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Engaging the public in policy-making

Public policy

Science is not the only area of public policy where government is trying to re-connect with the public because of a perceived decline in the trust the public has for authority. Nor, indeed, is the UK government the only government that recognises declining trust, and participation in the democratic process. The OECD PUMA initiative (July 2001) identified five reasons for engaging the public in policy-making in modern democracies. These were:

engaging_public

Within the United Kingdom, lead responsibility for consultation policy rests with the Cabinet Office. As well as working with Departments and the Devolved Administrations to identify and spread good practice, the Cabinet Office website also lists current consultations.

With the large numbers of consultations in progress at any one time and the amount of resources that these consume, there has been ongoing development of policy and guidance on the most effective ways to use consultation. In January 2004, the Regulatory Impact Unit published a “Code of Practice on Consultation” this was seen as being sufficiently central to Government policy that the foreword was written by the Prime Minister. The Code sets out standards for consultations run by the government. It aims to increase the involvement of individuals and groups in public consultations, minimising the burden it imposes on them, and giving them enough time to respond. Many organisations and individuals find it difficult to find the time to respond to relevant consultations and increasingly people are aware of consultation overload.

In addition to the code, the Cabinet Office also produces an annual assessment of performance that highlights not only whether the code is being followed but opportunities to develop good practice. There is a network of departmental consultation co-ordinators, responsible for implementing the code and sharing good practice. The 2003-4 Assessment included the following:

“Consultation co-ordinators were asked to provide details of lessons learnt since January 2003. Overwhelmingly, they responded that consultation had had a positive effect on the policymaking process. As one departmental consultation co-ordinator noted, ‘even if there are only a few responses to a consultation, they can impact on decision making.’ It was encouraging that many Departments had not only adopted the Code as a minimum standard of practice, but were enthusiastic about employing best practice consultation to make policy-making even more effective.”

It is clear that across Government there is growing interest, and expertise, at drawing in wider contributions to policy making. The question that arises, therefore, is whether science-based policy making raises any of its own particular issues?

Science-based policy

In some ways science-based policy-making pre-empted the ongoing push towards Open Government. This was largely driven by the perceived failure of the scientific advisory system during the BSE crisis and the GM foods debate. In the 1997 Chief Scientific Adviser’s guidelines on the use of scientific advice there was the recommendation to:

“Involve at least some experts from other not necessarily scientific disciplines to ensure that the evidence is subjected to a sufficiently questioning review from a wide-ranging set of viewpoints.”

However by 1999, the ability of non-experts to open up debate was being recognised. “The Advisory and Regulatory Framework for Biotechnology: Report from the Government’s Review” published by the Cabinet Office in May 1999 stated that:

“Most committees value input from lay members; it is often their questions which open up issues which experts might not otherwise have explored”

and by July 2000 the revised Chief Scientific Adviser’s guidelines stated that:

“It is important that sufficient early thought is given to presenting the issues, uncertainties and policy options to the public.”

The key messages of the guidelines – known as Guidelines 2000 – are that Departments should:

There has since been much work looking at how to “do” proactive consultation, which includes both studies of domestic and oversees initiatives 1. and guidance for science communicators 2.

Science and society

At PSP we conceptualise ‘consultation’ in two dimensions. The first views engaging the public in the development of policy on a spectrum of institutional or societal embeddedness from ‘research’ through ‘consultation’ to ‘involvement’. The second views consultation as part of a scale of communications from monologue to dialogue and this is discussed in depth in Science and Society - from Monologue to Dialogue, Mark Dyball and Suzanne King, Science in Parliament Vol. 59 No. 3, Summer 2002, which can also be found on this website.

Organisational relationships with the public - from distanced to embedded

Research is about observing and/or listening to the public to inform decisions but where the public is not interactively involved in the policy process. There has been a tendency for some organisations to present research as consultation. However, questionnaires used in large scale survey research are question and answer sessions, not dialogue and even qualitative research tends to take information from participants rather than engaging them interactively.

Consultation is where an organisation seeks the views of the stakeholders, including members of the public, about decisions. Traditionally in the UK this takes the form of a published document setting out the ideas/proposals of the consulting body and requesting views. More recently it has been recognised that to draw in the views of those less immediately interested in policy decisions, a more proactive approach is required. Social research techniques are being adapted to meet this. Central though is the definition of the consultation as a focused, time-bound exercise about a particular policy question at a particular time.

Involvement tends to be where long term structures have been put in place to enable groups to be actively involved in policy-making on an on-going basis.

Thus the scale of research, through consultation, to involvement reflects the degree to which the public and/or stakeholders are embedded in an organisation’s decision-making processes – from the maintained separation of research to the active participation and embeddedness of involvement.

Relationships with the public - from monologue to dialogue

Research, consultation and involvement are different ways of feeding public views into the policy process. Elsewhere on this site we consider how consultation relates to information, engagement and dialogue. On this scale we see information dissemination as a monologue where information is placed in the public domain with no expectation of response. Consultation, as already mentioned, represents the formal embodiment of two-way conversations on specific topics.

Engagement, on the other hand, involves activities supported by organisations that set out to stimulate interest in science - television programmes would be an example of such an activity. Despite invitations to email or text comments, look at related websites, or even join an on-line debate with scientists, such exercises are not designed to enable the public to feed into the policy process, except at the very broadest level.

Finally, we define dialogue as people’s discussions about science as part of their everyday conversations in much the same way that people discuss other issues of the day such as education, health services, crime, foreign policy or unemployment.

The relationship between these two dimensions can be summarised as follows:

At an institutional level the relationship with the public can be more or less embedded and more or less interactive.

1 See for example Open Channels: Public Dialogue in science and technology, Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, March 2001. Citizens as Partners, OECD, 2001. Evidence presented to the Science and Society Inquiry. Feeding the Debate: A report from the Debate Task Force of the Food Chain and Crops for Industry Panel; Foresight, DTI; February 2002.

2 Dialogue with the public: Practical guidelines, Research Councils UK, August 2002.