Public Involvement and Project Outcomes
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Sometimes the terminology of public participation professions is a complicated word stew. Public involvement, public outreach, public relations, public affairs, community affairs, community relations, community outreach… what the heck are all these terms? Do they all really mean the same thing, or are they all different? if the latter, how can someone make sense of what kind of public participation techniques are needed and when? I’ve drawn a diagram to help clarify the situation:
The scale of public involvement on a project proportionate to the stage of the project. When a project is just an idea or a problem needing a solution, almost everyone is involved. As a project moves into scoping, the number of public involved drops as the options (and thus the number of key stakeholders) also drops. This is more or less a constant decrease as the project progresses through the political process, financing, construction, and finally completion.
The ability of the public to affect the project, however, is not so simple. Early in the process, the public has little or no ability to shape the project, primarily because the project is as yet still no more than an idea or a problem, or vaporware at most. As the project progresses into visioning, however, the ability of the public who are involved to shape it increases. The potential to affect the project peaks around the time that political decisions are made, and then rapidly decreases as the project enters technical planning (such as with engineers). Once a project is funded, the ability of the public to affect the project outcomes — and especially to halt the project — becomes almost nil.
In practice, no project is as simple as the diagram suggests, but it is a tool that illustrates three distinct areas when a project needs help from communication professionals. These are:
The zone of creativity. As the project moves from a commonly understood problem through a visioning process, the greatest amount of public needs to be involved. In this phase, nearly every possibility is on the table, and there is a lot of scoping and option narrowing is taking place. Because of this, both support and opposition have a difficult time, because there’s simply not enough substance in existence yet to react to. This zone concludes when a single concept is codified into text as a concept plan. This is the zone in which public outreach and facilitation are key. Surveys, interviews, public advisory bodies, open houses, comment periods, and participatory design events (charrettes) are all common aspects of this zone.
The zone of risk. Following the drafting of a concept plan, the public’s ability to affect the project continues to increase up until the point that a political decision is reached. A vote by electeds or a ballot measure are both common examples. This is the time in a project when it is formed enough to both champion and oppose, and therefore contains the most amount of risk. It is the time when the project is most political in nature and concludes when the project secures financing. During this zone, communication centers on political campaigning, public relations, and media outreach, but also includes securing political support from key interest groups and other representative bodies.
The zone of stakeholder disempowerment. After financing is secured, the project moves into construction, and the public has little leverage to affect the project outcomes. This is the zone during which power has become the least balanced, with almost all of it in the hands of the public agency and almost none of it in the hands of the public. This is the period during which community affairs people do their work, communicating constantly with the public about construction and project impacts and working to find ways to minimize those impacts.
Communication is, of course, a qualitative art, and this is a highly simplified diagram. However, the point remains that as a project progresses from idea to completion, both the scale and the nature of communication support it needs changes. Simply producing communication swag (mailings, web sites) and holding public events throughout the project is neither efficient nor effective.
The entry 'Public Involvement and Project Outcomes' was posted
on July 15th, 2009 at 6:00 am
and last modified on February 5th, 2010 at 1:43 am, and is filed under Cities, Citizenship, Communication and Public Involvement.
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