[Guest Post by Patricia Dorsher is the Feedback Labs Launch Editor at Ashoka and James E. Jernberg Public Service Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Feedback Labs is a consortium of like-minded organizations, including Ashoka and Ushahidi, who are committed to citizen engagement in the fields of aid, philanthropy, and development. A previous version of this post was originally published on Feedback Labs on July 31, 2013.]
In feedback loops, not all mechanisms are created equal. You can get useful and accurate information by increasing citizen participation in feedback giving, but the process of eliciting information may be just as important as the data itself.
In a study recently added to the growing bank of literature on Feedback Labs, Kathy S. Quick and Martha S. Feldman examine citizen engagement initiatives undertaken by the City of Grand Rapids, Michigan. They evaluated the initiatives along two distinct dimensions: participation and inclusion. These terms are often used interchangeably, but Quick and Feldman argue that they in fact promote two very different processes.
Participation is distinguished as “efforts to increase public input oriented primarily to the content of programs and policies.” In a development context, this could mean using surveys of residents to solicit broad-based input on where to place water pumps within a community. This is an important step, but could be pushed further.
Inclusion, while often taken to mean special effort to engage members of minority and marginalized populations, is defined here as practices which “entail continuously creating a community involved in coproducing processes, policies, and programs for defining and addressing public issues.” Building on the previous example, this could be working with citizens to frame the discussion around water issues and set the agenda; perhaps part of the community doesn’t see the pumps as their most pressing need, but would rather focus on sanitation. An inclusive process would then let the conversation evolve, acting upon the input received from the community and shifting focus as necessary. Giving space for a community to identify and act upon their issues sets up a precedent for feedback-giving.
Inclusion breaks down common divisions between actors – such as funder verses beneficiary, expert verses experiential knowledge – and allows communities to better address their own needs through focusing on “making connections among people, across issues, and over time.” All these benefits have the potential to spur systems-level change. Closing the feedback loop, allowing citizens to drive the agenda rather than funders and implementers, increasing the sustainability of philanthropy by directing resources to the most pressing needs as identified locally, and creating stronger communities is truly transformational.
Additionally, Grand Rapids showed that inclusion processes led to greater community satisfaction than participation processes. So how can we get more bang for our buck in development? Even if participatory and inclusive processes create the same outcomes at the project level, greater community satisfaction is a true value-add and should be considered a goal worth spending resources on. Using more inclusive mechanisms is one way to get there.