Public consultation is an integral part of democratic government as it goes beyond democratic public representation and it extends in major democratic values, consensus building, collaboration and debate. Historically, public consultation has its roots in the ancient Greek Agora.
Consultation first and foremost involves sharing information. This requires openness and honesty, but also the information to be concise, relevant, accurate and timely. If you bombard your audience with tonnes of information and data then it’s highly unlikely that you'll get a meaningful participation in the consultation process.
Why is consultation important to successful transport planning
In a previous blog post, I presented the most common fallacies that creep in at the transport planning process and affect decision making. I suggested that an effective public and stakeholder consultation is one of the actions that help overcome such logical planning fallacies. There are a number of other reasons why consultation is important to transport planning:
- Tap into the knowledge, skills, experience and insights of stakeholders and the community. Whether it’s expert advice from a certain stakeholder or detailed local experience from a residents group, consultation can provide information that the planners have missed in the first step of their planning. Data gathering and analysis may point to a specific cause of a problem, but locals may know of the unexpected, unconventional reason behind the issue. Environmental issues affecting transport infrastructure planning is a prime example where local knowledge may be extremely useful.
- Improve the chances of successful delivery of planning actions. Quite often in planning transport actions and initiatives, there’s big criticism, opposition and even protests from social groups that are affected. Depending on the nature and the level of reactions and often due to the wider political climate (e.g. pre-election period) these action plans can be partially or in whole cancelled. In such a situation there’s not only a major waste of time and resources but it is also highly likely that the specific transport problem would not be addressed for a number of years until all protests and reactions are forgotten.
- Improve the level of compliance. Whether it is a transport regulation, policy or a transport infrastructure planning, there’s a risk of a low level of compliance or uptake if public consultation is not robust and efficient. The sense of legitimacy and shared ownership that are among the results of proper consultation significantly increases the level of voluntary compliance or usage. Consultation also allows time to make refinements and adjustments to the action plan so compliance and uptake are increased.
Who to include in transport planning consultation
Well the obvious answer - everyone is absolutely wrong. Involving unrelated people or stakeholder organisations in transport planning consultation results in unnecessary work and a lot of noise in the data and information that the transport planner needs to then analyse and reach conclusions. It is very critical that before any consultation procedure occurs, careful consultation planning needs to be undertaken. Of course, consultation planning should be integral part of the first stages of transport planning. Consultation planning cannot start without having defined and clarified purpose, objectives and expected outcomes of the transport planning scope. Next step is the identification of stakeholders and community groups. A good start to identify who needs to be part of the consultation process is by answering three simple questions:
- Who is directly or indirectly affected by the transport problem that is targeted?
- Who is an expert in the field of the particular subject studied?
- Who would be directly or indirectly affected by the actions anticipated at the initial stages of planning?
Of course stakeholder analysis is more complicated and you have terms like Primary, Secondary or Key stakeholders or a categorisation of the type of interests each stakeholder might have on the project (economic, environmental, social etc.). The image above is a stakeholder matrix according to power and interest. Warning: this matrix is not useful or applicable to all purposes and projects so use responsibly.
What is Nonsultation
One of the new terms that have appeared over the last years is the term Nonsultation. The definition of nonsultation is: A deceptive public consultation on decisions that have already been made. As with all neologisms, the term was coined due to the increasing phenomenon of pretentious and phony consultation. Such procedures are usually done in order to overcome regulatory requirements for public consultation and often hide intense political drive and hidden agendas. Another form of nonsultation is misrepresenting the numbers of individuals that participated in the consultation process. Spin doctors have mastered this over the last few years by announcing the sum of the number of members of participating organisations in a way that appears that all these members actually participated. Another popular way to misrepresent the actual numbers is to announce the total number of hits a consultation website gets, instead of the number of individuals (sessions and not page views or even unique page views). Nonsultation is the big enemy of consultation and planning mainly for the following reasons:
- It creates mistrust to genuine consultation attempts, lowering participation rates.
- It results in most cases in terrible transport outcomes as only dubious projects would attempt nonsultation.
- It negatively affects the whole idea of democratic government and puts doubts in everything that comes out of the public sector.
The excuse that is often heard for contacting a nonsultation instead of a proper consultation is the lack of interest for participation on behalf not only of the public but often even from stakeholder representatives that participating in the consultation is part of their job. This phenomenon is indeed true as people’s lives get busier but it should not be an excuse to avoid or misuse consultation.
The role of the transport planning consultant
To overcome this natural tendency to avoid consultation procedures and events, governments and councils should seek the help of transport planning consultants. Unlike communication experts, transport planners have a deep understanding of the transport planning process, the contextual analysis of the transport problems and a fairly good idea of the consequences of recommended or proposed alternative solutions. This is extremely useful in informing, discussing, debating and negotiating during the whole process. Of course there’s a lot transport planners can learn from communication professionals. From the body language and the hand gestures to cultural awareness, there’s a series of issues that a transport planner needs to consider when engaging in consultation.
