Encounters with the organisation: how local civil servants experience and handle tensions in public engagement

ABSTRACT

Civil servants in local governments across the globe are increasingly expected to engage the public. Engagement processes lead to tensions between the rising expectation to engage the public on the one hand, and the bureaucratic and managerial expectations, which still largely characterise municipal organisations, on the other. Based on focus groups totalling 73 frontline civil servants in ten Dutch municipalities, this article explores what tensions arise and through what practices civil servants handle them. We contribute to the recent debates on public engagement, showing that civil servants do not just use their discretion to deal with the tensions surrounding rules and policies, departmentalisation and performance management. They negotiate with colleagues and align people, structures and resources inside and outside their organisation to make public engagement work. In addition, the findings suggest that tensions mostly surface in interactions between civil servants. A real challenge in engagement, therefore, lies in developing shared resolutions with one’s colleagues.

KEYWORDS:

• Public engagement
• citizen participation
• citizens’ initiatives
• frontline work
• civil servants
• focus groups

Introduction

During the past three decades, local governments across Latin and North America (Bingham, Nabatchi and O’Leary 2005; Smith 2009; Fung 2015), Western Europe (Torfing, Peters, Pierre and Sorensen 2012; Michels and de Graaf 2010, 2017), Australasia (Mikami 2019; Parry, Alver and Thompson 2019), and Africa (Ferreira and Allegretti 2019) have experimented extensively with citizen and stakeholder engagement in developing and implementing policies and services. Some scholars even speak of a paradigm shift from Classical Public Administration and New Public Management to a New Public Governance (e.g. Osborne 2010; Denhardt and Denhardt 2011; Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg 2014). Engaging citizens throughout the policy making process, facilitating their initiatives, co-producing policy and governing collaboratively are presented as appropriate means to harness the complexity of present-day public issues, to improve the effectiveness of public policy, and as tools for democratisation at the local level (Wagenaar 2007; Michels and de Graaf 2017). More in particular, civil servants in local government are expected to respond more directly to stakeholders needs and citizens’ initiatives, and to connect these to their organisation (Haveri et al. 2009; Geurtz and van de Wijdeven 2010; Durose 2011; Vanleene, Voets, and Verschuere 2019; Van Hulst, de Graaf, and van den Brink 2012).

In practice, civil servants at the local level face several challenges when they engage the public. Important challenges in setting up and sustaining engagement processes include a lack of trust in government and its officials, a lack of diversity in and representativeness of participants, and the limited sustainability of citizen initiatives (Curry 2012; Jaspers and Steen 2019; Aschhoff and Vogel 2018; Michels and de Graaf 2010; Aschhoff and Vogel 2018). In more facilitative and collaborative roles, civil servants working with stakeholders in local government not only ‘encounter the public’ (Bartels 2013). After and while engaging citizens and other stakeholders, civil servants also need to conduct work inside their organisation to realise citizens’ and stakeholders’ needs (Escobar 2015). However, while local governments increasingly express their desire for increased citizen engagement, their organisations are often not equipped for it (Nederhand, Bekkers, and Voorberg 2016; Tuurnas 2015; Mees et al. 2019). Civil servants in local government appear to be confronted with tensions between the rising expectation to engage the public the one hand, and the bureaucratic and managerial expectations, which still largely characterise municipal organisations, on the other (Bartels 2016). Despite the increased attention to the tensions in citizen engagement, it remains unclear what form these tensions take, and what practices frontline civil servants carry out inside their organisation to overcome them. We lack accounts of ‘the backstage policy work carried out by the engagers’ (Escobar 2015, 270) that is needed to make public engagement work. In this article, therefore, we ask what tensions frontline civil servants experience in their organisation when engaging the public and how they handle these.

To answer our question, we draw on data from focus groups in ten municipalities in the Netherlands (with 73 participants in total). This article makes two main contributions to the literature on engagement processes in local government. First, we found that even though bureaucratic and managerial structures and values can be challenging, these matters do not usually withhold civil servants from engaging the public. Interestingly, next to the traditional use of discretion – for example, taking the time and resources to help active citizens – we found that the civil servants negotiate with colleagues to develop shared resolutions, and try to realise citizens’ initiatives and needs by aligning people, structures and resources. In response to local needs and initiatives, they combine and connect elements of the local bureaucracy and engagement processes, developing a hybrid practice (Stewart 2006) on the street level.

Secondly, rather than with structures and values in the abstract, tension play out during interactions between our civil servants and typically are resolved within them. These civil servants do not just span the boundaries of their organisations, they also have to span boundaries within them (Van Meerkerk and Edelenbos 2018). A real challenge, then, lies in negotiating and finding shared resolutions with colleagues who might have a different perspective on what it means to serve the public. This article shows how the relational character of present-day frontline work is not limited to encounters with citizens and other stakeholders (Bartels 2013; David and Forester 2015), but also characterises their encounters inside the organisation.

In the remainder of this article, we first paint the theoretical background of our research, building from the literature on frontline work and the literature on public engagement. Next, the methodology used is elaborated upon, followed by the findings and an overall analysis and reflection in the concluding section.

Tensions in engagement

Public engagement has come to encompass ‘processes that allow members of the public (…) to personally and actively exercise voice such that their ideas, concerns, needs, interests, and values are incorporated into governmental decision making’ (Nabatchi et al. 2014: 3). It covers the variety of methods, including deliberative and participatory processes used ‘to create, shape, and implement policy’ (Nabatchi and Blomgren Amsler 2014, 3). To fully capture the breadth of present-day public engagement in which civil servants in local government are involved, we add the facilitation of citizen self-organisation (Edelenbos, Van Meerkerk & Schenk 2018; Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist 2018). Civil servants ‘in the frontline’ are expected to adopt new roles and skills in order to engage the public. Indeed, even those civil servants who traditionally worked ‘backstage’, such as policy advisors, have more often encouraged to directly engage citizens and stakeholders (Anika and Damgaard 2018). In addition to the new expectations regarding their relationship with citizens and other external stakeholders, civil servants must also play a role in solving tensions between the interactive processes and the standard procedures of their municipal organisation (Bartels 2017; Anika and Damgaard 2018; Blijleven, van Hulst, and Hendriks 2019). The literature on citizen participation indicates that this may be a challenging endeavour and mentions several of such tensions (Nils and Vogel 2018; Jaspers and Steen 2019; Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist 2018). In this study, we focus on the tensions in public engagement at the local level, by which we mean tensions between the rising expectation to engage the public on the one hand, and the bureaucratic and managerial expectations, which still largely characterise municipal organisations, on the other.

