Introduction to the special issue: facilitating citizen engagement in interactive governance

ABSTRACT

This is an introduction to the special issue on facilitating citizen engagement in interactive governance. In this special issue, we focus on facilitators: the professionals that support and organise various forms of collaboration between governments and citizens that elsewhere have been conceptualised as interactive governance. We explore the main pressures that facilitators face and how these are negotiated in deliberative forms of policy-making, the co-production of public services, and in community-induced civic initiatives. With this exploration, we contribute to a burgeoning literature on facilitators as in-between actors, we make a unique comparison across three forms of interactive governance that are often analysed separately, we bring together disparate literatures on democratic innovation and public policy implementation, and we offer nuances and perspectives from various countries with six articles addressing facilitation in Scotland, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands.

KEYWORDS:

• Facilitators
• interactive governance
• deliberative policy-making
• co-production of public service
• civic initiatives

One of the most profound developments in governing has been the growing involvement of various stakeholders in policy design and in the implementation of public services (Hoppe 2011; Fung 2004; Lowndes, Pratchett, and Stoker 2001; Barnes, Newman, and Sullivan 2004; De; Graaf, van Hulst, and Michels 2015; Michels and de Graaf 2010; Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016; Hajer 2007; Bang 2004). Recently, this stakeholder involvement has been conceptualised as ‘interactive governance’, with much emphasis on collaboration between governments and citizens (Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016). A key understanding of government-citizen collaborations is that both government-induced activities, such as participatory and deliberative forms of policy-making or the co-production of public services, and community-induced civic initiatives all rely on interactions between facilitators and citizens (Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016). In this special issue, we use the term ‘facilitator’ for those working in the front-line of government that support citizens during interactive governance processes. Such facilitators can work for governmental organisations or they can be hired externally.

Much has been written on the roles and involvement of citizens in such processes (Alford 2014; Bakker et al. 2012; Barnes, Newman, and Sullivan 2004; Bovaird 2007; de Wilde, Hurenkamp, and Tonkens 2014; Michels and de Graaf 2010; Pestoff 2006; Van Dam, Duineveld, and During 2014). However, less attention has been paid to the facilitator, an important but often invisible professional that supports and organises different participatory processes (Bherer 2021; Lee 2015). We want to contribute to the scholarly work within democratic innovations-, public policy- and governance literature, by focusing on facilitation and the role it can play in supporting citizens in the creation of more legitimate policies, effective public services and solutions to community problems.

Facilitation is a broad term used in education science and psychology to describe how professionals help other people or groups to accomplish something, by creating enabling conditions and by fostering an environment that makes action possible on the basis of positive social interactions and learning (Hogan 2005). In the context of interactive governance, facilitation can be understood as an intervention that enables citizens to engage meaningfully in three forms of interactive governance, that is deliberation, co-production or civic initiatives. More specifically, the role of facilitators is to set up rules and procedures for discussion and exchanges between participants, strife for more inclusivity, help to obtain results, and create bridges with stakeholders inside or outside public administration. Although facilitation of interactive governance occurs at all levels of government, we see local governments employing it most and struggling with its challenges (Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).

What do we know?

Over the last decade, we can find burgeoning studies on the art and craft of what facilitators do to support citizens (Chilvers 2013; Cooper and Smith 2012; Lee 2015). These studies come from the often disconnected literature on democratic innovation and public policy implementation. Based on deliberative and participatory theories, democratic innovation literature has emphasised how facilitators create a positive context of dialogue that fosters inclusion, openness, transparency and reciprocity amongst citizens. Much focus has gone into what facilitators do to set up processes and procedures by which citizens can play an effective role in decision-making (Bherer et al. 2017; Christensen 2019; Christensen and McQuestin 2018; Escobar 2014; Hendriks and Carson 2008; Lee 2015). Spada and Vreeland (2013), for instance, show that facilitators struggle with treating citizens in an impartial and balanced way. Whereas the contribution of facilitators to organise effective dialogue is recognised, their position is also an important source of tension and critiques within participation and deliberation processes. To cope with these challenges, facilitators have access to various approaches, from traditional public arrangements to mini-public procedures (Cooper and Smith 2012), and they can adopt passive, moderate or involved styles of facilitation (Dillard 2013). Caroline Lee’s work (Lee 2015) shows that Public Participation Professionals (PPPs) often try to ensure the authenticity of the participatory arrangements that they design and to foster reciprocity between their sponsors and citizens. In other words, PPPs are not naive and are very conscious of the tensions connected with their profession. However, we cannot assume that all PPPs will in fact play this role, because they are far from being a homogeneous community with a shared understanding of public participation. There are ideological and philosophical divisions among facilitators on which participatory approaches to promote (Friess and Herff 2023; Mazeaud and Nonjon 2019).

