Why do we need policies to make participation work? Check out what Pori’s Participation Agent does!

In times when even personal sacrifices are much needed to tackle burning societal issues, it seems an important and relevant question how to stimulate and foster participation to have better public policies. As collaboration does not happen by accident and the level of collaboration in the society highly depends on complex socio-economic factors, we need general policies to stimulate and maintain the level of civic engagement. But is it possible at all to urge such a complex process and force out engagement?

At a minimum, active engagement in collaborative policies means that residents are willing to give up their time to contribute to a debate about ways in which their services can be improved. At best people will take charge of the planning and co-creation of services. Yet just asking citizens to give up time and contribute to a debate trends to be difficult, even for a „more advanced” city, like Pori who can draw on a deep culture of community engagement, resources and strategic commitments towards this goal.

1. From democracy to operation

Undoubtedly, Pori (85 000 inh.) is well marked on Finland’s mental map. Back in history, Pori was the home of the first stone theatre, the first sport club and the first pedestrian street in Finland. But most importantly Pori hosts the famous Suomi Arena, a public debate forum held simultaneously with the oldest jazz festival in Europe, Pori Jazz. Suomi Arena is not just a small, local event: last summer 73 000 visitors took part in about 200 events, where citizens can discuss societal issues with all type of decision makers directly!

According to Pori’s new participation policy which was prepared based on Strategy of Pori and the Local Government Act, participation is a “desire and opportunity to decide and influence. Participation is to be seen, heard, appreciated and understood. It prevents exclusion and gives the experience of belonging to the community. Participation should be seen wider than just being involved. It is an active activity: to influence common affairs”.

The whole story started with a kick-off workshop and a masterclass about participation and service design led by a professional brand team and service design agency. Then the municipality defined priorities based on user interviews and analysis of the findings. The operational model designed laid down the ways how citizens get involved in Pori's service development and operations, and the model was also tested in real-life context: 1. the development of Kirjurinluoto area provides a test-base for participatory neighbourhood planning and 2. the design of the new city brand summed up in this excellent movie. Now the process is under implementation at the municipality: the cross-departmental Participation Management Team has been set up consisting of two half-time employees (participation agents) who try to spread participatory approaches in all departments and in all personnel work through capacity building and service design.

Pori’s Participatory Policy is based the following principles:

1. Co-ordination: inclusion is an automatic part of the city's internal processes - the way of thinking and acting.

2. Transparency: what is the pursuit of aspiration, the purpose and the direction to go, is open and clear to all.

3. Responsibility: involvement is a conscious transfer of planning and decision-making powers to service users.

4. Development: involvement is the courage to abandon full control: the opportunity for genuinely interesting, new things requires a culture of failure and no fear of risks.

5. Operational opportunities: inclusion is agile and the means of inclusion change with the needs of local people in the right direction.

Prerequisites for successful participation:

1. Communication: timely, plain and multichannel communication in channels suitable for activating different target groups.

2. Expanding expertise: increasing the internal competence of a city organization, support and trust from management, a genuine experimental culture.

3. Resources: appropriate funding and human resources to enable budget participation, planning, inclusive development of services and digital interaction.

2. Participation must be a truly cross-cutting issue in Pori

Pori’s Seven Step Participation Model intends to:

1. respond to the relevant needs of the residents and their current phenomena;

2. target participation to real users;

3. clarify the goals of inclusion and communicate them openly;

4. choose the right inclusion method;

5. document, but avoid unnecessary bureaucracy;

6. not to worry about failure and to try boldly;

7. experiment, learn, and share experiences.

According to Elli-Mari Sulonen, Communications Designer and Participation Agent, the tools of participation are always selected according to the given development project and the participants. They intend to spread several participatory tools and techniques at all departments and various councils (e.g. elderly, youth, disability): having more understandable communication, tools to be able to listen to citizens, designing citizens’ forums and electronic participation channels, promotion of direct participation and participatory democracy, initiating new city-level volunteer programs and championships.

