2016-05-15
Robert Weymouth and Janette Hartz-Karp
Deliberative Collaborative Governance (DCG) is an arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative, and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets. The general public not only bring unique knowledge, experience and pragmatism to a problem, they also bring a representative legitimacy that can go some way to redressing the suspicion and distrust that undermines an effective resolution.
Examples of wicked problems that confront our case study area, Greater Geraldton, and indeed much of regional Australia, include: Indigenous health disadvantage, fracking and agriculture, fisheries and coastal governance, water resources management, climate change and urban planning. In particular, the City Region needs to find ways to resolve its share of the $15 billion national infrastructure backlog, estimated at around $3 million per annum per council, an increasingly constrained and controversial operational budget and the 'inherently wicked urban land use planning for projected population growth.
Although Greater Geraldton, like most other local governments, had been consulting with its residents, in the main, such efforts were perceived by the public to be 'too little too late. As a result, residents showed signs of being alienated from the institutions of government (e.g. in low local government voting rates), disinterested in the governments attempts at consultation (rarely participating in any numbers), and frustrated, sometimes angry or even outraged with the decisions of the local government. This led the then CEO of Greater Geraldton to initiate the 'Geraldton 2029 and Beyond initiative, over four years from 2010 – 2014, as a joint research project between the City of Greater Geraldton and Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute.
An 'Alliance Governance Group was instituted, consisting of industry, government, Indigenous Australians, and Non Government Organisation representatives, invited by the Mayor. To broaden transparency and inclusion, these stakeholders were joined by several everyday citizens who were randomly selected at a public meeting from a pool of volunteers who responded to advertisements in the local newspaper. The intention was for this Alliance Governance Group to be more than an advisory committee. Its purpose was to oversee the upcoming public deliberation processes to ensure their fairness, comprehensiveness, and transparency; and if needed, to prioritise proposals that resulted from these deliberations, then assist with their implementation.
Over the four years of the project, public deliberation initiatives were created and designed in response to emergent wicked problems. They were both 'bottom up initiatives instigated by the grass roots, as well as 'top down, instigated by the local government. In terms of grass roots initiatives, a relatively unique problem for Greater Geraldton was the paucity of civic interest groups. In contrast with issues at other levels of government and in other circumstances the presence and influence of local civic interest groups in Greater Geraldton is comparatively low (with the exception of sporting clubs). Hence, there is little upward strength from the grass roots, with few bonding or bridging organisations that could generate social capital.
To ameliorate this situation, a volunteer program was initiated through an advertisement in the Geraldton Guardian for 'Community Champions ‒ volunteers who could help to seed public interest in issues that mattered to the community. Forty Community Champions were trained to hold grass roots, small group public deliberations, the first being World Cafés. These were held to understand the sort of community that residents wanted for Geraldton now and into the future. The outcomes of these deliberations on what people wanted to keep and change, and their suggestions for change were prioritised by the Alliance Group together with the Champions, and where possible, were implemented forthwith. However, some of these changes, such as 'planting one million trees and 'making Geraldton the bike capital of the West were anything but short term projects.
The 'Community Champions also ran the second phase of stimulating grass roots initiatives (some Champions had remained involved and others were elicited). The Champions were trained in, and then organised Community Cafés. A Community Café is a small, hosted, drop-in conversation among diverse people about their views and feelings about issues of importance. They are held in real cafés or other public places to enhance the sense of inclusivity and creativity that can spontaneously occur when people get together. The aim is to foster inquiry rather than debate about issues that matter, and to speak with the heart and the mind.
The intent of the Cafés was to follow up on issues raised during the prior deliberations about the importance of retaining the “Gero Feel”, no matter what future development eventuated. The debate about planned increases in urban density had also been taken up in the press. This represented a classic wicked problem, which would be directly confronted in the Citys next plan to focus on Geraldtons future natural and urban form. The Conversation Cafés were also augmented by requests to schools and the broad community to submit photos, drawings, poems, essays of what the “Gero feel” meant to them. From the school childrens artwork, the City created bookmarks, postcards, and banners, all of which are in constant use by the City to reinforce community identity. The outputs of the Conversation Cafés as well as the artwork were used as background information for the large-scale public deliberation on the urban form that followed.
These initiatives run by the Community Champions did produce concrete outcomes that were helpful within the scope of the projects described above, but they were not able to sustain the effort of stimulating grass roots participation. Without the continued support of the City in training and support, as well as initiating areas to progress (which the City was unable to resource), this initiative gradually faded and ended.
