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Kellogg Project Update – Cutting Edge Civic Engagement By Local Governments - January 2008

PACE is moving forward on an intensive research project to document, analyze and disseminate information on cutting edge civic engagement efforts by local government. The research is part of a two-year project supported by the Kellogg Foundation to examine new models of public engagement.

Towns, villages, cities and counties are rich sources of civic innovation, but many success stories and new models go unheralded outside the small circles of people who follow the ins and outs of local government. One of our first discoveries in this research was the lack of any central clearinghouse or database to identify and assess the scale and impact of these local efforts. Literally thousands of communities have become “laboratories” of civic experimentation and change. Their efforts vary in scope and nature. Some are temporary, designed to solve a specific problem or to forge a new community “vision” for the future. Others, like the Neighborhood Councils in Los Angeles, reflect long-term structural changes that influence the day-to-day operations of city departments.

Local innovation has been driven as much by necessity as by any abstract sense of mission or idealism. During the late 1970s, two trends converged to create a greater demand for civic experimentation. The first was an increase in grassroots, community organizing and passionate, single-issue advocacy. The second was a growing skepticism about government, its ability to solve problems and an organized opposition to tax increases. As citizens were demanding more for less from the public sector, outside sources of funding, notably state and federal “block grants,” were drying up. Consequently, many local officials had no choice but to seek news way of interacting with the public. The alternative was dysfunction and paralysis.

Another development was the proliferation of new state and federal mandates governing everything from environmental protection to land use planning. These laws typically included vague language about public participation, but in many communities, planners and city officials designed processes that went far beyond the mandates.

Technology is clearly an important change factor and a big unknown in the future of civic engagement. Computers give citizens instant access to a wide range of information and provide new forums for policy discussion. Web-based “citizen journalists” are adding new, if often discordant, voices to the marketplace of ideas, while government agencies are finding innovative ways of using the Internet to inform and engage the citizenry. People are better informed than ever but also, in many cases, more physically isolated. Managers and elected officials who want to succeed must find effective ways of communicating and convening to tap the potential of technology.

A first step in this project was to interview experts in the field, scan the available literature and search newspaper indexes and other databases for recent examples of civic change. Terry Amsler, director of the Collaborative Governance Initiative at the Institute for Local Government, a nonprofit research and resources arm of the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties, sees “an explosion of experimentation in civic engagement” from Chula Vista, a modest border town near Tijuana, to the affluent suburbs of the Silicon Valley.

Terry notes that many “homegrown” efforts are being organized by local officials, consultants and residents who may have little contact with widely known deliberative democracy advocates and experts in the field. Planning-related and other private firms often play a big and under-recognized role in local public engagement activities. A defining question for on-the-ground practice, he suggests, is whether “sponsors and practitioners have a considered and clear sense of the intended purposes of their planned public deliberation, and are the models or strategies selected likely to get them there.”

Local government has undergone a sea change in the way it views the public. The signs are everywhere. For instance, instead of having a marketing and communications department, the City of Ventura, California, now has a “Division of Civic Engagement” with a website featuring streaming video of public meetings, a city manager’s blog and “portals” to learn more about civic events, local news and volunteer opportunities. Also, public administration and policy programs at universities have adopted the language and values of civic engagement in their curricula.

Clearly, there is a rich brew of experimentation going on at the local level. In fact, there are so many stories of civic change that, initially, the difficult question was where to start. Many different fields and disciplines come together in an inchoate mass known as civic engagement, including conflict resolution, government reinvention, leadership development, strategic planning, opinion polling, urban design, and environmentalism. All of which make our research project both challenging and potentially more rewarding for our audience of funders, practitioners, local officials, academics and informed citizens.

If you have ideas or references to share with PACE regarding this research effort, please email the project director, Mike McGrath, at mcgrath.mike1@gmail.com