Pori’s participatory policy also aims to make the municipal operation more responsive to local needs and thus to create better public policies in general. And that’s the key! In order to do so, Participation Agents and involved experts train not only the staff, but politicians too. Among others, they created a toolbox (including feedback and initiatives, suggestions, voting, online decision making, forums and councils, open data, digital inclusion policies, communication channels), they promote a new volunteering model and platform thinking (solving problems with users through service innovations), and experiment with participating budgeting.

The ultimate goal of the new participatory policy is to create a new generation city, the Intelligent Pori 3.0 let’s say, a user-centred intelligent city that is based on participation and co-production.

3. Why is it important for the Come in! network?

In Pori there is a direct connection between the new participatory policy and the community-driven festival, the good practice to be organised within the Come in! network, since Saampola neighbourhood - where the good practice will be partly adapted - is a part of the “listening program” of the city within the participatory policy.

But to understand why Pori’s participatory policy is very important to all partners, we must have a look on social innovation policies. Municipalities have direct roles within transferring the good practice (organising the festival), i.e. helping with sponsors and press, and they have to nurture the community-driven event. Participating municipalities reusing this community-led initiative, being able to facilitate bottom-up developments without too much control, acting as matchmakers and harvesting and accelerating the results of such a community festival by crossing silos, can generate significant policy impact or spill-overs on the long run.

Increased use of placemaking and co-creation techniques in generally speaking should be a visible impact at each partner city. How participatory techniques can be used in other policies? How to make it visible? At the end of the project, participating municipalities should organise joint workshop with related departments and institutions to harvest the community impact generated by the festival. For this, Pori’s participatory policy can be a useful example. There are many policy fields that can be potentially stimulated (e.g. heritage education, public spaces, social innovation, transforming existing events to more community-driven), but there are three major fields identified within the Come in! network:

1. Exploration and new dialogue about dissonant (brutal) heritage (Varaždin, Forlì, Újbuda)

2. Urban green spaces as our heritage (Pori, Újbuda, Varaždin and Targówek)

3. Participatory approaches, co-creation and placemaking within urban renewal (Plasencia, Targówek, Gheorgheni)

This last one is essential to meet today’s public policy challenges.

4. Crossing silos within the municipality for better urban policies

To meet today’s public policy challenges – continued fiscal pressures, rising public expectations, more complex public policy issues – there is a crucial need to increase the level of innovation in the public sector if they are to meet the challenges of the 21st century. There are lots of discussions on how to create new relationship with citizens and nurture their ideas, but there is far less conversation how municipal structures should be changed to be able to better respond to innovation and very few cities have systematic approach to sharing knowledge and stimulating internal innovation. OECD recommends four calls to action for each governments with regards to the above theme:

1. Focus on people – Governments must invest in the capacity and capabilities of civil servants as the catalysts of innovation. This includes building the culture, incentives and norms to facilitate new ways of working.
2. Put knowledge to use – Governments must facilitate the free flow of information, data and knowledge across the public sector and use it to respond creatively to new challenges and opportunities.
3. Working together – Governments must advance new organisational structures and leverage partnerships to enhance approaches and tools, share risk and harness available information and resources for innovation.
4. Rethink the rules – Government must ensure that internal rules and processes are balanced in their capacity to mitigate risks while protecting resources and enabling innovation.

In order to achieve this, a well-organised community festival reflecting on urban issues, built environment and their liveability can stimulate the below issues for example, leading to service innovation:

• The need to build capacities of the front line staff and create tools to enable design methodologies and techniques.
• Experimenting design thinking as a result of placemaking: redesign services from the perspective of the customer. Residents are at once public service users and taxpayers who finance these services. As taxpayers, residents want cheaper local government services; and as service users, residents want their services to be better and quicker. Design-led thinking and a user centred approach are integral to transforming our public services into successful, sustainable services.
• Using citizens as experts: creating a platform for private citizens with useful skills to support to develop courses for government employees, civil society groups and communities (see the report on Sao Paulo: Agents of Open Government).
• Stimulating innovation within the municipality (e.g. Aarhus Innovation Centre)
• Creating plans to cross silos by e.g. working groups (e.g. Gdansk’ Local Participatory Public Policy Creation and Implementation).

Ferenc Szigeti-Böröcz