In the literatures on frontline work and engagement processes, we have identified four tensions that can be expected to play an important role in public engagement in present-day local government. The first two tensions already came to the fore in early studies of frontline workers (Lipsky 1980), and have been echoed in later studies of frontline workers and engagement processes.¹ First, there is the classic tension between citizens’ expectations and the formal policies, rules and procedures, which carry and symbolise bureaucratic values such as impartiality, neutrality and accountability (Tuurnas 2015). Nowadays, civil servants in the frontline are increasingly expected to be responsive and flexible towards local needs and initiatives and develop solutions together with local stakeholders in open-ended processes (Durose 2011; Dickinson, Needham, Mangan and Sulliva2019). They are required to be outward-oriented, collaborative and creative to bring together a range of different stakeholders (e.g., Dickinson et al. 2019; Rhodes 2016; Kruyen and van Genugten 2020; Vanleene et al. 2018). This classic tension may thus be enhanced as a result of increasing expectations (Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist 2018; Nils and Vogel 2018; Mees et al. 2019; Van Eijk and Steen 2019; Ianniello et al. 2019). In connection to this, participatory processes may conflict with formal politics. Even though local governments facilitate participatory processes, politicians and administrators often decide how these processes are designed and how the outcomes will be taken into account (Hoppe 2011; Verloo 2019; Eckerd and Heidelberg 2019).

Secondly, citizens and other stakeholders expect frontline organisations to invest time, money and other resources in helping them, but these resources typically are scarce (Lipsky 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Rice 2012). This tension most probably increases as a result of performance management, with its strong focus on efficiency (Lipsky 1980). Several recent studies confirm this (Hjörne, Juliha, and van Nijnaten 2010; De Graaf, Huberts, and Smulders 2016). Moreover, public engagement requires at least some degree of openness and a responsiveness to ideas and initiatives that emerge in the process. It is difficult to be facilitative and responsive if resources are scarce or if they have been allocated on the basis of pre-set goals and projects (Tuurnas 2015; Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist 2018; Aschhoff and Vogel 2019; Jaspers and Steen 2019; compare Hood 1991). In addition, a study by Van Eijk and Steen (2019) found that when organisations invest their resources in developing co-production and supporting structures, this also increases civil servants’ willingness to engage in co-production projects.

In the literature on public engagement processes, we encountered two more key tensions. The third tension stems from the need for integrated and collaborative approaches in public engagement. As the needs and initiatives of local communities often cut across the responsibilities of individual civil servants and departments, public engagement requires collaboration, not only outside, but also within the local bureaucracy (Bartels 2016; Tuurnas 2015). Collaboration, however, may be hampered by departmentalisation and organisational ‘silos’ in local government organisations with strong sectorial barriers (Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist 2018; Aschhoff and Vogel 2019; Mees et al. 2019). Mees et al. (2019), for example, found that active citizens often lack one clear point of contact within the municipal organisation, and risk being sent back and forth through the organisation. Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist (2018), in addition, found that civil servants in local government often experience the departmental barriers as challenging, although some boundary spanners see the barriers as easy to overcome, as long as the officials on the other side of the boundary did not display ‘result-oriented or inward-oriented behaviour or attitude’ (ibid., 11).

The fourth tension we identified, is between different forms knowledge and the roles associated with them (King, Feltey, and O’Neill Susel 1998; Edelenbos 2005; Ianniello et al. 2019). Generally, ‘expert’ knowledge is valued as a cornerstone of bureaucracy. In a participatory context, however, it needs to be complemented and combined with contextual, ‘local’ knowledge (Van Tol Smit, De Loë, and Plummer 2015). In line with this, civil servants need to find a balance between different roles, between being an expert advisor (who knows best) and a neutral facilitator (who merely helps) (Anika and Damgaard 2018; Nils and Vogel 2018; Aschhoff and Vogel 2019; Vanleene, Voets and Verschuere 2018). These different role expectations are a potential source of tension as civil servants’ substantive and technical expertise and professional standards and the views and local knowledge of the public can be seriously conflicting (Fisher 1993; Verhoeven and Van Bochove 2018). Table 1 provides an overview of the tensions that civil servants in local government could expect to encounter when they engage the public. To be sure, the tensions, as we describe them here, are general ones that can be expected and that take a particular form in practice. Our aim, here, is to further specify the form they might take in a range of engagement processes in local government.

Table 1. Tensions in public engagement.

Tension	Old ‘classical’ expectations	Newly added expectations
1	Act according to formal rules, policies, procedures and politics	Be flexible, responsive to citizens
2	Focus on effectiveness and efficiency according to pre-set standards	Work with open-ended processes
3	Work from a central discipline (united in department)	Collaborate with multiple disciplines (integrated approach, across departments)
4	Adopt an expert role and work from professional expertise	Adopt a facilitative role and work from local knowledge

Dealing with tensions

Now we know what tensions might be encountered, we want to know how civil servants might deal with those tensions. An obvious source for this is the literature on street level bureaucracy and frontline work. Lipsky (1980) long ago showed how frontline workers engage in practices like rationing services and categorising clients to deal with classic tensions. A review of the literature on frontline coping (Tummers et al. 2015) showed that frontline workers generally handle conflicting demands by moving away from their clients (e.g., routinising or rationing services), moving against clients (rigid rule following) or moving towards their clients (e.g., bending or breaking the rules or using personal resources). In a participatory context, Verhoeven and Bochove (2018) recently showed that frontline workers in care and welfare services cooperating with volunteers, deal with tensions by moving away from frail volunteers and moving towards professional, vigorous volunteers.