In public policy literature, much attention has gone into what we may call the democratisation of the relationships between public professionals, understood as front-line workers, and citizens during policy implementation. For instance, in planning Forester (2009) shows how deliberative practitioners practice professional humility that allows for social learning by building citizens’ confidence, creating spaces for deliberation and listening carefully to citizens. Durose (2011) found in local governance that frontline workers employ strategies such as ‘reaching’ and ‘enabling’ to include marginalised groups in service provision, while Tonkens and Verhoeven (2018) demonstrate that frontline workers stimulated more inclusive civic initiatives by asking non-active citizens to engage by developing their civic skills, by assisting them in connecting with others, and by being more responsive. Finally, Agger and Poulsen (2017) demonstrate that frontline workers’ ability to handle conflicts in urban regeneration projects plays a decisive role in the inclusivity of participatory processes. These examples fit with the meta-analysis of policy implementation literature by Tummers et al (2015) that signals a growing trend of frontline workers adjusting to citizens’ needs and trying to help them (see also Vanleene, Voets, and Verschuere 2019). All these studies point in the direction of frontline workers developing a facilitative attitude and skills in relation to citizens.

Focus, objective, main question and contribution

All the interest in the behaviour and attitudes of facilitators in the democratic innovation and policy implementation literature leads to scant attention to the challenges that facilitators face during interactive governance processes. Facilitators are in constant interaction with citizens, with the organisation they work for or are hired by, with other organisations involved in governance practices, with the expectations of all these actors and with the outcomes they manage to produce in interaction with them. Hence, facilitators work as in-between actors that manage, reframe and mediate at the interface between citizens, public authorities, politicians, and other actors involved in interactive governance (Bherer et al. 2017; van Meerkerk and Edelenbos 2018). In this work, facilitators encounter citizens’ demands and expectations, a reluctant back office, administrative or political backlash, red tape, stringent performance indicators and efficiency prescriptions, which they all need to reconcile with the art and craft of what they do to facilitate citizens. These pressures on their work differ for internal facilitators working for governmental or other public organisations and facilitators that are externally hired. The internal facilitators must navigate the institutional politics of policy making (Escobar 2017), while the external ones are caught between the pressures of a commercial enterprise and the demands of their public patrons (Hendriks and Carson 2008).

The objective of this special issue is to understand how facilitators deal with the pressures put upon them by the various actors they engage with while upholding the art and craft of their work during processes of interactive governance. Hence, the key question organising this special issue is as follows: what are the main pressures that facilitators face in interactive governance with citizens and how are these negotiated in various forms of interactive governance processes?

By asking this central question, this special issue unites four specific contributions to existing literature:

1. It contributes to a burgeoning literature on facilitators as in-between actors that navigate and negotiate the complex interactions with the various actors they engage with in their daily practices. As such, it adds to a small but steadily growing literature that takes an agentic perspective on collaboration during interactive governance processes by focusing on individuals instead of organisations (Van Hulst, de Graaf, and van den Brink 2012; van Meerkerk and Edelenbos 2018).

