| Home > Events > Disease, Disaster, Democracy > Conference Speakers > Panel 1 Panel I: What Government Gains by Engaging the Public Panel | Audio | Q&A Transcript | Q&A audio Panel Transcript
Monica Schoch-Spana (Moderator):
It's my pleasure to introduce the panelists for our first discussion: what government gains by engaging the public. In this panel, we are hoping to discuss what we mean when we say "citizen engagement" and "community engagement." What are these objectives and how do we obtain them? In essence, why should any of us care about these types of endeavors, whether we are government officials, or heads of community-based organizations, or folks who are just trying to get through their day-to-day lives taking care of their friends and family? In this panel, we are interested in talking about the enabling conditions for engagement. Very specifically, because our themes are disease and disaster, we want to pose the question of how can authorities bring citizens and communities into policy decisions, as well as actions regarding health emergencies? We are going to hear from representatives from the public health and homeland security communities about how they and their peers have sought to involve the public in their missions. It's my real pleasure to first introduce Mary Pat McKinnon, who is Director of Public Involvement for the Canadian Policy Research Networks. Mary Pat will be speaking to us about what does public involvement mean, opening our conversation today about goals of community and citizen engagement; Mary Pat. Mary Pat MacKinnon
"What Does 'Public Involvement' Mean?" Last night when I checked in, I was telling the front desk while they were trying to find my reservation, "I'm here for the Disease, Disaster and Democracy Summit." She looked at me and I said, "Oh, actually we are trying to use democracy to perhaps prevent some of that disease and disaster," and she was a little bit more comfortable. I'm going to be talking this morning more about the democracy piece. Perhaps, if you could just go to the first slide please? In my brief time I hope to set the stage for a more in-depth discussion around citizen engagement in the context of disease and disaster preparation. Right off the top, let me tell you that I'm not an expert in this field. I can say that myself and my family of five lived through the 1998 ice storm at the epicenter in Ontario, but that is a little bit different than the expertise of most of you in the room. My experience is with citizen dialogues, and we have had quite an extensive experience over the last decade in this area. I am going to draw on that to talk a bit about both the theory and practice of citizen engagement processes; what it means and why it may be gaining more attention and importance. I'll talk about some of the enabling conditions for citizen and civic participation. Just to very quickly give you a brief snapshot, the Canadian Policy Research Network, the organization that I represent today, is a centrist not for-profit think tank. Our mission is to create knowledge and lead public dialogue and debate on economic and social issues important to Canadians. We have four networks; I'm the director of the public involvement network, and our network is really about three things. We call ourselves "research practitioners" because we are actually in the business of doing citizen dialogues to help inform public policy and to improve civic literacy. But we also undertake research to strengthen both the theory and practice of political and civic engagement, and we try to build capacity. This morning I want to start with some of the assumptions, and I think it's important to put my assumptions on the table so you can understand where we're coming from. I root citizen engagement within democratic theory. The three assumptions that I think are important for us, at least, [are]...The first is that democracy actually requires citizen engagement or citizen participation for legitimacy. We are talking about both the rights and responsibilities of citizens, but we are also talking about the concept of citizen dignity, requiring the capacity-building of citizens. A second assumption really speaks to the need for active citizenship requiring a certain level of knowledge. I'm not talking about expert knowledge, but knowledge and skill. Now, the levels of participation, the levels of knowledge and skill, are indeed contested, but most agree there is a certain level required. The third assumption, which I think is really important, is that with citizen participation and citizen engagement, there are both normative and instrumental or procedural purposes at play. Recently, the American Political Science Association looked at citizen engagement and it came up with four reasons why it's essential for democracy. Quickly, these are that it enhances the quality of democratic governance by providing evidence of citizen preferences to decision makers. Second is the legitimacy argument, and this harkens back to J.S. Mill's argument that the greater the share of the population that is mobilized and that mobilizes, the more interest that can be recognized. Third is [that] citizens' skills and knowledge are developed through direct participation, and the fourth is-and this one is a little different-civically engaged citizens can actually provide goods and services that neither the state nor the market can replace. Moving along, to try and get a bit more specific about where we are coming from with citizen engagement, we root it within the field of deliberative democracy-we have been fortunate to benefit from a lot of very important thinkers in the United States, not the least of which is Benjamin Barber-we know that this has emerged in response to the inadequacies of our democratic practice. It's important to emphasize that it is not intended to overthrow or replace representative democracy, but rather to improve and evolve it to a higher state. It has emerged out of a very genuine concern about the health and future of democracy as a distinct and cultural mode of life. Barber wrote back in the mid '80s that