Study reveals how some communities make public engagement stick

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October 20, 2009 | | East Hartford, Connecticut

Everyday Democracy and the Kettering Foundation release a research report that provides insights on how public engagement activities can grow into a diverse, ongoing practice.

When sufficiently agitated, Americans can, and often do, mobilize—at least on a one-time basis—to find solutions for critical community problems. A new research report, issued this week by Everyday Democracy and the Kettering Foundation, provides insights into how public engagement initiatives can grow into a regular practice, used to address a variety of community issues.

The report, entitled Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities was written by Harvard University researchers Archon Fung and Elena Fagotto. In the report, they argue that the most successful civic engagement efforts not only address particular public issues such as school redistricting, domestic violence, or racism, but also improve the quality of local democratic governance. “Those who build institutions and practices of public engagement often work at two levels," according to the authors. "Not only do they address urgently felt needs in their communities, but, although they may not have intended it, they also improve the machinery of democratic self-government.”

Read an excerpt of the report below.

Sustaining Public Engagement will be of interest to researchers and community organizers. The report features concrete examples of sustained community-led dialogue and problem solving efforts.

“People hungry for a deeper understanding of how deliberative democracy can become a routine practice in communities will want to read this report cover to cover,” says Martha L. McCoy, executive director for Everyday Democracy.

The insights found in Sustaining Public Engagement are grounded in case studies of initiatives in Kuna, Idaho; Portsmouth, N.H.; Kansas City, Kan.; Montgomery County, Md.; and communities in Connecticut, West Virginia, South Dakota and Hawaii. The case studies draw upon different approaches to public deliberation, including National Issues Forums, community-wide study circles, and several other locally designed initiatives.

Report excerpt:

We attempt to understand why deliberation in our study communities has successfully spread over time by developing the concept of embedded deliberation. We explain the characteristics of embeddedness and why it is helpful to understand embeddedness on two levels: some practices embed deliberative reflection while others also embed deliberative public action. The first establishes habits of ongoing deliberation to improve community relations, clarifies the understanding of public policy problems, or provides input to policymakers, while the second translates deliberation into action by mobilizing communities and resources to solve local problems.

The first level of embeddedness is a necessary condition for the second. All of the communities that have embedded public action have also developed habits of public reflection. Some communities do not move from reflection to action because the problems they attempt to solve, from limited social trust to the need for public input, require individual transformation or ad hoc involvement, not a sustained mobilization of citizens.

Drawing upon work with researcher Joseph Goldman, we suggest that three factors in communities favor embedded deliberation:

Political authority
Elected officials must support public deliberation and be willing to consider its results and even share authority with bodies of deliberating citizens.

Deliberative capacity
Public or, more often, civic organizations in the community must develop the resources and expertise to convene structured deliberations and to mobilize people to participate in those deliberations.

Demand for democracy
Though rarely evident in our study communities, embeddedness requires a popular constituency that presses for public deliberation when such engagement becomes uncomfortable or inconvenient for local elites and authorities.

We then offer some tentative thoughts about benchmarks and measures of deliberative embeddedness and the kinds of civic leadership and strategies that are likely to sustain local deliberative practices.