We encountered other ways of dealing with tensions in studies of public engagement processes, in particular co-production (Nils and Vogel 2018; Jaspers and Steen 2019), New Public Governance reforms (Van Gestel, Kuiper, and Hendrikx 2019; Sørensen and Bentzen 2020) and non-governmental initiatives (Grotenbreg and Altamirano 2017). This also brought us to more recent work on dealing with value tensions in public policy (e.g. Thacher and Rein 2004; Stewart 2006; De Graaf, Huberts, and Smulders 2016). These publications show that organisations and the officials working for them may, first, choose to adhere to values that are consistent with a dominant discourse (’bias’). They sometimes slowly move emphasis from one value to another (’incrementalism’), or they resolve value conflicts by selecting the preferred value on a case-to-case basis (‘casuistry’) (Stewart 2006; Nils and Vogel 2018; Jaspers and Steen 2019). Frontline workers may also leave the decision between values to a higher administrative or legislative authority (’escalation’) (De Graaf, Huberts, and Smulders 2016; Jaspers and Steen 2019). In a participatory context, characterised by flexibility, frontline workers may follow basic formal rules and develop informal rules to deal with tensions (‘regulation’) (Nils and Vogel 2018).

Many of these strategies offer ways to choose between conflicting expectations and values connected to them. These studies also show that organisations and individuals might aim to combine different values. They cope with tensions by dividing attention over different values over time (‘cycling’), installing different institutions or officials to represent different values (‘firewalls’) (Thacher and Rein 2004) or combining the different values in multiple, co-existing policies and practices (‘hybridisation’) (Stewart 2006; Grotenbreg and Altamirano 2017; Jaspers and Steen 2019). Research on professionals and public-sector reform also indicates that public professionals may creatively mediate expectations from (NPG) reforms and other bureaucratic and managerial expectations from their organisation (Van Gestel, Kuiper, and Hendrikx 2019; Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist 2018; Gleeson and Knights 2006). Sørensen and Bentzen (2020), for example, suggest that creating ‘informal arenas that allow them to enhance their capacity to combine different roles and role fragments through training and experimentation’ (147) may be the most effective way for public administrators to deal with conflicting role expectations.

So far, these are the theoretical expectations. But how do civil servants in Dutch local government actually experience and handle these tensions? Scholars and practitioners might learn from those experiences and practices. Before we get to that, we will describe the research context and the way we generated and analysed our data.

Methodology

Research context and data collection

Dutch local governments, though operating within the boundaries set by central legislation, have a high degree of autonomy and are governed by a council and administration of aldermen and mayor. Like local government in many Western countries, Dutch local governments have been experimenting with citizen engagement and encouraging active citizenship over the past three decades (Bakker et al. 2012; Michels and de Graaf 2017). In fact, most local governments in the Netherlands have adopted policies to promote and facilitate public engagement processes and citizens’ initiatives (Van den Bongaardt 2018). In the municipal organisation, a group of civil servants in different roles engages the public. Neighbourhood managers, for instance, are employed to connect internal processes and developments in neighbourhoods and to work with communities to improve the liveability. Other civil servants who did not traditionally work with citizens, such as project leaders and policy advisors, nowadays also frequently engage citizens and stakeholders in their policies and processes or respond to their initiatives.

In order to understand what tensions civil servants experience and how they deal with them, we conducted focus groups. Focus groups were organised to explore a specific set of issues in which the researcher actively encourages and attends to the group interaction (Barbour and Jenny 1999). We chose to conduct focus groups (instead of, for example, individual interviews) because of their inherently social nature, and their ability to produce data at the group and interaction level (Crang and Cook 2007). This allowed us to see, for example, which tensions really struck a nerve.

Focus groups typically provide insights into group norms and the respondents’ natural vocabulary within their organisation (Cyr 2016); our groups showed us how civil servants actually spoke with their organisational peers. We learned, for example, how civil servants talked about citizen engagement in terms of responsiveness and serving the public, and, therefore, as a natural part of their work. We heard how they often distinguished themselves from colleagues who, in their opinion, were not serving the citizens as they should by avoiding public engagement.

As we were looking for recurrent, generic tensions and ways of dealing with them, we aimed to work with a broad range of municipalities. We were able to organise focus group sessions in ten different municipal organisations. The precondition for including organisations was that they (regularly) organise engagement processes and were interesting in learning more about these processes. This was meant to ensure access to enough knowledgeable participants for our research. The ten municipalities included in this study form a broad set: varying in geographical location, number of inhabitants (ranging from close to 50,000 to over 350,000 inhabitants) and degree of urbanisation (CBS 2017). In total, 73 civil servants attended the focus group sessions (41 women, 32 men). We selected the participants together with our gatekeepers at each municipality – often policy advisor and sometimes a manager, involved the organisations’ in public engagement programmes or policies. We selected participants who were involved in public engagement on a regular basis, and preferably had obtained at least some years of experience working with the public. To capture the full range of civil servants engaging the public, we included participants in a broad range of positions (e.g., neighbourhood managers, policy advisors, project managers) and policy specialities (e.g., social policy, planning, safety, sustainability). A potential risk of selecting municipalities and respondents that likely hold a positive attitude towards public engagement, is that the data may paint a picture that is brighter than elsewhere in the organisation or the country. By explicitly asking the respondents for the barriers they experienced in their organisation, we aimed to mitigate this potential bias.

During the focus groups, the participants were split into two groups. One group was asked to list and discuss the barriers that they encountered inside their organisation when they worked with citizens and partners from outside city hall. A second group was asked to list and discuss what helps them in their organisations when working with the ‘outside world’ and overcoming challenges in that area. Next, the groups switched and discussed the items the other group had listed and added items to the list if they felt this was necessary. During these discussions, the researchers each joined a group, but intervened as little as possible. The process of choosing which items to discuss and write down was left to the participants entirely. We facilitated discussion by asking follow up questions to have participant elaborate examples and experiences, and when necessary, made sure all participants got the chance to respond. After these two rounds of dialogue, the participants sat together with the researchers to discuss their responses and to provide examples for the items on their lists and how they handled those situations. Finally, we showed the lists developed by the previous groups, and had the participants briefly respond to the items generated in other municipalities. The focus groups lasted for around 90 minutes.