democracy built on representative institutions, adversarial competition among competing interests, and protection of private rights was weak compared to another tradition, which gave equal or greater emphasis to community action, public talk and civic responsibility. Getting down to look at some definitions-and I think it is important to take a minute with definitions-we often hear "political engagement" and "civic engagement," and they are similar, but they are not synonyms really. Civic engagement really embraces a broader set of activities and involvement that includes political participation. But we often think of it more as the actions, beliefs and knowledge that link citizens to their societies, and that establish the basis for cooperative behavior; there I am quoting a Canadian political scientist, Brenda O'Neill. Political engagement, or political participation, is really about embracing multiple modes and objectives of political activity, which includes voting and elections, interest group and social movement activity, and protest behavior. I really think we need to be talking about both, but they're not the same thing. Recently in the UK there was a very important commission called the Power Inquiry. That inquiry's report talks about the need to develop a culture of political participation, where it is the norm for policy and decision making to occur with the direct input from citizens. I would recommend that you look at that report-it's online-because it's got some excellent suggestions around political participation and civic engagement. Before I go further, I want to just take a moment and step back and say we all use the words "citizen engagement"--what are we talking about? The two definitions that I am using here I find helpful because they speak to the capacity aspect as well as the deliberation aspect. As you probably are aware, OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has devoted considerable attention to this whole area in the last half-decade or so. Its definition emphasizes, or recognizes, both the capacity of citizens to discuss and generate, and the requirement for governments to share in the agenda setting. The second definition, which I've taken from some CPRN commissioned work, I included because it emphasizes the iterative and interactive nature of citizen engagement processes. These aren't one-off events; really, they are on-going iterative and interactive processes. It's important that we don't talk about citizen engagement or involvement in a vacuum, but remember that citizens exist within communities. Moving on to the next slide, which talks about what most theorists and practitioners in the field would describe as "attributes" or "characteristics" of citizen engagement. These are that, firstly, it has to emphasize meaningful information, some power sharing, mutual respect and exchange; secondly, that there is an accountability dimension built in. There are reciprocal relationships involved in the whole citizen engagement concept. It involves reciprocity, or relationship building, between the governors and the governed. It offers opportunities for learning, capacity building, dialogue and deliberation. Here in the United States, some of the organizations that have been at the forefront of the movement towards more deliberative processes are Public Agenda, at the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forum, which talk about issue framing, naming and deliberation. And finally, the need for value-based discussions that talk about serious choices and trade offs. After all, at the essence of policy is really the need to choose, and those are some of the most difficult issues that I think we will be dealing with today. Moving on to the next slide, just quickly, you will all be familiar with this, but I am using the Rowe/Frewer typology of levels of public involvement. I think it is important for us to be clear when we are using terms, because sometimes it is confusing both to the public as well as to the practitioners. If we think of public involvement as a continuum, let's distinguish levels according to the flow of information. I'm not saying one level is good and the other level is bad; they are all obviously important and serve legitimate purposes. But in the first, "public communication," it's more unidirectional. We are typically talking about the flow of information from the agencies to the public. In the second, in "consultation," it's more typically from the public back to agencies. In "public participation," the third level, it's really bidirectional flows, and I would add among the public and between the public and government agencies. Some examples of the first, for instance, under communication are typically advertisements and press releases; under consultation, you get focus groups, public opinion polls, and public hearings. Then in the third, under participation, in this country, study circles, citizen juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls and citizen dialogues. Online engagement is found in all three levels, but most often is seen in the first two levels. Most public involvement to date is concentrated in the first two levels. In the next slide, I've provided some examples, and probably most of you are familiar with the International Association of Public Participation's spectrum of five levels. I have included it here as well as Health Canada's continuum which also has five levels; and I have also included a regional health authority in Canada. They're all variations on a theme; the point being that you are usually moving from just that unidirectional into a bidirectional kind of relationship. Some of you may also be familiar with Sherry Arnstein's "A Ladder of Citizen Participation." This goes back to the 60s. She talked about eight levels; the first two she referred to as "manipulation and therapy," and she called those "non-participation." The next three levels, she said, were "informing, consultation and placation," and she called that "tokenism." The last three: "partnership, delegated power and citizen control," she referred to as a "citizen