United Kingdom
The most widely discussed jurisdiction in the practices of governance dialogue is the United Kingdom. The Labour government has vigorously pursued an agenda of “modernization and democratic renewal” that has included among its central foci the engagement of citizen participation – particularly in the health care sector and at the level of local government. Their use of partnerships has been a particularly salient and debated initiative in this regard. Additionally, regional initiatives in Wales and Northern Ireland have also attracted attention.
A key dimension of the Labour agenda has been an emphasis on partnership and civic renewal. This emphasis has opened up new governance spaces in the UK. These new opportunities though have presented specific challenges. Among these challenges are the preference of officials to have a sector speak with a single voice, risking the loss of other voices; a concern that civil society or community “representatives” are in fact often unrepresentative; cooptation into the policy process, causing some participants to lose their critical distance; and a still largely untheorized understanding of the relationship between representative and participatory democracy, causing many politicians to feel threatened by the process.
In the field of local government, particularly, since coming to power in 1997 the Labour government has implemented a bold agenda of local government reforms. Running throughout this reform agenda has been an imperative for more rigorous practices of governance dialogue. The 1998 white paper, Modern Local Government: In Touch with the People states that central government “wishes to see consultation and participation embedded into the culture of all councils…and undertaken across a wide range of each council’s responsibilities.” The consensus to date is that this governance dialogue project in local government has been only a qualified success. Part of the problem has been the impression of conflicting objectives and imperatives. The more widely cited problem though has been the role of local councilors’ attitudes to governance dialogue. The success of governance dialogue rests upon the attitude that these councilors – as the holders of conventional power – take toward the prospect of providing citizens a clear and legitimate ability to influence the political process. Some have gone as far as to refer to the ingenuity of some local councils in subverting the process. It has been suggested that a process of input accountability may be required to ensure that local councilors live up to the objectives and spirit of the governance dialogue dimensions of local government reform.
Another area of the Labour government’s democratic renewal program that has met with mixed reviews is in the area of health care provision. The role of primary care groups (PCG) and primary care trusts (PCT) has been reinvented as part of the central government’s new partnership-oriented approach to health care service delivery. These partnerships involve the PCG and PCT in cooperation with NHS hospital trusts, local elected authorities, academic and research interests, voluntary organizations and the local community. The partnerships bid for funds targeted to specific problems. The integrity of the partnership is an important part of the assessment process.
However, early research indicates that the on-the-ground operation of these partnerships perpetuates the dominance of managers and professionals in decision-making, at the expense of the local population and patients for whose benefit such participatory exercises had been initially intended. An additional problem is the role of the new public management (NPM) orientation of government officials. The democratizing aspects of governance dialogue, it has been argued, tend to be sacrificed to an NPM perspective that values public participation primarily as an aid to organizational learning. Obstacles to securing effective public participation – including a lack of substantive guidance regarding policy implementation, that produces uncertainly amongst local decision makers as to how best to proceed – is said to be rooted in the fear of local missteps in trying to figure out the conflicting imperatives of NPM priorities and public participatory practices. It is argued in the scholarly literature that the inherent limitations of governance dialogue within the NPM paradigm have prevented the democratic renewal that is considered so central to the Labour Party’s agenda of democratic renewal.
A generally more positive response, though, has greeted the U.K. efforts at regional governance dialogue reform. A case in point is the establishment of Wale’s National Assembly. Inspired by a widespread view that civil society was weaker in Wales than elsewhere in the U.K., the Assembly was designed as a means to strengthen it. The Government of Wales Act of 1998 commits the Assembly to a legally binding partnership with voluntary organizations. Published guidelines outline the means by which the Assembly will facilitate dialogue with “relevant” networks, organizations and groups.
Also, the search for peace in long troubled Northern Ireland too reflects this new emphasis in U.K. political thinking on the importance of governance dialogue. The Northern Ireland Civic Forum was created as part of the Belfast Agreement and established under the Northern Ireland Act of 1998. It brings together representatives of various sectors to act as a consultative forum on social, economic and cultural issues. The success of the Forum has been due to its ability and willingness to continually reconstruct its own boundaries through dialogue outside of and within the Forum.
Northern Ireland has, improbably, emerged as an important case study in the most innovative citizen engaging approaches to participatory planning. In 1999, a draft document for planning reform in the region was subjected to examination by a panel of invited stakeholders. Published in 2000, it was submitted to a further round of public input. This process involved public participation, at various levels, over three years, with an emphasis on “planning through dialogue.” This process, premised on an exhaustive search for consensus across a wide range of stakeholders, is a style of planning that fits well with the contemporary emphasis on partnership, civil society, conflict mediation and democratic renewal, and stands in stark contrast to the expert-invented blueprint process all too familiar in Northern Ireland.
Taken together, this range of initiatives places the United Kingdom at the forefront of reform in the interest of enhanced governance dialogue.
Practices in the UK have been well described recently in:
Marian Barnes et al., “Power, participation and political renewal: Issues from a study of public participation in two English cities,” IDS Bulletin
Vikki Bell, “In pursuit of civic participation: The early experiences of the Northern Ireland Civic Forum, 2000-2002,” Political Studies
Colin Copus, “Re-engaging citizens and councils: The importance of the councilor to enhanced citizen involvement,” Local Government Studies
Howard Davis and Guy Daly, “From community government to communitarian partnership? Approaches to devolution in Birmingham,” Local Government Studies
Lesley Hodgson, “The National Assembly for Wales, civil society and consultation,” Politics
Timothy Milewa et al., “Partnerships, power and the “new” politics of community participation in British health care,” Social Policy & Administration
Michael Murray and John Greer, “Participatory planning as dialogue: The Northern Ireland Regional Strategic Framework and its public examination process,” Policy Studies
Catherine Needham, “Consultation: A cure for local government?” Parliamentary Affairs
Rosemary Rowe and Michael Shepherd, “Public participation in the new NHS: No closer to citizen control?” Social Policy and Administration
Marilyn Taylor et al., “A sea-change or a swamp? New spaces for voluntary sector engagement in governance in the UK,” IDS Bulletin
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