If you’ve taken the IAP2 Foundations course from us, you’ve heard us say (until you’re maybe tired of hearing us say it) that effective, authentic public participation is about making better, sustainable, powerful decisions. Public involvement isn’t just a nice, feel-good thing to do to placate the unruly masses; it’s ...
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Public participation is grounded in the premise that people who are affected by a decision have a right to have something to say about that decision. I’ve generally presumed that we, in America, shared a fundamental belief that the public’s interest is the foundation of a functioning democracy. And that ...
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Most of what’s written and discussed about public participation these days emphasizes online engagement and that’s understandable. It’s still new enough, organizations are able to reach an exponentially larger audience, and users’ comfort level and convenience continues to grow. But the rules aren’t really any different than they’ve always been; ...
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Sitting around knitting toaster covers the other night, I was thinking about what Fiona Hill and Newsweek magazine both are calling America’s Cold Civil War. The overall lack of empathy on display is beyond anything we’ve seen. It’s more than apparent that those of us who see other people as ...
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We’ve said this before but it bears repeating: many of the pieces that we include in this newsletter are written from and for the perspective of profit making businesses. Companies usually need to worry about their credibility, profitability and competitive advantage. Government? Not so much. But given the continuing decline ...
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By most credible measurements, government continues its downward spiral as the least trusted of institutions by most people. But public servants might take heart in the fact that media (news) isn’t far behind in its loss of credibility. The partisan divide – meaning who on the political spectrum does or ...
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I know I talk too much. We all talk too much. We’re in a period of time where everybody has an electronic bullhorn in their hands all the time. Everybody’s talking and damn few people are actually listening. So, we talk about active listening here quite a bit; a necessary ...
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In the 1950s, thousands of people died annually and tens of thousands were paralyzed by polio. People celebrated and embraced the science that developed the vaccine that quickly eradicated that disease in the U.S. But COVID-19 has produced an entirely different public reaction and health policy experts are wrestling with ...
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The pushback usually heard about public participation tends to focus on how long it takes, and that criticism is often justified. Doing a lot of work under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) over the years, we’ve seen project studies migrate from months-long affairs to years-long marathons with budgets and ...
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The pushback usually heard about public participation tends to focus on how long it takes, and that criticism is often justified. Doing a lot of work under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) over the years, we’ve seen project studies migrate from months-long affairs to years-long marathons with budgets and ...
read more →
