Public Service, Dialogue and Citizenship
Tomorrow, June 23, is United Nations Public Service Day, which aims to celebrate the value and virtue of public service, recognize the work of public servants, and encourage young people to pursue careers in the public sector.
In honor of this day, Essential Partners is holding a free workshop that will introduce Boston-area public service employees to the ways in which dialogue can be used to enhance their work.
The recent report, “Aligning the Work of Government to Strengthen the Work of Citizens: A Study of Public Administrators in Local and Regional Government,” points to the need for public service employees to learn such skills. Here, co-author of the report Barnett Pearce shares key findings in the report and helps us understand dialogue’s role in building civic engagement.
The Public as Partners
Authenticity. Communication skills. Relationships. Rethinking our professional responsibilities. Culture change.
Were local government officials really using these words?
For fifteen years, Kim Pearce and I and our colleagues at the Public Dialogue Consortium have been working with elected and staff members of local governments. We’ve found them—particularly city managers—to be pragmatic, “get it done” people. Frankly, they have often been suspicious of our single-minded focus on the quality of communication, our academic degrees, and our work as researchers and theorists.
So, Kim and I were surprised to hear these words during the series of seminars for local government staff presented by the nonprofit Common Sense California in 2009. Supported by the Kettering Foundation, we worked with Common Sense California to evaluate the seminars and, in the process, addressed the question: “What do public administrators need to know and to do in order to promote and respond constructively to an engaged community?”
Perhaps the most significant finding of the report was that public administrators who were experienced and successful in supporting civic engagement insisted that “civic engagement” is not a set of tools; it is a profound restructuring of the relationship between government and citizens.
The new relationship requires government to redefine its leadership role. Instead of acting as “the decision-maker,” government becomes the convener and facilitator of processes for collaborative decision-making. Community members make a comparable shift from “consumers” of government services to a full-throated “citizenship” that carries both responsibilities and rights. The concept is “partnership” as a community.
Relationships are redefined in communication, and result in changed patterns of communication. When we asked what was most needed to increase civic engagement in their communities, these public administrators did not cite (as we expected) increased funding. Rather, they clearly focused on communication skills.
For their own part, they cited the need to learn how to design and facilitate public meetings that would lead to government-citizen partnership. And the need to change government staff’s attitudes toward the public. In addition, they also noted that members of the public need improved communication skills, particularly the ability to listen to each other.
Many public administrators hesitate to involve the public as partners in community decision-making, in part because it seems an abdication of their responsibilities as leaders. However, those who have tried it report that it leads to a different concept of leadership. As Dave Knapp, City Manager of Cupertino, California, put it:
"It used to be that if you did something, you had to tell the public about it. And then it became, if you are planning to do something, you have to tell them about it. And then it became, if you are planning to do something, you have to offer them an opportunity to come in and say what they want to say. You don’t have to do anything about it, but you have to give them the opportunity to come and have input. The model now, is when you have an issue, you are better off to have the community weigh in on the definition of the problem, the possible solutions of the problem, and to actually affect the outcome of the decisions process."
When Kim and I started our work with city governments in the mid-1990s, it was difficult to explain what would be gained by paying attention to the quality of communication among the public and between the public and government officials. But, since then, the situation has changed dramatically—there are now literally hundreds of models of cities and counties that have successfully completed important civic engagement projects and hundreds of experienced city and county managers whose work is “proof” that it can be done and done well.
”Can civic engagement work?” We think the answer is an emphatic “yes.” Our study provides a good set of answers to the question, “What to public administrators need to know in order to make it work?” And, Essential Partners is helping public administrators build those skills and key knowledge, with education, free resources, and trainings, such as today’s free workshop.
Barnett Pearce is Professor Emeritus at Fielding Graduate University; Principal of Pearce Associates, Inc. and a Founding Member of the Public Dialogue Consortium.