What is your consultation delivering?

How to
What is your consultation delivering?
Informed  Decisions

Informed Decisions

Contributor

Key Highlights

  • Effective public consultation goes beyond meeting legal obligations; it encompasses broad community engagement, improved public understanding of council activities, and the collection of representative feedback to inform decision-making.
  • Positive outcomes of consultation include high submission rates, emergence of innovative ideas, strengthened council-community relationships, and increased civic participation, all contributing to more informed and accepted policy decisions.
  • Gathering input that accurately reflects the diverse priorities and aspirations of the community is crucial for councillors to make decisions that truly represent their constituents.
  • With increasing community diversity, especially noted in New Zealand, councils must ensure that consultation processes are inclusive and capture a wide range of perspectives to support participative democracy effectively.

Many New Zealand councils are still up to their armpits in the 2012 Long Term Plan (LTP) consultation. It’s a huge undertaking and one of the most important consultation tasks conducted by councils. I talked a little in my last blog about how much resource is put into public consultation these days, so I pose the question …

How do you know when your public consultation has been effective?

This is a multi-choice question, and you can select one or more answer (and you may have other answers) ….

The consultation has been effective when…

  • the process has met all legal requirements
  • the information has had good reach into the community
  • the community has responded with high numbers of submissions
  • the community’s understanding and awareness of council activity has improved as a result
  • community buy-in to the final decision has increased
  • good new ideas have surfaced in the submissions
  • the council/community relationship has been improved as a result of the consultation
  • feelings of citizenship increase as the result of participation
  • the consultation submissions accurately represent the priorities, thoughts and aspirations of the community
  • the submissions help councillors to make a good decision

Was this a trick question?

Not really, in that all those outcomes are positive. Most consultation programmes are designed with the objectives of reach, response, awareness, understanding, and engagement. However, I bring up the point to discuss a key purpose of consultation – that of gathering representative comment from the community. Only by doing so can consultation support councillors to make informed decisions on behalf of communities.

In New Zealand, it has only been in the last decade that consultation requirements have expanded to include most significant council decisions. One of the main reasons for this is the increasing diversity of communities. How can a handful of councillors represent the many priorities of different communities of interest? The theory of participative democracy is all well and good, however in practice how useful is consultation when the resulting submissions fail to represent the community’s perceptions?

In my next blog I’ll look at how demographic characteristics link to community agendas and why it’s important to know your community and who you are hearing from.

If you have any thoughts or tips on making a consultation effective, please leave us a comment.

To access detailed demographic information about local communities, access .id’s free demographic resource centre at www.id.com.au

STAY INFORMED

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