Ingredients for Community Engagement

It is well recognised that local authorities play a crucial role in civil renewal. In response to this the Community Empowerment Division (formerly at the Home Office but now part of the Department for Communities and Local Government DCLG) in partnership with the Local Government Association and the Society for Local Authority Chief Executives developed the Civic Pioneer initiative. Civic Pioneers are councils who have signed up to say they are committeddeveloping ways to involve citizens in the decision making process.

DCLG is currently working with a number of Civic Pioneer authorities to examine how they have developed and are developing their approaches to engaging local people in shaping public policies and services. This information has been useful in contributing to shaping proposals in the forthcoming Local Government White paper which has as one aim the greater involvement of citizens and communities in influencing the nature of service delivery.

The Civic Pioneer authorities use a range of different models for citizen engagement, reflecting the local context in which individual authorities operate. Currently, the authorities are conducting a stock-take of their engagement arrangements and following this they will develop and implement an Action Plan to strengthen these arrangements.

The main aim of the `Community Engagement: Ingredients for Success' report is to carefully examine different approaches to engagement being used and to assess what works and under which circumstances. Clearly different approaches are likely to be more applicable to different areas: what works for local neighbourhood involvement in a diverse urban area may be different to what works in a more homogeneous rural one. Therefore, the main aim of the research is to identify transferable features, or ingredients, that can be applied to different policy developments/areas.

The outputs of the exercise are to establish the key influences on successful citizen engagement. As well as looking at the structures in place to enable citizen engagement, this project also explores the views of those citizens involved in the different arrangements, to gauge what they feel does and does not work and how their involvement has changed their views and behaviour about engagement and decision-making.