Analysis

The focus groups were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were analysed qualitatively, through a three-stage coding process (Charmaz 2006). Following an abductive research logic (Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow 2012; Ashworth, McDermott, and Currie 2019), emerging themes were compared to the existing literature in an iterative process consisting of three stages. During the first stage of initial coding we read the transcripts line by line and coded them, staying as close as possible to the labels and descriptions given to them by the participants (Charmaz 2006). Then, we compared the initial codes and their content, looking for differences and similarities. The second stage of more focused coding resulted in grouping together the initial (often ‘in vivo’) codes that cover similar content and recoded them with labels that best fit their content. What stood out in these first two stages of the analysis is that the civil servants listed ‘colleagues’ as one of their key sources of tension. Here, they referred to difficulties in getting colleagues involved, and commented on some of their colleagues’ attitudes.

In the third stage of the analysis, the content of the categories was compared to the literature. We connected the themes to the broader theoretical categories (Thornberg 2012) derived from the literature – the four tensions identified in Table 1. During this stage, we found that some initial themes, such as ‘departmentalisation’, directly reflected one of the tensions we read about in the literature. Other initial themes could be grouped together as subcategories of the broader theoretical categories (e.g., ‘rules and policies’, ‘politics’ and ‘formal procedures’ as subcategories of formal rules, policies, procedures and politics).

The theoretical tension between the expert and facilitator roles regarding professional knowledge and standards was not explicitly listed by the focus group participants. This theme, however, did cover a substantial part of the initial code referring to ‘colleagues.’ Taking a closer look at the content of this code, we saw that many of the references to ‘colleagues’ entailed colleagues favouring their expert knowledge over citizens’ perspectives. The other text fragments referring to colleagues as a barrier, largely reflected another underlying tension regarding the role of policies and procedures (i.e., colleagues not wanting to defer from them).

Finally, we analysed the data concerning ‘what helps’ according to the public servants in a similar vein. We developed an initial set of inductive codes using NVivo software and compared these to the strategies from the literature in a second round of deductive coding. This coding process lead us to identify of two street level sub categories of ‘hybridisation’.

Findings

Key tensions

In the analysis of the focus group data we recognised the four key tensions in the literature: (1) following formal rules, policies, procedures and politics vs. being flexible and responsive towards citizens; (2) doing performance management focusing on effectiveness and efficiency vs. working with open-ended processes; (3) departmentalisation vs. an integrated approach and (4) civil servants’ playing expert vs. facilitating roles. First, the tension between rules, policies, procedures and politics, and being flexible and responsive towards citizens, surfaced in the focus groups. Even if processes were to have become more open ended, civil servants seldom work in a policy void. Two policy advisors working in Municipality A reflected on this matter²:

Advisor Anna: It’s difficult, because if you give them [participating citizens] a blank canvas, you need to be able to actually offer them that. If these people want a nice park in that place, while you know that they will build houses there … they’ll all draw a little park and then you’ll have to tell them: yeah … we can’t do that.

Advisor Mary:Those are the political conditions and rules of the game. You might not have made the design yet, but you do know there has to be a certain amount of parking lots and all those things … the ingredients.

The attention that stakeholders’ needs and initiatives get will always be limited by rules and procedures, such as parking norms, social housing policies, zoning laws or safety regulations. Rules, policies and procedures are an inherent part of the work context and often reflect important public values, such as mobility, good living conditions, safety or health. The civil servants we spoke with, however, emphasised that rules and procedures and the limits they create are not often, by themselves, their biggest problem. Civil servants know that their local government organisation serves different values (and interests) simultaneously, and that policies, rules and procedures reflect values that clash with the values embedded stakeholder needs and initiatives. In addition, these needs and initiatives might be in line with the purposes of one policy, but conflict with other ones. Civil servants, here, were also confronted with tensions within the organisation. More problematic, however, are moments in which politics get priority over local needs and initiatives. As one civil servant explained: ’Even if it fits with all the policy goals and programmes … the alderman [still] says: ”We’re not doing it, we’d get too much trouble”’ (Civil servant, Municipality G).

Concerning the tension between performance management and open-ended processes, the civil servants in the focus groups experience that, even though the politicians and managers generally embrace the idea of public engagement, this is not always reflected in their work practices. Performance management is often based on the formal goals connected to the different municipal departments, and the associated budgets and schedules. These budgets and schedules, in turn, rarely include time and money for ideas and initiatives emerging from citizen engagement. A neighbourhood manager in Municipality I summarised this tension as follows: ‘This administration says you need to mobilise the power of the people, have a policy for [dealing with] initiatives, participation in all sorts and shapes …. That’s what they say at the administrative level. The directors are also stating that, but the closer you get to the shop floor, the more you get stuck in annual plans and budgets (…) And then you see that the initiatives from the neighbourhoods seldom fit the boxes that we have created for them (…). In the end, the higher managers ask the middle managers: “Did you meet your targets? Did you keep you keep your budget?”’ Engaging the public typically creates more work, on top of the work one has been allotted.

We also heard from the focus group participants that civil servants might refrain from engagement, as they fear they cannot meet the expectations. When discussing this, the public servants emphasised the importance of managerial and political back up, when working in a participatory mode. If there is formal approval, civil servants feel it is legitimate to spend time on the extra work that comes from engaging the public. The tension between pre-set standards and responding to emergent needs and initiatives also surface when civil servants interact with colleagues from other departments. Civil servants who participated in the focus groups felt that some of their colleagues from other departments do not prioritise the engagement processes. Their colleagues claim to be too busy to get involved. Although the participants in the focus groups also experience time pressure themselves, they thought it is always possible to ‘make time’. Several civil servants in our focus groups suspected their colleagues of using their schedule as an excuse. In sum, the second key tension was clearly felt – because of it, engagement processes might not become part of the policy process to start with or not get the attention needed from the organisation at large.

