In New Zealand, central government is experiencing a once in a generation cost-driven re-set. Concurrently, local governments are locking in their long-term budgets in a situation where demand on funding exceeds the funding available.
While there is much discussion underway about reducing overheads and tightening expenditure, a deeper, more enduring challenge remains for our public sector: how do organisations secure the outcomes the public needs in areas critical to building a cohesive, functioning and thriving society?
The real questions we should be discussing are not only about cost efficiency but also extend to how we prioritise and weigh up decisions, how we converse with one another and how we set up our institutions to succeed.
Central to this is engaging communities and stakeholders on big decisions. Where trade-offs are required, decisions-makers cannot please all interest groups, but they can help communities build genuine understanding of options and the complexities around those options.
Perhaps counter intuitively, given the plethora of outlets and platforms available in our digital world, effective engagement, communication and public discourse has never been more difficult. Traditional media is struggling for relevance, agenda driven misinformation and disinformation is ever present, there is response bias to the loudest voices, declining trust in public institutions, and a lack of confidence, if not credibility, in community ‘consultation’ processes.
Could it be that the often maligned local government sector deserves commendation, and encouragement? Could it be that local government holds the keys to building a society we are proud to hand over to our children and their children?
In the western world there has been a re-emergence of deliberative democracy principles in public decision making. An excellent paper in Policy Quarterly entitled ‘The Rise, Fall and Re-Rise Of Deliberative Democracy In New Zealand’ (Wright, Buklijas, Rashbrooke) highlights fifteen local examples of deliberative democracy processes dating back to 1996. Nine of the fifteen are local government examples and I note also that Auckland and Wellington Councils have included deliberative consultation principles as part of it Long Term Plan preparation.
Deliberative democracy involves a representative group of citizens participating in properly informed, professionally facilitated, high quality discussions on big decisions. ‘Representative’ means a cross-sectional, demographically-representative, sample of citizens. The citizen group recommends options to decision-makers that are binding, or are at least strongly endorsed.
In an environment of divisive narratives, these methods offer frameworks and tools that can help cut through noise and get to the core of some of the conversations our public institutions need to be having with their constituents.
One might ask though, why set up another bureaucratic process? Haven’t we got enough barriers to good decision making? Isn’t there enough noise already?
Participative processes under the principles of deliberative democracy are adjacent to traditional political and bureaucratic structures; designed to give citizens access to professional decision-making information, to have them consider it from an informed and neutral stance, to hear their voices. To demonstrate respect.
It helps overcome one of the enduring challenges within our usual democratic mechanisms, when it comes to big decisions. That is the risk of fixed interests competing for outcomes that suit those interests first, over the greater good of the communities funding those outcomes via taxes or rates.
You do not have to look far for decisions made with poor engagement that led to poor outcomes (or no outcomes) at national or local level.
Nor do you have to look far to find other jurisdictions changing it up. In Victoria, Australia, local authorities are required to use deliberative engagement practices which invite community to make recommendations on the authority’s work plan, financial and health and wellbeing plans. Many use randomly selected community panels to achieve this outcome.
Whichever way you want to cut it, quality decisions come from quality discussions. If there are ways to foster higher quality conversations, so that we have better outcomes, it would seem sensible to do that.
The Taitaurā (Society of Local Government Managers) 2023 Annual Report, noted, in the context of the Future for Local Government Review, that ‘New Zealand needs a different approach to the way it builds civic discourse’.
Quite right.
SenateSHJ advises local government organisations in New Zealand, New South Wales and Victoria.