power." I'm not sure it's quite that stark, but you get the message. Moving along then, to sort of wrap this into a case...If you can make a case about why engage, I'd suggest to you that there are at least three reasons why it is important to be doing this now. The first is the disconnect between citizens and governments. This is something a lot of us worry about. The symptoms we see in our country, and lots of other western countries, are a decline in voting, particularly among young people, in our country particularly among aboriginal people and ethnic visible minorities, and a decline in trust. We are seeing a pressure for more accountable and transparent public and private institutions. We are seeing a public that is far less deferential, more educated and demand a say. Secondly, an argument for it is that the legitimacy and the sustainability of public policy really do depend on citizen engagement. And thirdly, more effective policies and programs really require-the wicked problems of public policy really require citizens to both define the public interest as well as to implement it. Moving along, building on that, if we see citizen engagement as both an instrument and an end (I think we should think of it both ways), it's not just simply a means to foster social capital, social cohesion, contribute to more educated an active citizens. It also is a good in its own right as a way to build stronger democracies and more resilient communities. Moving to the close, if we go to the next slide-around challenges, if you flip those arguments into what are the challenges, I think these will be familiar to all of you: resistance to change; skepticism on the part of both the decision makers and citizens; low civic literacy; spaces for public dialogue are shrinking; the resources, skills and time requirements; and the research and evaluation skills. On my last slide, I want to end with enabling conditions. What are the enabling conditions? I think there are at least six. The first is the need for clarity of purpose in objectives; the "why" really does come first. Secondly, opportunities have to be there for learning and contribution. You have to be able to have some influence. Thirdly, we need to have participatory processes that have quality design and implementation and that are representative or at least, inclusive. Fourth, is the need for adequate resources and realistic time frames. Fifth, transparency and feedback, and the final one, evaluation needs to be built in at the outset, so we can support learning. In closing, I would say that we need to move from a deficit-focused model to an asset-based model, and it won't happen without effort, resources and a culture shift. I look forward in our conversations to thinking about what needs to happen to align public will, capacity and resources. Thanks very much I look forward to our discussion. [Applause] Karen Marsh
"A National Charter for Hometown Security" Monica Schoch-Spana (moderator):
Thank you very much for a lot of good things to mull over, Mary Pat. Our next speaker is Karen Marsh, who is the Director of the Citizen Corps, which is administered out of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. We welcome Karen to tell us about what her organization attempts to do in involving and engaging the public. Karen Marsh:
Thank you very much; it's a pleasure to be here. It's a little intimidating to follow such an extensive theoretical discussion on citizen engagement, and then to talk about a program that it is actually trying to achieve many of those things, but I will let you know we have done to date. As you heard, I do work in the Department of Homeland Security, and I am here to tell you about our principal initiative to engage citizens at a grassroots level. I would like to give you a little bit of history about that, and tell you about some of the recent policy changes and efforts in this area. Citizen Corps was launched by the President in the State of the Union Address in 2002. It has a very broad, very ambitious agenda. Our mission is, very simply, to engage everyone in America in participating in making the country a safer place. We have always had an all-hazards focus. Certainly in the early years of the department, there was a heavy emphasis on terrorism, but I want to state very clearly that Citizen Corps has always maintained an all-hazards focus to include natural hazards, technological hazards, terrorism, of course, but also any other community safety issues, to include public health issues, and of course, bioterrorism, and anything else to make the community safer. When Citizen Corps was launched, we focused very definitely on trying to build the local infrastructure to support this engagement. Only so much can be done from the national level, so we have worked very hard to develop the infrastructure throughout the country through the Citizen Corps Council. I am very proud to say, we now have nearly two thousand Citizen Corps Councils around the country, and the jurisdictions that they serve is approximately 72 percent of the country. Now, having said that, not all of these councils are as strong and robust and as reaching out to the public as much as we need to, but we have a lot of things in the works to try to support them. Very definitely, we are trying to achieve a cultural shift on two fronts. One is to have the federal government, state government and local government first responders reach out to the rest of the community. We are trying to break that paternalistic perspective that it is for the government to respond to the needs of citizens-to break that to reach out to civic leaders, private sector leaders, faith based leaders, etc., to bring them into the process of planning training exercises, again, for all hazards. The second cultural shift, of course, is for the general public at large, and to now make the general public realize that we all have a responsibility to be informed, to be personally prepared, to get training and to participate in the process-so a cultural shift on two fronts. Going back to the Citizen Corps Council, we at the national