2. It makes a unique comparison across three forms of interactive governance that are often analysed separately. It compares facilitation in a) participatory and deliberative forms of policy making where citizens are supported in providing input to policy processes that varies from consultation to actual decision-making (Barnes, Newman, and Sullivan 2004; Fung 2004; Michels and de Graaf 2010); b) processes of co-production in which citizens and professionals contribute to both designing and making decisions on public services as well as implementing them (Bovaird 2007; Nabatchi, Sancino, and Sicilia 2017); c) civic initiatives through which citizens on a voluntary basis take up collective, often informal, social or political activities to deal pragmatically with public issues in their communities (Edelenbos and van Meerkerk 2016; Tonkens and Verhoeven 2018). These civic initiatives often engage with professionals because they need some form of support to ensure that their initiatives commence, continue or have the desired impact. Hence, they can be seen as forms of blended action in which civic engagement and governmental support coincide (Bakker et al. 2012; Tonkens and Verhoeven 2018). By comparing across these three forms of interactive governance, variations and commonalities between pressures faced and solutions found by facilitators can be analysed more systematically.

3. It brings together disparate literature on democratic innovation and public policy implementation. As such, it covers and integrates insights from policy design and policy implementation processes that are often disconnected in the literature, but that very much interact in practice (John 1998). In addition, the special issue connects these literatures with the relatively new literature on the governance of civic initiatives.

4. It offers unfolding nuances and perspectives from various countries, which is rarely found in studies on citizen engagement in interactive governance. The comparison is based on the availability of a limited number of researchers that work in different literatures and countries, whilst exploring the pressures that facilitators are facing.

Overview of the articles

The special issue covers the main pressures that facilitators face as actors caught in-between the citizens they try to facilitate, the organisations they work for or are hired by and the other organisations involved in these processes of interactive governance. We succeeded in putting together in-depth studies covering the facilitation of deliberation, co-production and civic initiatives. After this introduction, we present two papers on the pressures faced by facilitators during deliberative and participatory processes in Scotland (Bynner, Escobar and Weakley) and Canada (Bherer). The next two papers deal with the facilitation of co-production in England, France and Canada (McMullin) and in Denmark (Agger and Tortzen). The facilitation of civic initiatives is analysed in a paper on the Netherlands (Verhoeven and Tonkens), while the final paper by Blijleven covers all three modes of interactive governance for the Netherlands.

The first paper by Bynner et al. (2023) concerns the specific role of public servants who act as facilitators. Since the adoption of the Community Empowerment Act in 2015, Scottish local governments are encouraged to involve citizens in policy making through local forums, participatory budgeting and mini-publics. Consequently, the work of facilitators working for local government has developed rapidly in Scotland. In fact, the status of institutional insiders gives facilitators a special role in the implementation of the new forms of interactive governance. Their work is political, in the sense that Scottish facilitators create the conditions for wider participation and inclusion. Based on extensive research amongst these facilitators, Bynner et al show that official facilitators see themselves as ‘culture change workers’ challenging traditions and beliefs among representatives, others bureaucrats and citizens. More specifically, their work leads them to influence the civic culture (by promoting social inclusion and by mobilising beyond usual-suspects), the political culture (by working with representatives towards power-sharing, supporting citizens to chair meetings and set the agenda), the bureaucratic culture (by promoting a change from top-down government based on command and control, to an understanding of the added value of citizen participation) and, finally, the professional culture (by taking time to develop innovative modes of interaction). However, whereas job satisfaction seems to be relatively high among official facilitators, the paper also points to the challenges they meet when navigating between traditional forms of governing and interactive governance. A first challenge is the lack of resources caused by austerity policies, which undermines facilitators' work and increases their workload. A second challenge is the distrust by citizens, with some believing that facilitation exists to achieve budget-cuts. Overall, the paper points to the difficulty of facilitators that consider themselves to be agents of change, whilst working in a very slowly transforming government context, sometimes leading facilitators to see themselves ‘internal activists’.

