Public engagement

Public engagement or public participation is a term that has recently been used to describe "the practice of involving members of the public in the agenda-setting, decision-making, and policy-forming activities of organizations/institutions responsible for policy development." It is focused on the participatory actions of the public to aid in policy making based in their values. The tradition of a decision-making body getting inputs from those with less power is generally known as "consultation". This became popular with UK governments during the 1980s and 1990s. Even though most governments that carry out consultations are democratically elected, many people who became involved in these processes were surprised that conduct of such "consultations" was unsatisfactory in at least three respects. Groups that already had influence were often the only ones consulted People who did not have the resources would usually not be able to be part of a consultation, even if the decision it was meant to influence might have a major impact on them. There were no agreed safeguards against consultations being used cynically by decision-makers to make it look like they had sought to canvass other opinions, while in fact having set a new policy in place even before it asked the question. As early as 1979, science analyst Dorothy Nelkin pointed out that much of what passed for participation in governance could best be understood as attempts by the powerful to co-opt the public. Public engagement is a relatively new term, hardly used before the late 1990s. The existing term it shares most in common with is participatory democracy, discussed by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G D H Cole. Many see participatory democracy as complementing representative democratic systems, in that it puts decision-making powers more directly in the hands of ordinary people. Rousseau suggested that participatory approaches to democracy had the advantage of demonstrating that "no citizen is a master of another" and that, in society, "all of us are equally dependent on our fellow citizens".