The third tension is that between working from a central discipline (united in a department) and collaborating with multiple disciplines. As mentioned before, the civil servants must deal with several, sometimes contradictory values. Bridging these different values, however, can be particularly challenging because of departmentalisation. As we saw in our investigation, municipal organisations, in their division of budgets and positions, are structured largely along the lines of the professional disciplines or policy areas (e.g., social policy, economic policy, spatial planning and maintenance departments). Civil servants in different departments serve different policy goals and therefore have different values and interests. The small green spaces in a city, for example, are potential community gardens in the eyes of the neighbourhood manager, and potential sources of income for the real estate department. Focus group participants also pointed out that due to the departmentalisation, they are often unaware of what their colleagues in different departments are working on, and opportunities for efficient cooperation might be missed. According to the civil servants, departmentalisation not only complicates cooperation, it may also result in issues with or disputes over ‘ownership’. As long as an external initiative has not been connected to a particular policy or department, it remains unclear who is responsible.

The final tension we encountered in the literature was that between working from an expert role using mainly professional knowledge versus working from a more facilitative role using mainly (stakeholders’) local knowledge. This tension the civil servants in the focus groups hardly experienced themselves. Some of the participants stated that they had experienced this tension earlier in their careers, but had learned to view professional and local knowledge as complementary. In the focus group in Municipality B, a designer reflected on his learning experience during a large-scale refurbishment project: ‘During that time, I learned to design together with citizens and be of service to the city. Before, I had learned to make plans and implement them, and if anyone had an opinion about it, I hated that!’ In various focus groups, other participants connected responsiveness towards citizens’ needs and initiatives to ‘being in service of the city’. For them, this does not mean doing what citizens demand, though. It means finding the right balance between what one’s profession expertise tells them and how stakeholders see matters.

During our analysis we did find that this tension plays a role in interactions between members of the focus groups and some of their colleagues. There are always colleagues who do not share a positive attitude towards stakeholders’ local knowledge. That can become a problem. When civil servants work with stakeholders, they often need to involve a particular colleague because of their knowledge, resources or permission. In the experience of the focus group participants, some of their colleagues could not or would not go beyond their own professional discipline. A designer in Municipality B, for example, experienced this when he collaborated with citizens and stakeholders in redesigning a city park:

Designer Casper: I have gone through this whole process with those people. And then, when it comes down to getting a logging permit for this path we set out together, there is this group in the maintenance department, and they just don’t get it. … They don’t understand this whole process.

Neighbourhood manager Jane:They do feel involved but

…

Designer Casper:Exactly. They want to protect the trees.

Neighbourhood manager:They don’t realise they need to take off their blinders and look at it from an integrated perspective.

From our focus groups we learned that often working with stakeholders is easier and more satisfying than working with colleagues in the municipal organisation who are not able or willing to prioritise stakeholders’ needs and initiatives. In sum, we recognised the tensions that existed between the old and new expectations that we encountered in the literature, although their form and content differed from our (academic) expectations. The question, though, is through what practices do frontline civil servants deal with these tensions?

Dealing with tensions

We identified three key practices through which in which the civil servants respond to these tensions. They use their discretion to bias stakeholder needs and initiatives. In addition, the civil servants practice hybridisation in two ways: they negotiate with colleagues and superiors, and try to align people, structures and resources inside and outside their organisation. We found only two examples of firewalls and escalating and one example of casuistry and no evidence of cycling or regulating.

First, the civil servants are biased in favour of stakeholder needs and initiatives, what Tummers et al. (2015) would call moving towards citizens. In response to the classical tensions related to rules and performance management, for example, they invest more of their working hours in facilitating stakeholders (than would officially be the norm), prioritise citizen initiated projects over others, named particular projects ‘pilots’ to be able to experiment and interpret policies broadly, in order to work on a particular need or initiative in name of that policy. When different policies may apply to a particular situation, they work with the policy that is in line with what the stakeholders they work with want. Among the participants in the focus groups, there seemed to be a shared understanding that it is often impossible to satisfy all formal requirements: ‘If you stack all the rules in a pile, you can’t do much … . We want to build houses, but if you consider all the rules, it’s not even possible. So as a project manager, you need to feel allowed to wheel and deal’ (Policy advisor, Municipality A). As a result, it appears that the civil servants in local government feel it can be legitimate and sometimes unavoidable to deviate from a rule or procedure. In other words, the civil servants make use of co-existing and contradicting policies within the municipality, here, in order to facilitate citizens’ needs and initiatives. In other cases, however, internal tensions need to be resolved in order to deal with tensions with the outside world. This brings us to the second practice.

Secondly, we found that the civil servants try to negotiate with colleagues and superiors. When negotiating, the civil servants tried to convince colleagues of the value of a particular idea or initiative, or they searched for shared interests. Several participants in the focus groups experienced convincing initially reluctant colleagues to cooperate in their projects. They took their colleagues out to see the projects and initiatives with their own eyes, and brought them into contact with citizens to make them experience the importance of a particular need or initiative. In addition, they also actively looked for shared values and interests, aiming to take into account their colleagues’ perspectives. In eight out of the ten focus groups, civil servants emphasised that maintaining positive relations with their colleagues, as well as with the stakeholders outside city hall is vital in getting their work done. In some focus groups, in addition, the civil servants stated that they actively seek support from colleagues or superiors in their negotiating with other colleagues. Although they started off in these situation on the side of the citizens – representing their interest or initiative towards their organisation – they often developed a hybrid solution to the particular situation, combining elements of the stakeholder perspectives and those of their colleagues.

