Transformative practices : the political work of public engagement practitioners
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Date
01/07/2014Author
Escobar-Rodriguez, Oliver
Escobar, Oliver
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Abstract
Participatory and deliberative democracy have attracted global attention, both as a
field of research and practice. This interest reflects ongoing experimentation with
ideas and practices of stakeholder governance, collaborative policy-making and
citizen participation. The institutionalisation of such practices in Scotland is taking
place through local partnership arrangements and public engagement processes. In
particular, the Scottish Government’s Community Planning policy mandates local
authorities to develop partnerships where various sectors and organisations are
summoned to engage in collaborative policy-making. Central to this agenda is the
involvement of citizens and communities through an increasing number of official
local forums. In this sense, Scotland resembles other countries where public
authorities seek working combinations of strategic partnership governance and
local citizen participation.
Despite burgeoning interest and developments, however, scarce attention has been
paid to the role of public engagement officials tasked with turning participatory and
deliberative ideals into everyday practices. Indeed, we still know little about the
policy work of official ‘public engagers’ who organise participatory processes by
negotiating a contested milieu of actors and agendas, while being constrained and
enabled by an evolving ecology of participation. Consequently, this thesis presents
findings from two years of ethnographic fieldwork shadowing public engagers in a
Scottish Local Authority Area. The uniqueness of these policy workers is that their
expertise is not on a particular policy area, but on stakeholder and citizen
engagement across policy domains. That is, their expertise is on process, and their
job is to facilitate deliberative forums to inform local policy-making. The
fundamental question addressed here is not whether participatory policy-making
works, but rather how does it work, what kind of work does it take, and what kind
of work does it do.
By foregrounding the ‘how’ question, this thesis provides a new practice-based
analytical framework to both understand and inform participation processes. The
findings highlight the importance of the engagers’ political work, thus illustrating
the disciplinary force of engagement practice and the contested nature of
participatory policy-making. Understanding these dimensions offers insight into
new political spaces for the renegotiation of the relationship between authorities
and citizens. Accordingly, the research shows how public engagers work to open
and develop such spaces in order to foster new relationships through a new ‘politics
of process’. In addition, it explores the impact that this work has on the engagers’
community of practice, as well as the challenges they face as engagement work gets
institutionalised. Therefore, the thesis offers a distinct ethnographic account of the
role of agency in developing official local spaces for participatory and deliberative
democracy in Scotland.