Although these early attempts to pioneer various forms of bottom-up deliberative collaborative governance did not eventuate into long-standing, self-perpetuating, innovative modes of governance, other empowered public deliberation initiatives had more success. Meaningful community participation was achieved and maintained through the constant practice of instituting deliberative 'minipublics of randomly sampled everyday people deliberating together to resolve tough issues for the City as they arose. The 'minipublics were an effective means of reaching a considered, coherent community voice: all the Greater Geraldton 'minipublics submitted to the City and Council a Final Report of their agreed recommendations together with a coherent rationale for their decisions.
In Greater Geraldton it has also been observed that the success of DCG has created the conditions for more ambitious collaborations. Each time a 'minipublic has resolved a complex issue to the satisfaction of public officials and the public (often to the surprise of both), confidence in this modus operandi has increased. In an adaptive manner, when complex or contentious issues then arose, or opportunities presented, care was taken to ensure the most appropriate public deliberation technique or techniques to address that issue and match the confidence level of the City and public was selected. The result has been that the City has tended to achieve a way forward that has had growing legitimacy, acceptability and hence ease of implementation than the top-down decision-making with minimal consultation that was prominent prior to this project.
The largest setback in the trend of increasing community-wide trust occurred during the final year of the '2029 and Beyond initiative, when the City decided to significantly raise property rates and service charges with minimal community participation. The City had determined that this rate rise was required to address cost shifting from the State Government, looming infrastructure backlogs, and a revaluation of assets. Simply advertising in the local paper to inform the community of the rate rise, together with a formal request for feedback, no longer met community expectations of sharing in important decision-making processes. The resulting outrage manifested in several ways. A social media and petition campaign against the rate rises rapidly gained large popular support. A scheduled half council election immediately after the rate rise saw many new candidates stand on platforms of reform related to rates, and almost all incumbents standing for re-election lost their seats to these reform candidates. Significantly, a citizen activist group spontaneously formed (CGGRDC, 2012) and raised a complaint against the City in the judicial forum of the State Administrative Tribunal. During the mediation process, a number of commitments were made to avoid the matter going to hearing, including a commitment by the City to more collaboration and transparency with the community on the following years budget (CGG, 2013). The mechanism proposed for this collaboration was Participatory Budgeting (PB). This resulted in the implementation of two deliberative Panel PBs - one PB on the Citys entire operational budget, and another on the long term capital works program. In terms of DCG, an unfortunate situation was turned into a significant opportunity.
Budgeting at all levels of government exhibits many of the characteristics of wicked problems. There are many divergent views on the impacts and end goals of budgeting, with significant expenditure of common funds involved, and recurrent and shifting goals of spending. Local government budgeting can be even more problematic with revenue sources limited by regulation, strident and powerful community demands for often divergent outcomes, and increasing cost shifting from other levels of government. Public budgeting has previously been regarded as the prerogative of finance and treasury departments, with the final allocation of resources determined by public sector officials. However, particularly in the developing world and increasingly in the western world, this assumption is increasingly being contested through the implementation of participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic decision-making process that entrusts citizens (and sometimes non-citizens, too) to allocate public budgets. It involves a set of principles and a variety of methods to enable and empower everyday people to deliberate amongst themselves and with government officials over the allocation of public resources. PBs have now spread across the globe, most prolifically in developing countries, where they are often supported by the World Bank – precisely because they are likely to enhance democracy by improving civic participation in decision-making, bringing transparency and accountability to local governments, increasing the public legitimacy of decisions made, and improving social wellbeing.
Overall, the research conducted during the four year DCG process in Greater Geraldton that had involved several thousand participants, showed that DCG had made an impact on declining levels of public trust in government. Specifically, results of participant surveys administered prior and post public deliberative initiatives, showed that the vast majority believed that the City had conducted engagements in which they could have their own voice heard, hear the voices of others, get access to unbiased information, and create outcomes that represented all those present, which the City was more than likely to implement.
On the other side of the trust relationship, the City staff had gained skills and confidence in a new way of operating in partnership with the community, and this manifested in more efficient and effective engagement. Importantly, interviews with staff members who had directly participated in collaboration events, regardless of organisational position, showed their increased trust in the ability of the community to come to good decisions.
Photo: Geraldton viewed from Sunset Beach. City of Greater Geradton