This article is for you if you’ve ever struggled to convince your colleagues about the value of investing in community participation - whether you work local government, central government or a community organisation.

Let’s talk about the ‘risk of ignoring’ community participation

It’s not easy to evaluate the return on investment of involving your community in your organisation’s decisions or service delivery. So, if you’re like most organisations, you probably just don’t get around to it.

And that’s understandable. After all, you have an ever-increasing range of pressures clamouring for attention. Every year there are more compliance requirements from yet more policy changes.

But it’s hard to justify future investments in community participation if you don’t know the return on previous efforts.

This leaves you with two options:

• One, most obviously, is to invest more into evaluating your community participation initiatives. But - you guessed it - that isn’t going to be cheap. And it’s probably going to be a hard sell around the governance table.

• The alternative is to start thinking about a different kind of R.O.I. from community participation. Instead of the usual ‘return on investment’, let’s talk about the ‘risk of ignoring’.

Front-page frustrations and project delays

Next time you read the newspaper, keep your eye out for those juicy articles where somebody is up in arms about something in the community.

Those stories tell you everything you need to know about the first risk of ignoring community participation. Delayed projects and the public up in arms - that’s the most obvious risk.

As you read these newspaper articles, ask yourself this:

Are they up in arms about the substance of the decision or the process the organisation followed?

The two are linked, of course. And a good community participation process will help you to move ahead with decisions that people might otherwise have objected to. 

Their participation allows them to understand the trade-offs your organisation is being forced to make.

A gradual erosion of trust and confidence

One recent example of the first risk of ignoring springs to mind. It’s an everyday example of what can happen when the role of community participation is overlooked, until late in a project’s timeline.

Last year the Nelson City Council decided to trial the closure of Hampton Street. It’s a small side-street off a main arterial road, with a primary school down one side. 

The Council certainly had legitimate reasons for trialing the closure for a year. The small street had been host to more than its fair share of accidents.

However, residents who may well have responded positively to the closure instead were frustrated at the short timeframes for responding to the Council’s decision.

One resident summed it up like this in the Nelson Mail:

"We had one week to respond. I sent an email, but I never got a reply ... it took me a few days out of my holiday with my family to craft that, and then they didn't even have the decency to respond to my letter."

The issue dominated the local newswires for a week, and resulted in extra work for council staff to respond to residents’ concerns and frustrations.

The one positive, of stories like these, is that the Council has since appointed a new Engagement Manager to build the engagement capability of council staff. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is already resulting in fewer such incidents.

Basing your decisions on the loud minority

The Productivity Commission’s Local Government Insights report released in 2020 paints a vivid high-level picture of the challenges facing local government in New Zealand. 

Although written for local government, the findings are relevant for all sectors.

Part 2 of the report asks “What’s really at the heart of the challenges we’re experiencing?” and explores five causal factors. 

One is what the Commission calls “a democratic deficit at the local level… meaning some people’s views and interests are not adequately represented and councils are not being adequately held to account for the impacts of their decisions.”

This is the second risk of ignoring community participation.

Like all decision-makers, leaders within organisations are susceptible to what psychologists call “the recency effect”. This is when your decisions are heavily influenced by what information you have recently digested.

What does this mean for organisations that regularly hear from the same demographics each year? It means decisions are often made with the loud minority’s interests at heart.

The Commission notes that those bearing the negative outcomes of councils’ planning and funding decisions are not well represented in either community engagement or local elections. This usually includes younger people, Māori, Pasifika peoples and renters – groups more likely to suffer from a lack of affordable housing.

This risk of ignoring isn’t limited to those councils with limited budgets or no community engagement staff either. A recent research project on Young People Leading Change in Auckland found that:

Some local boards continue to favour models of participation that are not inclusive of diverse populations, that are alien to many young people, and are not appropriate to geographical distance and transport challenges.

This can be a vicious cycle. These unheard voices across communities do not participate in consultation processes because those processes do not suit them. As a result, their voices are not heard and decisions do not serve their interests. This further puts them off from participating. And so the cycle continues.

There is no easy fix to break this cycle. But what we do know is that leadership from the top of organisations is often crucial to changing the culture of community participation and rebuilding trust with communities.

Remember the other ROI of community participation

You may frown at this deficit-based approach to communicating the benefits of community participation. If you’re working in an organisation where community participation is strong, you can probably instead focus on the success stories - on the improved working relationships between your organisation and your communities.

But if community participation is not part of business-as-usual for your organisation, the “risk of ignoring” is a valuable and memorable framework for countering resistance to investment in community participation.