Laurence Bherer’s (2023) contribution in the second paper analyses the challenges met by public participation professionals (PPPs) working for private firms providing public engagement services. Public authorities often prefer to delegate the organisation, implementation and facilitation of participatory processes to PPPs, who then need to satisfy their client but also to organise a fair public forum where citizens feel listened to. The ideal of impartiality explains this challenge, and while previous analysis has shown how PPPs work with this ideal when they facilitate dialogue with citizens, we know less about the strategies they use with their clients that hire them to keep public engagement credible. Based on interviews with PPPs, the paper shows six main strategies they apply: 1) Choosing or avoiding certain clients that seem not ready to organise a fair public engagement process; 2) Using the contract with the client to set shared rules and norms; 3) Being knowledgeable about the issue at stake in order to engage in dialogue and negotiate with the client during the entire process; 4) Declining public communication activities to avoid the association of public engagement with public relation services; 5) Coaching the client to adopt an open attitude towards the implementation of the public forum; 6) Being reflexive about their practice by organising in-house meetings and writing guides on different topics, only for internal uses of their firm. Overall, these strategies reveal how much time PPPs invest in their interaction with clients before and after the public forum. However, as the paper shows, these strategies can vary depending on how professionals understand the impartiality associated with their profession.

In the third paper, Caitlin McMullin (2022) analyses facilitation practices in co-production, which she defines as: ‘the involvement of professionals (i.e., paid employees) from any sector and citizens in both designing and delivering public services. To understand what facilitation is in the specific context of co-production, McMullin makes a very interesting distinction between the professional’s core service delivery tasks and the complementary tasks whose goals are to support indirectly the core service. Whereas the core service delivery tasks involved in co-production processes are well known, the complementary tasks and their challenges are less clear. The paper analyses how these complementary tasks are accomplished by third-sector organisations involved in the delivery of public services in France, the UK and Canada. Because of the more flexible culture of third-sector organisations, professionals are more engaged in complementary work than public servants, and it is thus empirically easier to identify these tasks in this specific context. The analysis reveals three kinds of complementary tasks supporting citizen engagement. First, complementary activities include informal training, concerning personal and social skills, the technical aspects of the core services, or even how to deliver services when some citizens co-produce them. For example, professionals could train some parents to become leaders in family activities of the organisation. Second, professionals also perform small administrative tasks, such as designing flyers, photocopying, taking minutes of meetings, booking rooms, sending emails, etc. These activities can be very important to facilitate citizens that are highly involved in the production of the core services. Third, budget management is also a complementary task associated with co-production. It includes writing grant proposals, for which citizens usually have little interest, and managing budgets for ongoing projects. However, whereas professionals identify these activities as crucial for the success of the co-production, complementary tasks cause some challenges. Complementary tasks can, for instance, become more important than the provision of the core tasks, for which they are first and foremost paid. Professionals thus run the risk of accomplishing many complementary tasks for which they are overqualified. Another challenge is the need to resist the urge to take up complementary tasks because that is more effective and less time-consuming than co-producing the tasks with users.

The fourth paper by Agger and Tortzen (2022) looks at the challenges met by public servants they call ‘frontline co-producers’, who are in charge of facilitating co-production processes that require collaboration among multiple actors in the Danish municipality of Vordingborg. These public servants work in very different sectors, such as the planning of local harbours or open-school initiatives, with cultural and business actors, and at several levels of the local bureaucracy (top-level, middle-manager, employee). They are not traditional street-level bureaucrats, but instead they have frontline experience, regardless of their position in the local organisation. This volatility of their position comes from the fact that their facilitative role is often informal, deriving from pragmatic situations where they have to develop connective activities which include direct facilitation practices and negotiation of the institutional context with top administrative management. The objective of the study is to see how frontline co-producers perceive and practice co-production and what are the key enabling and inhibiting factors at the managerial level for supporting them. Based on interviews with 18 frontline co-producers, the paper shows first that co-production is often a response to local needs, dissatisfactions or protest and is initiated bottom-up. This explains why the front-line co-producers emphasise the need for flexibility in the institutional environment. For them, a supportive management of co-production allows enough time and resources, promoting this way of doing public services and understanding the context in which co-production evolved. However, whereas Denmark is recognised to be a country particularly open to co-production, this does not mean that it is easily integrated into local public administration. The silo structure of the organisation and internal rivalry sometimes inhibits co-production.

