereas engaging with insider stakeholders (referred to below as ‘strong publics’) tends to bring their particular knowledge and interests to the forefront (Creasy et al 2007: 23). Correspondingly any evaluation should consider the possibility that different types of benefit can accrue to a number of different types of stakeholder[1], such as:

· individual citizens

· elected representatives

· government bodies

· other public sector partners

· political parties

· NGOs

· citizen groups

· the academic and research community

· business and industry

· mass communication media

Focusing more particularly on eParticipation, a report to the Australian government maintained that “the benfits of online policy consultation parallel those of traditional consultation.” (AGIMO 2004) But, it goes on, they also carry 'added value':

Online methods ... extend the reach of government consultation through greater access, including availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Online methods can also provide a safer and more deliberative way in which agencies can engage with citizens through secure, faster and more manageable ways of handling a large-scale group input. Online methods can also attract sectors of the community (for example, youth) who may not usually engage with government.” (ibid.)

In our analytical framework (Smith, Macintosh & Millard 2008) we listed a more extensive but essentially similar range of benefits for eParticipation:

- for project owners:

· cost reduction, resource rationalisation

· time savings

· greater productivity

· staff who are more competent and skilled in their jobs and thus achieve greater output, etc.

· less bureaucracy and administration (administrative burden reduction)

· more transparency, accountability, etc., within the agency

· increased staff satisfaction

· increased security for the agency

· redeployment of staff from back-office (administration) to front-office (service delivery, democracy and engagement)

· increase agency agility and innovation

· decision-makers better informed about public policy and service needs

· increased contact with the public providing opportunity for better relationship building

· better informed public

· improved acceptance levels for new services and policies by the public

- for participants:

· successful access to and use of eParticipation processes

· time savings

· clearer opportunity to comment and participate, with less bureaucracy and administration

· more convenience

· more transparency, accountability, etc., for participants

· expectations of users met

· increased user satisfaction

· increased sense of fulfilment

· increased security for participants

Building on this, group discussion at the first European eParticipation study workshop (Millard 2008: 16) suggested that there are five main types of benefit depending on the stakeholders involved:

i) For participants – to increase convenience, satisfaction, feelings of involvement, greater engagement and commitment in community and society, also noting that eParticipation is not only a rational but also an emotional experience.

ii) For organisations -- to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and legitimacy of organisations, for example successful participation can increase the economic viability of private and civil sector organisations, and probably also public institutions as well, by reducing costs.

iii) For organisations -- to increase the efficiency and quality of their own policy-making.

iv) For governments -- to support social cohesion and other society-wide policies.

v) For all –eParticipation can increase overall participation rates and the intensity and quality of participation if undertaken in the right way.

Some of the benefits listed under the first point relate to the intrinsic and private benefits of eParticipation, but most are derived from assumptions about reduced transaction and coordination costs, with the potential to broaden access or increase response rates, the potentially greater deliberativeness of the medium, with implications for the quality of participation, and the enhanced information-processing capacity of the technology. Many of these benefits appear self-evident to practitioners and authorities. Moreover, the private sector’s growing deployment of social networking tools both in customer relations and within organisations (e.g. to enable teamwork and mutual learning) would appear to validate their utility (Mayo & Steinberg 2007). Yet the evidence base is poor (Coleman, Macintosh and Schneeberger 2008). In fact evidence is lacking on the benefits of public participation per se –surprisingly, in view of the long history of using participative methods in spheres like housing, health and the environment. In relation to community engagement, Rogers & Robinson reported to the British Government: “there are real difficulties in establishing reliable measures” (Rogers & Robinson 2004: 51); and in relation to public participation in policy-making, Involve concluded: “actual cost-benefit analyses of participation are, as far as we have been able to discern, virtually non-existent” (Involve 2005: 61). The latter report adds, however, that in the authors’ opinion benefits are usually underestimated, being too intangible, too long-term, and too affected by confounding variables to be captured by standard project evaluation methods. It will be argued here that there is also often a failure to properly contextualise the benefits of (e)Participation with reference to democratic norms associated with the governance regimes which participation activities are expected to co-exist with or indeed to co-shape.

4 Analytical distinctions

The Involve report cited above makes two distinctions between types of benefit of public participation which are useful for analytical purposes:

Instrumental – transformative (intrinsic)

Public goods and values – private goods and values

The first distinction refers to whether the participation process is a means or and end. In other words instrumental benefits are related to outcomes, whilst transformative or intrinsic benefits are process-related. Involve used the word transformative to imply that participants themselves can benefit as a participation process transforms people or organisations. Here we prefer the more neutral term intrinsic because we wish to denote types of benefits that are intrinsic to the participation process, whether as an explicit goal or a by-product. They will normally be about learning – whether through individual reflection or social learning – but need not necessarily be transformative.

The second distinction is crucial when thinking about who benefits: public goods (like better policies or stronger communities) potentially spread the benefits much wider than private goods which only accrue to direct participants (like skills, information, status and income, or benefits in health and wellbeing that are contingent on individual behaviour change). Secondary beneficiaries of participation that produces public goods could be individuals, groups and communities advocated for, or ‘society’ as a whole, for example as a result of changes in social capital or better policies. In this respect, there can of course be ‘victims’ of participation insofar as participatory policy-making has redistributive effects that produce benefits for some groups and disbenefits for others, or changes the social climate of a place in ways that improve the quality of life for some groups but complicate the lives of others. Many (though not all) of the intrinsic benefits will tend to be private goods, whereas instrumental benefits will often tend to be expressed in terms of public goods and values. The former tend to be better identified in many project evaluations than the latter.