Thirdly, the civil servants also engaged in hybridisation when they aligned people, structures and resources inside and outside their organisation, and within their organisation. A policy advisor in Municipality A, for example, explained how she managed to work with a youth group that wanted to develop a place to hang out by connecting the project to her responsibility for the structure of green spaces in that area. By aligning, the civil servants sometimes created new, often informal structures to deal with citizen engagement and overcome departmentalisation. For example, one neighbourhood manager explained how he involved several colleagues in response to an initiative from the neighbourhood aimed at helping unemployed citizens become entrepreneurs. The initiative touched upon themes related to at least five different departments. Instead of just giving the initiator the five addresses of the departments, the neighbourhood manager brought his colleagues together in a meeting with the initiator. It worked: ‘We reached consensus within the hour that this was a good initiative that fits the goals of five programmes’ (neighbourhood manager in Municipality E). The initiative could be paid for with the neighbourhood budget and another budget that happened to be available at one of the departments that were involved. This way of working was considered a success and was applied several more times by the neighbourhood manager and his colleagues.

In sum, by biasing, negotiating and aligning, the civil servants try to facilitate the needs and initiatives of citizens, particularly when this contrasts with different, more traditional expectations that are anchored in their municipal organisation in several ways. This does not mean, however, that they ignore or resist the traditional expectations. Rather, by negotiating, they seek shared resolutions and when they align, they build from existing structures and values and connect them to the public engagement processes. Below, in Table 2, we list the general tensions and responding practices we encountered and provide examples of the responses.

Table 2. Tensions and responses.

Tension	Response	Example(s)
Acting according to formal rules, policies, procedures and politics vs. being flexible and responsive towards citizens	Biasing, negotiating or aligning to expand the limits created by the rules, procedures and policies	Weighing values/policy goals and choosing between them (biasing); Negotiating with colleagues and superiors (negotiating); Connecting external needs and initiatives with policies and budgets (aligning)
Focus on effectiveness and efficiency according to pre-set standards vs. working with open-ended processes	Biasing or aligning to create time for the initiatives and ideas	Spending (extra) time on external initiatives (biasing); Connecting external needs and initiatives with policies and tasks (aligning)
Working from a central discipline (united in department) vs. collaborating with multiple disciplines (integrated approach)	Aligning people, processes and resources for inter-departmental cooperation	Initiating new structures for cooperation (aligning)
Adopting an expert role and working from professional expertise vs. adopting a facilitative role and working from local knowledge	Negotiating and looking for shared solutions with colleagues	Negotiating with colleagues and superiors to get their cooperation or permission (negotiating)

More illustrations of the tensions and responses in the form of participants’ own words can be found in Appendix A.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we have set out to develop a better understanding of the tensions civil servants involved in public engagement processes in local government experience, and how they handle these tensions. Building on the literature on frontline work and public engagement we have focused on four tensions. Our findings confirm that frontline civil servants experience tensions between the situations and interactions in engagement processes at the street level on the one hand, and the formal rules, policies, procedures and politics, performance management, departmentalisation on the other hand. To a lesser degree they experienced the tension between different knowledges and roles connected. Needs and initiatives civil servants hear about in encounters with the public do not automatically find a place in local municipal organisation. They require civil servants to make connections between these external needs and initiatives and internal structures and values, and connections within their organisation (i.e., between different departments). We found that civil servants working on the front lines try to overcome and resolve these tensions by biasing stakeholder needs or initiatives, and negotiating with colleagues and superiors and aligning people, structures and resources.

Our paper makes two distinctive contributions to debates in the public administration literature. First, we extend our understanding of the tensions in public engagement in local government and the way these tensions are handled. Our research sheds more light on the tensions depicted in previous research (e.g., Edelenbos 2005; Van Dam, Duineveld, and Roel During 2015; Mees et al. 2019; Bartels 2016) and nuances them. Our findings suggest that Dutch frontline civil servants view some elements of classical bureaucracy as compatible with or complementary to the spirit of public engagement. In those cases, we might not even speak of tensions. In the view of our civil servants, rules, policies, procedures and expert knowledge can be complementary to and aligned with citizens’ input and local knowledge. The civil servants who participated in the focus groups in majority seemed to honour skills and knowledge related to New Public Governance, while still valuing more traditional skills and knowledge (Kruyen and van Genugten 2020; Van der Steen, van Twist, and Bressers 2018).

Furthermore, the civil servants in the focus groups discussed many cases in which they prioritised citizens’ needs and initiatives over bureaucratic and managerial expectations. We found that they sometimes bend the rules and spend extra time in their effort to move towards the citizens (Tummers et al. 2015; Jaspers and Steen 2019). We also learned that civil servants seek shared resolutions and align engagement processes with other values in their organisation. These findings show that the frontline civil servants, in response to concrete situations, engage in hybridisation. Whereas the literature tends to discuss hybridisation at the organisational level as ‘the coexistence of two policies or practices with different values bases’ (Stewart 2006: 188; Grotenbreg and Altamirano 2017; Jaspers and Steen 2019), the practices we found (negotiating and aligning) took place on the frontlines of local government. These practices show how efforts at the street level may make hybridisation at the organisational level work. In a similar vein, our findings suggest that the practice of creating ‘firewalls’ on the organisational level – establishing and sustaining multiple institutions, organisational units or positions to represent different values (Thacher and Rein 2004; Jaspers and Steen 2019) – may lead to new tensions in situations that are resolved at the street level.

This brings us to our second contribution. Our research shows that tensions not only appear between public servants and the bureaucratic and managerial values of their organisational context (expressed through e.g. policies, procedures and management practices) (e.g., Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers 2015; Mees et al. 2019). Tensions, in the civil servants’ experience, emerge from and are mediated through the interactions with colleagues. In particular, the civil servants experienced difficulties when they needed the cooperation from colleagues who, in their opinion, did not prioritise dealing with citizens’ needs and emerging initiatives. This confirms Nederhand, van der Steen, and van Twist (2018) expectation that civil servants’ practices may be even more important than organisational structures, in achieving cooperation. The need for collaboration and the importance of relations is not restricted to what civil servants have to do with stakeholders (Bartels 2013; Bartels 2017; Laws and Forester 2015). Civil servants not only have encounters outside, they have many encounters in their own organisation that, in turn, affect encounters outside.