Verhoeven and Tonkens’s (2022) fifth paper deals with the facilitation of civic initiatives, understood as ‘collective, informal, social or political activities by citizens as volunteers that aim to deal pragmatically with public issues in their communities’. From the point of view of frontline workers, enabling civic initiatives requires what Verhoeven and Tonkens call a ‘modest approach’ of public service. This modest approach involves learning not to be in charge and leaving substantial autonomy to citizens. The objective of the paper is to understand what the challenges are that frontline workers meet in implementing this modest approach. To answer this question, the authors draw on Albert Dzur’s ideals on democratic professionalism, which are based on the idea that promoting the involvement of citizens in empowering ways requires giving them influence in the professional span of control. Frontline workers do not give up their entire responsibility to citizens but are open to sharing their power and authority with citizens. By doing this, frontline workers contribute to transforming bureaucratic and hierarchic institutions and promoting collaborative projects. Based on documentary research, surveys and interviews with civic initiators (the citizens) and the frontline workers who helped them in underprivileged neighbourhoods of Amsterdam, the paper shows that frontline workers face two main challenges in their facilitation work that relate to the tension between sharing authority while retaining responsibility. The first challenge stemming from this tension is between active support and stepping back to leave the initiative to citizens. There are many triggers for frontline workers to take an active role in supporting civic initiators and in protecting them from bureaucratic backlash. The second challenge is between being present at initiatives and other daily work or private life. Civic initiators demand attention from frontline workers at all kinds of moments during their initiatives, moments which may not fit with administrative tasks, working hours or activities in private life after working hours. The paper shows that facilitation of civic initiatives through a modest approach by frontline workers also requires organisational transformation.

In the final sixth paper, Wieke Blijleven (2022) is interested in the specific experiences of expert civil servants in various forms of interactive governance. Because they are experts in their field and are expected to give policy recommendations, but also need to act as facilitators and as bureaucrats, these civil servants face tensions that make their work challenging. In order to analyse how expert civil servants deal with tensions, Blijleven ‘shadowed’ five civil servants from five different Dutch municipalities working in the field of planning and also interviewed them. The empirical analysis shows that expert civil servants meet important tensions between their bureaucrat and facilitative roles. For example, being in charge of implementing a public policy is difficult to reconcile with facilitating an open dialogue in a neutral way. Furthermore, civil servants’ involvement in the policy means that they are very much aware of the limited resources available for a project. This creates a clash between citizen preferences and the professional assessment of the situation and can lead citizens to distrust expert civil servants. Another tension comes from the fact that expert civil servants often lose control over their project when they meet with worried citizens to whom they need to justify their ideas. However, the paper shows that their expertise can be useful in resolving these tensions. First, expert civil servants use their expertise to explain the policy rationale and further elucidate their ideas by giving examples, pictures, et cetera. Their expertise also facilitates the discussion they can have with their colleagues to find a way to accommodate the citizens’ demands and thus adapting a project. Their expertise can also lead them to oppose other disciplines or departments. Second, in a public forum, expert civil servants also challenge critical citizens by exposing long-term and community interests of a project. They can also spend time providing answers to citizens before and after public meetings.

Conclusions and directions for future research

Together, the six papers provide a complex portrait of facilitators engaging in interactive governance. Most of them work in local public administrations, but as the analyses of McMullin and Bherer show, they can also be hired by third-sector organisations or by private firms to whom public authorities have delegated public service provision or public engagement processes. Facilitation can be a full-time job or part of a core function within a government. In the latter case, the facilitator need not be a street-level bureaucrat. The research of Agger and Tortzen reveals that facilitation can be a formal or informal role for managers as well. The papers from Blijleven and from Verhoeven and Tonkens show that facilitators need to conciliate facilitation with other tasks for which their expert knowledge is important. This requires that facilitators learn to switch between using their core expertise and policy design or -implementation work in which they are in charge of interactive modes of governance and sharing power with citizens. This becomes especially clear in the paper by Verhoeven and Tonkens in which civic initiatives are facilitated through forms of democratic professionalism.

The papers reveal how facilitation creates a specific professional ethos, dedicated to the transfiguration/reformation of local governance and conventional ways of designing and implementing policy. Many facilitators see themselves as agents of change, especially inside the organisations that hire them. Facilitators do not devote all their time to working with citizens. In fact, an important part of their work is to help public authorities to embrace interactive governance and challenge conventional ways of doing things. Bynner, Escobar and Weakley qualify this part of facilitators’ jobs as political and hence call them ‘culture change workers’ or ‘internal activists’.