level have never dictated, mandated or required the membership of these councils. We want local communities to form the membership of the council as best suits their community. We recognize that every community is different; they have different hazards, different geographic concerns, different population density and different population composition. At a minimum, however, we've always said that the council should have representation of government, of each the first responder disciplines, and then, the civic leadership, be it a civic organization, a faith-based organization, private sector, educational system, transportation, critical infrastructure, media, minority and special needs advocacy groups-so it really is for the community to establish the membership of that councils as appropriate for the community. I'm delighted to see that you are going to hear, a little bit later, from Ann Patton, from Tulsa, who has been involved in this from the beginning. You also have Rob Tosatto in the afternoon who is going to speak to you on one of the specific programs in the Citizen Corps. The council is really the mechanism at the local level; that is to do the strategic planning, to reach out to the community, to engage the citizens, to inform them, to involve them in training, in exercises and the volunteer programs. Citizen Corps' mission, as I said, is to reach out for public education; it is also to engage the public. We have five principal programs that are specific volunteer programs that are the interface between citizens and the specific disciplines. We have Fire Corps, which is a volunteer program to specifically support the fire service community. We have Volunteers in Police Service and Neighborhood Watch which is the liaison to law enforcement. We have the Community Emergency Response Teams, which is essentially a 24-hour hands-on instructional course for citizens, and primarily supports emergency responders and management. Then we have the Medical Reserve Corps. Commander Tosatto is the director of the Medical Reserve Corps; he'll be here this afternoon. Their mission is, as I said, for public health, but also for emergency medical services. It is for trained medical professionals who want to volunteer their time, but it is also for the layperson with an interest in public health issues. As you certainly heard from Dr. Henderson, there is a role for the layperson who doesn't have necessarily the highly developed medical skills [but?] that can support in surge capacity for public health and medical emergencies. As I said, it's a very, very broad and ambitious agenda, and it is very definitely our view that to achieve an elevated level of preparedness in this country that we have got to do this through social networks at the local level. It is important that we provide information nationally in all the websites [and] the plans. Information that is readily available to the public is important, but to really achieve better education and engagement, it's got to be done at the local level through the schools, through the faith-based organizations, civic organizations and the social infrastructure. Speaking very briefly on some of the developments from the Department of Homeland in this issue...Since Citizen Corps was announced in 2002, there have been quite a number of developments with the creation of the Department. We now have Homeland Security presidential directives that come from the President. HSPD-8-I think there are about 17 of them to date-was specifically on national preparedness, and it directed the department to develop a national preparedness strategy. I am very pleased to say that the general public is a part of that strategy. The general public is referenced in the mission statement and the cascading documents. There is a national preparedness goal, a national preparedness strategy, etc. The goal is being revised, and the role of citizens is going to be elevated in the revised goal, so, I'm very pleased to say that. As part of this strategy, we also have very specifically identified target capabilities. There is a list of 37 target capabilities that have been released for state and local governments to plan towards. One of the 37, and one of four common capabilities, is "community preparedness and participation." In this target capability, it lays out specific target levels for citizen education. There is a baseline level of universal preparedness: skills, abilities and knowledge that everyone in the country should have for all hazards. Then there is a more specialized level based on risk, so that if you live in an urban environment you need a more specialized, more in-depth knowledge of terrorism, and the consequences of chemical WMD, etc., if you live in a high-threat area. A natural hazard area, of course, you have to have a more specialized level of education on those issues. Then, there is the volunteer component of the citizen participation level, and that is the volunteer programs that I've referenced. These programs are principally an on-going support. It's an on-going augmentation to the local infrastructure, but they are also there to function in a surge capacity when an incident actually occurs. To that point, we have also recently conducted a nationwide plan review. Certainly after Katrina, there had been a lot of documented lessons learned, and one of the immediate reactions from the White House was that we needed to very definitely look at all the emergency plans around the country. This was a very intensive, exhaustive study; we looked at all the emergency operations plans for every state and territory -- 56 -- as well as 75 urban areas. The phase one report was released to the Hill in March, and the second phase report is going to be released June 1st. Citizen Corps looked at all of these plans from the perspective of citizen education and citizen engagement, and I will tell you that the news is not good. We have a lot of work to do with respect to the emergency operations planning in this country. We have a lot of work to do to relate the exercises that are going on to the planning process, so that we have a