Almost everywhere, political leaders don't work with the strange animal known as 'the Public'. They work with 'key stakeholders' when they have to.  And they prefer to decide a policy then 'consult' key stakeholders. Then they get on with the business of governing. There are at least three reasons for this. First, in representative democracies, many leaders genuinely believe that they were elected to take all the decisions, that 'the Public' only have a role when they vote during periodic elections. Second, authoritarian rule is still the rule rather than the exception in our world, even where countries have formal democracies. And where you have an authoritarian political culture, both the rulers and the ruled believe that leaders should take all the decisions. Third, the policy making technocracies in most countries prefer to keep the public out of the policy making process. It is seen as the business of experts. Their attitude can be summed up thus:'The public, what do they know about anything?'

Yet as anyone who knows anything about how politics works appreciates, 'the Public' do not disappear after periodic elections. Ignore 'the Public' and trust in government is at risk both generally and specifically...in terms of consequences when the next election comes around. Intelligent leaders know that the best policies need a combination of political will and public will (that is, broad support ) to be successful and sustainable, and that requires public engagement in the policy making process. They also know that public services work best when they are truly responsive to citizen needs and offer mechanisms for political accountability; and these too require public engagement. But how do you build citizen centered policies and services? What lessons are being learned?

For two days in Ljubljana, Slovenia - June 26-27 - the Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, hosted an international workshop on the topic. CommGap was one of the sponsors. The workshop brought together government officials from several OECD states and civil society organisations. It was a superb event. Its strength: it was all about tools, approaches, and techniques that are being tried around the OECD on public engagement in policy making and service delivery. The master classes on Day Two were particularly compelling. The organizers have promised to put all the presentations on their website. I urge an acquaintance with the treasures they contain.

As I said in Ljubljana while participating in the closing panel, the best techniques offered at the workshop were those that took into consideration the reality of the political process in each country.  Methods of public engagement that sound worthy, noble and soul-warming but end up with inputs that political leaders can afford to ignore are, in my humble view, a waste of time. The best methods manage to pull together John Kingdom's three streams: problems confronting a society, the policy process that generates solutions and options, and the political process that decides an issue...or ignores it. For, it is only when the streams come together that an issue moves to the decision agenda. My point is this: if public engagement is not about shaping decisions - policies, laws, programs - then what is the point? The good news is that several techniques for doing just that were showcased in lovely Ljubljana. The Directorate of Public Governance in the OECD are to be congratulated for pursuing this area of work in order to change the practices of  relentlessly technocratic, elite-based, public-ignoring policy making and policy implementation structures.

Photo Credit Flickr User StrudelMonkey