Working with citizens to define key aspects of the process

While you need a clear objective, scope and mandate to invite citizens to a participatory exercise, you should not foreclose alternative framings of the issue of concern. You should leave space for citizens to reflect on the issue definition and potentially extend it or reframe it, if the way you or others (including experts) view the issue doesn’t resonate with the way participants experience it. This is a very good way to make sure that the process remains meaningful to participants and that it reflects their concerns. 

You must also make the discussion tangible enough to citizens’ lives and experience, to ensure that citizens can substantially contribute with their knowledge and experience to address the topic of concern. This is crucial, especially when defining the guiding question and tasks to be carried out by the participants. If these will be too technical, requiring a lot of expert knowledge, there could be very little that participants can add, which can eventually put them off. At the same time, you must balance the narrowness and broadness of the question viz-a-viz the specialised information needed to address it (see ‘progressive disclosure of information’ in the previous section). If your question has a yes/no answer, then participants won't be able to contribute with their own substantial input. If it is too broad, the discussions might go in too many different directions, resulting in lack of concrete ideas.

Guiding question

So, what can be a good guiding question? Here is an example from one of the pilot co-creation workshops we coordinated: How can we bring together the many small and often individual actions for pollinators that are already present in the area to increase their impact? This is a great question, as it starts with something that some citizens already do. As such it recognises the efforts and experiences already present. It also creates a well-defined space for collaboration, through which agency, efficacy and empowerment can be achieved. Finally, it is very concrete, making it easy to define the desired outcomes (e.g., an action plan).

Purpose and objectives

In parallel to the question, you need to define the purpose and objectives. If purpose is the long-term ambition, the objectives of the process are the things that you need to get there. And so, if the purpose of a process is improving the quality of the public debate on pollinators, your objective might be to develop, through discussions among citizens, well-articulated positions on the issue, including points of agreement and disagreement, presented in an accessible format. 

Both purpose and objectives will determine several aspects of the process, including the design of the process and events, recruitment and format of the outputs. Following on the example above, such process would very likely begin with understanding the different positions of diverse social groups, which can be done, e.g., through focus groups, and could conclude with deliberations that seek common ground. On the other hand, if you are aiming to design a plan for redeveloping a park – to eventually make the city more pollinator-friendly – you will carry out a co-creation workshop focusing on the needs of citizens and ideas they can bring.

Outputs

The outputs of the engagement process can take many forms: formal recommendations on political direction, prototypes of solutions to a specific problem, visions of the future, rich descriptions of the issue, opinions on pre-defined proposals and many, many more. As an organiser, you might want to define the type of results the process should deliver - especially if the engagement is a formal process linked to institutional decision making. Working with the decision makers and stakeholders might also be helpful at this stage, as it will help define the outputs in a way that is useful for an institution and will take into consideration the interests and concerns of important actors that can be crucial during the implementation stage. On the other hand, if the process is less formal, you can define the format of results together with citizens to make them most meaningful to them.

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