Finally, we want to point to possibilities for future research. First, our observations regarding the encounters inside the municipal organisation open up an interesting area for future research. Earlier studies of frontline work have generally treated relationships among frontline workers as important but unproblematic, as characterised by mutual support and learning (e.g. Lipsky 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Hupe and Hill 2007; Rice 2012). Our findings show that these encounters between colleagues, at least in a participatory context, require more attention. In addition, we should mention this research focuses on and is limited to the tensions inside the local government organisation. In reality, these tensions are often related to tensions that play out outside the organisation. Future research may therefore explore how exactly the tensions and interactions ‘backstage’, inside the municipal organisation, affect civil servants’ ‘frontstage’ interactions with citizens and other stakeholders, and the tensions they experience outside the municipal organisation, when engaging the public, and vice versa.

Second, we need to point out that this research has made use of interactions between civil servants in the setting of focus groups. It is limited by the set-up and characteristics of this method and the participants in our focus groups. As our findings are grounded in qualitative research in ten municipalities the Netherlands, they cannot simply be generalised to any context. In particular, we should mention that the ten municipalities included in the study all regularly engage their citizens in developing and implementing policy, and were selected, in part, based on their interest in learning about engagement processes. The selection therefore may represent a more positive picture of the Dutch, and the international practice of public engagement in local government. The study, however, aims to provide in-depth insights into and an analytical understanding of tensions in public engagement that is also relevant to (civil servants in) other countries and domains. An international comparison would also be a useful next step. In addition, we should point out that we selected civil servants who regularly engage the public and likely share a relatively positive stance towards public engagement. The importance that was attributed to negotiating with colleagues in the focus groups suggest that this attitude is not shared by all civil servants. It would be interesting, therefore, to study the perspectives (and tensions) of those in municipal organisations or other public organisations and institutions who do not encounter stakeholders on a daily basis and in particular those who have a more traditional perspective on serving the public interest. Finally, using ethnographic methods such as shadowing and other forms of observation to study the interactions between colleagues, would allow us to further understand the kinds of tensions and resolving practices we encountered in our research.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Frank Hendriks for his help with the focus groups and for his thoughts and feedback on earlier versions of this article. In addition, we would like to thank the civil servants participating in the focus group sessions in Dutch local governments, and thank A&O Fonds Gemeenten, VNG and the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, for supporting the research. Finally, we are grateful for the comments provided by the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted in the context of a consortium of six local governments, A&O Fonds Gemeenten, The Association of Netherlands Municipalities/Vereniging van Nederlandse Gemeenten (VNG), the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and Tilburg University. All parties involved contributed financial support and other means to conduct the research. The independence of the researchers was safeguarded through contracts.

Notes on contributors

Wieke Blijleven

Wieke Blijleven completed an MSc degree in public administration and organisational science and is currently finishing her PhD project in the Department of Public Law and Governance of Tilburg University, the Netherlands, where she works as a researcher and a consultant for the KWINK groep. Her research focuses on local governance, (frontline) civil servants and citizen participation.

Merlijn van Hulst

Merlijn van Hulst is an associate professor in the Department of Public Law and Governance of Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is interested in work practices in public organisations and local governance and specialises in interpretive research methods. He has published in journals including the British Journal of Criminology, Planning Theory, Public Administration Review, and the American Review of Public Administration.

Notes

1. We built our set of four from a longer list of more specific tensions as we encountered them in the literature. This way, we were able to cover much ground. We do not claim however, to include each and every tensions one might encounter in literature or practice.

2. We have replaced the names of the municipalities with letters and the names of the focus group participants with fictitious names.