Whereas the facilitators in the different papers seem to really appreciate their role, they experience important challenges that are similar across countries. We can summarise these challenges in three broad families. First, facilitators deal with important institutional challenges, such as the lack of resources and austerity logics, which undermine what they can do to transform local governance. However, the most important institutional challenge is working with colleagues to tweak governance practices. The silo culture and the scepticism among politicians and civil servants about what citizens can contribute can be frustrating. Institutional challenges also concern the relationship between public authorities and the facilitators of public fora, co-production of services or the support of citizen initiatives. Delegated mandates are often not clear and public authorities can be tempted to intervene in the work of facilitators. Second, facilitators meet several professional challenges which lead them make constant choices about the best way of acting. One professional challenge is managing time: the time they spend on facilitation often competes with other parts of the job, especially for those who facilitate co-production and civic initiatives. Another professional challenge is dealing with supportive activities that are crucial to sustaining citizens (such as photocopying, designing flyers, sending invitations, et cetera) but which are very trivial. However, paradoxically, it is tempting for facilitators to take charge of all these mundane responsibilities rather than co-producing them with citizens. As Verhoeven and Tonkens show, facilitators have to constantly negotiate the balance between leaving the autonomy to civic initiators and taking charge of tasks. Third, facilitators encounter citizen challenges, when citizens are sceptical about interactive governance, wondering if local authorities are ready to really give them space and power. Facilitators often know the constraints of a specific project as well as the slow progress of decision-making processes. However, they want to keep citizens engaged and motivated. To make that happen, facilitators need to be authentic and honest, but cannot reveal all the internal challenges associated with a project.

To address these institutional, professional and citizen challenges, facilitators use their position as insiders or hired hands. As in-between actors, they try to grasp spaces of negotiation. This involves spending a lot of time with colleagues to explain the contributions of citizens, or more generally, promote interactive governance. All this hard work helps them to create more organisational flexibility. The paper by Bherer shows that facilitators spend a lot of time with the public forum sponsors to demystify citizen participation and coach them carefully throughout the process. Externally hired facilitators use their specific position as outsiders to negotiate their role by establishing shared norms or specifying activities they are not ready to undertak.

Overall, the papers show well that facilitation processes should not be seen exclusively as dedicated to creating a public for policy design. On the contrary, facilitation is also integrated in the co-production of public services and in working with civic initiatives. Facilitators are thus ‘muddling through’ policy processes to create space for interactive governance. In subsequent research, it would be interesting to link public managers attitudes towards interactive governance (Migchelbrink and Van de Walle 2022) and the transformative work facilitators are doing in policy processes. Are managers more open to citizen engagement when facilitators inside the organisation or hired as externals try to organise interactive governance?

An original contribution of this special issue is to study facilitation across participatory and deliberative forms of policy-making, processes of co-production and civic initiatives. Usually, these three forms of interactive governance are studied separately, whereas in policy processes they all co-exist and perhaps even co-evolve as public organisations open up to interactive governance. The papers in this special issue show the similarity of the institutional, professional and citizen challenges met by facilitators across these different forms of interactive governance in different organisations and countries. However, for future research, it would be very interesting to empirically compare facilitation in these three forms of interactive governance within the same institutional context. This can provide more systematic insights into how the act of facilitation is different or similar across forms of interactive governance. We can also ask whether public administrations are more open to the facilitation of participatory and deliberative fora, of co-production or of civic initiatives? Combining democratic innovation and policy implementation literature in this special issue reveals that there is in fact a large spectrum of formal and informal facilitation, accomplished by different kinds of public servants and hired external facilitators. To further explore this spectrum, we need more research that builds on these different literatures. However, this requires researchers to engage in more interdisciplinary forms of collaboration. This special issue shows that it can be done.

As the various suggestions for future research and the contributions to this special issue point out, taking an agentic perspective on the daily practices of facilitators allows to open the black box of interactive governance processes. Now that the black box is opened, we need to further inspect it to see what is has to offer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.