tighter circle between the plan, exercising against the plan, testing the plan, and then feeding the lessons learned with the exercise back to improve the plan. This report is coming out as I said, June 1st; I think it is going to get significant attention around the country. We need to make sure that these plans address all hazards, [and] better educate, inform, and engage the public. Some of the specific areas we looked at were the public education piece, public communications with alerts and warnings, evacuations, mass-care, and resource management. Some of the other areas that we have included the general public in national policy documents [are] in national exercise program. We have a couple of hurricane exercises that are going on right now in preparation for the 2006 hurricane season, the competitive training grant program out of DHS, and of course, the Homeland Security Grant program. Citizen Corps does receive line-item appropriations from Congress. I will tell you that our history has been rather checkered, and in recent years it has in fact gone down, but what we've been able to do is ensure that all of the funding streams coming from the department to the state and local governments referenced the need to engage and better educate citizens. So again, we're trying to integrate this through the whole Homeland Security strategy. Certainly, we saw with Katrina there were lots of lessons learned, and again, through the COP review, we know that we need to increase our attention to vulnerable populations. Quite frankly, there just has not been enough attention, specific development on programs and outreach efforts to these populations, and they include a variety, certainly people with disabilities, but also people with language and cultural differences, age-related issues from the very old to the very young, people with pets and service animals, and of course people who have a health issue at the time of an incident. We are also looking at research, and it's wonderful to be here and to hear some of the academic theory behind citizen engagement. We're trying to look at some of the research to look at motivational barriers for citizens. Why is it that citizens are not taking the steps to be prepared? Why is it that citizens are not coming forward and getting training? Why is it that the private sector has not yet institutionalized first-aid training and institutionalized evacuation drills and plans within the private sector scope? We're looking at a lot of this research. We're trying to provide the research and the tools to local communities, so they can leverage the research. Going back to that local Citizen Corps Council, it really is the local community that bears the biggest burden on this. I will tell you that from the national perspective-I've been involved with Citizen Corps from the beginning-it is overwhelming to me to see the commitment from the local communities. We have asked a tremendous amount of them in terms of the strategic thinking. We want these local communities to start to document the assets that they have available. We want them to try to segment the community, and to think very strategically about how you reach out to communities, so that you're thinking about where you have large concentrations of people, to make sure that you're training people who, for example, work at Union Station. The people who work at the shops at Union Station--if there were to be an attack there, they are the ones who are going to be thrust into an area of responsibility. We need to think a little more carefully about who we're reaching out to, and who we're actually training and using in a search capacity. Certainly with Katrina we saw that there are tremendous benefits to doing this. One of the highlights of the Katrina response was in the Houston area. The Harris County Citizen Corps Council ran the entire Astrodome operations. They absorbed and processed over 65,000 evacuees from New Orleans. They had over 60,000 volunteers who came to the Astrodome setting. They essentially stood up an entire city in less than 24 hours. They had a separate zip code. They had a surgery. They had a post office. It was a phenomenal demonstration of what pre-planning could do. They had MOUs in place; they certainly had a way to reach out to all their volunteers. They had pre-trained their volunteers. They had MOUs for the private sector. They had standby contracts with medical waste retrieval companies. So it is very definitely that the pre-planning and engaging of citizens will pay dividends. Very definitely, if you have a better informed and better trained public, you will get a better, more appropriate immediate response from the public. With the on-going volunteer programs you have on-going, augmented support for the first responder disciplines, so that the first responders can deal with the more highly skilled, more highly trained aspects of their job. Again, you have the search capacity, if you involve citizens on an ongoing basis, you have the search capacity, people who are trained in an incident command system, know how to function in an emergency management environment. Then of course, through this ongoing outreach, you establish greater trust and greater collaborations, and you will have citizens who listen more carefully and follow instructions and the response phase goes more smoothly. Again, I would encourage you all to look at the Harris County example for a tremendous example of how the pre-planning can make a difference, and that we need to continue to involve citizens in all of these areas. That's really, in a nutshell, what Citizen Corps is. As I said, I'm very pleased to see that you've got some other representatives here who can tell you more about the practice versus what I've told you is the theory. I just want to close by saying that the Department of Homeland Security, working with state and local government partners, is committed to involving the public in all-hazards national preparedness. Thank you very much. [Applause] Proceedings of the May 23, 2006 Summit: Disease, Disaster, & Democracy Transcription by CastingWords |