Furthermore, transport planning consultants have a vested interest in a successful consultation because:
- It affects the final success of their planning work. Every transport professional is judged by and also takes pride of the final outcomes of her work. Starting with the initial phases of planning and stepping into a meaningful engagement, consultation improves the chances of delivering an outcome that helps our communities raise their standard of living.
- It helps expand their professional network. Stakeholder representatives, elected officials, association executives and in general interesting and attractive people are added to the personal and professional network of transport planners.
- It provides useful leads to the next piece of business. It allows them to demonstrate their skills, understand the needs of and build trust with other potential clients.
Advocacy planning
One method of planning that has a huge potential of overcoming the barriers to participation is advocacy planning. This idea is not new as it first appeared in the 60s and it basically involves employing professional planners to act as advocates for certain interest groups in the planning consultation process. While it is not a particularly popular method and not widely used, it is extremely useful in ensuring that the voice of underrepresented groups is heard and their rights respected. In Australia there are a number of examples where this have been used successfully especially when advocate planners were representing Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island communities. The whole concept of advocacy planning is based in the idea that the planner is not solely a value-neutral technician and instead, values are part of every planning process. It also takes into account that a planner should not attempt to represent the “public interest” but rather represent diverse interests, especially minority interests. The main objection to this approach is the cost associated with this. Sometimes it’s already hard enough to convince decision makers about the benefits of planning let alone consultation, so spending money for advocacy planning sounds too extreme. In reality, this is an investment that in the long term benefits the actions of planning.
New ideas and ways for effective transport planning consultation
Traditionally transport planning consultation took the form of “talk to a planner” sessions. A planner or a team of planners and engineers will invite the local community to a planned consultation activity. This was usually done through the local paper or sometimes by mail. The most common venues for such a session was the civic centre or the local library. There the planners would try to inform and explain the intentions and basic aspects of the planning work. During the first period that this approach was followed, there were some fairly good results. This was something new for the local communities and a lot of people initially embraced these consultation sessions and participated. Gradually, attendance numbers went down and soon planning practitioners realised that they wanted new ideas and approaches to consultation. During the last two decades some new ways emerged that had better results:
- Gamification: The concept of applying game mechanics and design elements in order to motivate and engage people was something that was used in a number of other fields and finally made its way to the consultation process. The success of the gamification approach is mainly due to the natural human tendency for achievement, mastery, competition and playfulness. Public Space Trading Cards is such an example where a well-known game was modified and used in Barcelona to inform residents about urban space issue and collect their opinions through the game cards.
- Engaging the family: One of the problems that the first attempt to public consultation faced was the reluctance of people that were young parents to participate due to family commitments. A usual response to consultation invitation was: “I can’t attend because I don’t have anyone/anywhere to leave my children”. The response to that was: “Well, bring the kids along”. But of course if the kids had no activities to do during the time their parents participated in the consultation, they would get bored and effectively wouldn’t allow their parents to have a meaningful participation. The answer to this problem was for the consultation team to offer some children activities on the side. The better these activities were organised the more successful the outcome was as in many cases these activities acted as an attraction to the families.
- Online Consultation: This approach became very popular over the last decade. Initially it took the form of bulletin boards, discussion boards and even mailing lists and soon it evolved to more suitable forms such as purpose-made websites and even real time online chats. And of course lately developing consultation apps for smart phones is the most trendy thing for a planning authority to have. This whole online consultation concept quickly proved quite popular and especially academics realised the potential this had and started discussing issues and terms such as e-government or e-democracy where decisions for even the smallest issues could be made through online consultation and voting.
What the future looks like
All the previous listed new ideas are becoming old increasingly quickly. People are getting bored and tired of the same ideas and the plethora of online and offline consultation sessions make things even worse. We are already experiencing growing competition among planners on who would design and deliver the most innovative consultation process that would attract the largest crowd and get the best outcomes. It is not uncommon to have a combination of all previous elements such as online gamification types of consultation. Without claiming to be a prophet, it’s highly likely that in the near future we would see more of:
Interactive presentation of data with the use of visualisations. Up until now the emphasis on innovation in consultation was around getting the participants responses. Soon it will be on the first stage of the consultation process. Informing the stakeholders and presenting the information in a way that suits best not just the majority but everyone. People would have the choice on how they want to view information and data, which aspects are important to them and which not and of course the choice from a variety of different types of visualisations that help them best to understand all that.
Follow up information. This is an area that has a huge potential to increase participation and effectiveness of consultation attempts. Most people feel that it’s meaningless to participate and share their opinion on a transport planning issue when they don’t learn at the end how their opinion shaped planning and what the end result of all this work was. This is particular important for transport planning as not every planning project ends up materialising.
Leaderboards – Consultation Olympics. This is a more bold prediction. Whenever scoreboards or leaderboards were used in transport as for example in active travel schemes they were a big success. Reward and recognition programs are bound to be part of the consultation process. Local or State Governments might start to reward citizens participating in consultation by recognising their efforts and even rewarding them in a way or another. Soon competition will spread and then we may even have a Guinness World Record about the most consultations participated. And who knows maybe one day besides Maths Olympics we may have Consultation Olympics…
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