Appendix A

Illustrative quotes

Table

Tension 1. Acting according to formal rules, policies, procedures and politics vs. being flexible and responsive towards citizens	When we say: okay, we’ll go outside, we have all this baggage …. What bothers me is that you don’t feel you can speak freely because you are sort of cornered. You cannot take this outside, this option is not possible anymore …. […] I want to be able to go outside and really collect input, have open conversations. (Civil servant, Municipality D) We would like to facilitate urban farming, people starting a garden in the city … yet, often it does not fit with the zoning laws, so you need a formal procedure, which is costly, and those people do not have the money. […] It also costs time, but these people would rather start tomorrow. Yeah, that’s how those things related to policies and rules … don’t fit with these kinds of initiatives from the city that wants to start straight away. (Civil servant, Municipality A) Even then, it can still break down due to a lack of support from the aldermen. I am working on this case at the moment: everyone is very excited about it, and then there is an alderman who says: ‘well … let’s not do this right now’. … even if it fits will all the policy goals and programmes …. There was another personal position of the alderman. […] That the alderman says: ‘we’re not doing it, we’d get into too much trouble, we’re not going to do that’. (Civil servant, Municipality G)
Tension 2. Focus on effectiveness and efficiency according to pre-set standards vs. working with open-ended processes	Many of us work outside and interactively with the city, but we also have this whole battery of managers that direct to … well, chores, and those things are based on the organisation, or team or department goals. They think we are just playing outside, they don’t find it important, while those people outside find it very valuable. The mindset and understanding of what is going on outside and what those colleagues are doing. (Civil servant, Municipality H). Dialogue in Municipality C: Civil servant 1: we tell citizens: if you have ideas, we’ll take care of it, but inside the organisation, everyone who is not directly involved with that citizen thinks: yeah, I have other things that I need to do first. So, a broadly shared starting point in our organisation, is that what is missing? Civil servant 2: well … also the time we have to take care of those things that pop up. Right now, one hundred percent of our time is full, while we should have a shift towards seventy-five percent of the time booked for regular tasks and twenty-five percent to deal with requests from outside. The administration’s priorities are great, we have all planned them, but we do not save any time in our schedules to do what we are actually there for. I think there is a tension between our ambitions and resources. On the one hand, we have this ambition for participation – which is not even equally shared by everyone […] And that ambition is expressed, the resources often lack. If we find this important in your department, that means we need to have the time and resources. (Civil servant, Municipality B)
Tension 3. Working from a central discipline (united in department) vs. collaborating with multiple disciplines (integrated approach)	I experience that our organisation is in a phase that it seems that we have two modes of organisation existing next to each other: area- based working versus what I would, call centralised working. While really they are the extremes of the same model. Some things we do at the city level because it is the ideal scale, actually, we should ask ourselves that question for every problem: what is the right area or scale? What complicates this is that it seems to be some kind of power play. (Civil servant, Municipality E) Getting rid of the boundaries is not a solution, I think, nor is it an ambition because you need those boundaries. Otherwise you would lose our overview. I think the challenge is to make sure that you have some cocktail picks poking through those structures, to have an integrated view. (Civil servant, Municipality H) What I was used to, working in other municipalities: there is an initiative that enters through a city planner or advisor and then they talk to the traffic specialist individual, and they will give their advice … Then you usually get all this different contradictory advice. Here, when we get a plan, all specialists receive the plan a day in advance, I think, and then you have a meeting with all specialists together. So if there are any contradictions at the table, you can talk them through, immediately. (Civil servant, Municipality A)
Tension 4. Adopting an expert role and working from professional expertise vs. adopting a facilitative role and working from local knowledge	On personal experiences and colleagues As a government, you can’t oversee everything when you design a plan. And you’ll find that many citizens have some kind of fascination or hobby: house sparrows – we were just talking about that – insects … there are people working on green and sustainability, and they can contribute to the plan, which is fun. (Civil servant, Municipality C) I think it is a difference in mindset, a mindset of getting as much things done as possible within the organisation, and the mindset of people who spend much time outside. A manager who doesn’t have a clue about what you are doing outside and sees it as some gimmick, while you think: I am actually working for this city, why don’t you get that! (Civil servant, Municipality H) It has a lot to do with the person, and I think it also has to do with how good you are at your craft. People who find their work difficult tend to be more rigid than people who easily rise above the matter. For example, in conversations with citizens: do you dare talk openly because you know it all, or do you want everything to be strictly regulated because you are afraid? (Civil servant, Municipality I) You are doing something as a professional, you are designing something or you have come up with something or know all about something, and then you enter an environment in which you think: these are all lay people, and they want to have something to say about your area of expertise. Like: ‘’that doesn’t make sense!” Or ‘’I also know about parking” … I have noticed that it can be difficult for colleagues who work in their area of expertise to open up and talk and listen without prejudice, and actually do something with it. (Civil servant, Municipality D) We have been working on [municipality-wide participatory project Y]. Sometimes you hear from people in the organisation who have not helped with the project: that’s their thing, they’ll do it. Well, I also have my other work here that needs to be done […] Really, it should be part of the work, but that’s not how they experience it. (Civil servant, Municipality J)
Biasing	Those goals are so abstract … with some creative thinking you can consider a lot of things under those labels (Civil servant, Municipality G) Dialogue in Municipality J Civil servant 1: Aside from your formal competencies, you need to have some status or credibility that people will accept things from you, and believe they make sense. … you know? Civil servant 2: like what you say is true Civil servant 1: yes, or maybe it is trust. Look, you also have your preferences, and you know if you go to some colleagues: we’ll get it done; while with some others, you think: I’ll work around them or it’ll take even longer.
Negotiating	I think that as long as you have a good story to tell about why we should cooperate, you can get a lot of people on board, eventually. (Civil servant, Municipality G) [I have a colleague] who was assigned to make the bus route to [neighbourhood X] through [street Y] go faster, like four minutes faster. She worked on it, and you come up with: removing bus stops or traffic lights, making a separate bus lane, all kinds of measures, just to get the bus there four minutes quicker … At some point she thought: what nonsense, this is not what it really is about! So she said: we need to deal with this in a more integrated way, broaden the project to refurbishing the entire street. […] She talked to her supervisor: ‘’you really need to broaden the scope. If we go through with this, we are planning for resistance”. (Civil servant, municipality I) If you want to get things done or take someone along in a process, you need to go and meet them. You have your network outside, but you also need to work on your network inside, don’t think: ‘’I’ll just send an email, that’ll do the trick”. (Civil servant, Municipality B) I don’t have any technical knowledge, so I work with colleagues who do. Sometimes you get to deal with colleagues who have such a one-track mind when it comes to their area of expertise, and they fail to connect with: who are we doing this for, really? What helps, for me, is to take them along outside, for example, people from the traffic department, join me, look around, talk to people. (Civil servant, Municipality B)
Aligning	We are working on collecting input for formulating the neighbourhood challenges. We go to all kinds of places to collect: what do people find important issues to tackle? In the city centre, we found people want better walking routes [free from obstacles] […] So, I was working on that last Monday, with colleagues from traffic and maintenance, to translate those requests into specific measures. At the traffic department, they had just received a new budget, four times 300.000, I think, for accessibility. […] So, there was a project manager who had to operationalise that – very top down. And he was like: wow, how am I going to do this? So, I came in with my list of places in the city centre where there had been complaints about the accessibility of the pavements. And yes, then you get to bring those together. What was urgent for me, was urgent for him, because he could use this to fill part of his accessibility programme. (Civil servant, Municipality J) There was an empty lot, some initiatives wanted to develop something there, but they did not want to buy or rent the place. How do we deal with that? What do we find important? From that project, I learned that collaborating with stakeholders can do much for building ownership, that people take responsibility. I remember thinking: ‘well, this is nothing like project management, it is all ad hoc responding to everything … ’. I think, maybe that is the new way to go, moving along with opportunities … (Civil servant, Municipality C) With most people who are at the table here, we have a meeting about every two weeks to talk about certain themes. Then you’ll find that you start seeing all kinds of connections. Those close contacts really help. You walk into each other’s’ offices: I am working on this, what does that mean for you? (Civil servant, Municipality G)