Recommendations: Next Steps for Practitioners and Research

A consistent lesson from these case studies is that giving residents real power in policymaking can have real benefits. But when designed poorly, civic engagement models often serve as window dressing for a policymaking process that doesn’t actually incorporate civic feedback.

When considering the dynamics of political power, it’s important that civic engagement models don’t appear as if a city government is just including citizens to cover a capacity, budget, or labor gap. Over time, when civic engagement only appears to consist of residents donating time, labor, or money, without their concerns or opinions being included in policymaking, it can feel exploitative to the cynical constituent, and understandably so.

Fundamentally, civic engagement works best when it feels like a fair partnership between residents and public servants where all parties have some meaningful power. While this can be accomplished through highly dedicated programs like participatory budgeting, giving residents power can happen in smaller, more manageable forms, too, as in York or Murcia.

Across each of these case studies, technology played a large role, if not in the execution of the civic engagement program, at least in the promotions and outreach efforts. When they implemented technology most successfully, however, these case studies blended in-person and online components, as in Flint and London.

This approach has two main benefits: First, a hybrid model adds an important in-person dimension to engagement where people can be seen, heard, and visible to their neighbors—increasingly important in an ever-tech-focused world. By doing so, they can better build social capital and interpersonal relationships.

Second, a hybrid approach helps to alleviate some of the well-documented challenges of overly relying on civic tech tools alone as a remedy for more equitable engagement. A survey by MySociety, a prominent NGO, describes civic tech in richer and more developed countries as having a “clear bias in users towards the group that has often been referred to as ‘male, pale, and stale.’”¹Done poorly, an overreliance on data analysis or civic tech without engagement can end up reinforcing the inherent biases built into new technology like algorithmic decision-making, or facial recognition software.²

Even when using this hybrid approach, however, any government process implementing technology must consider how they will impact traditionally marginalized communities. Next, a low-technology counterbalance will be imperative. For example, the blockwalking models like those incorporated by the Philadelphia Parks Alliance, a local nonprofit focusing on improving public spaces, and the New York City Public Engagement Unit, a branch of the mayor’s office focused on public outreach, emphasizes meeting residents where they are by sending canvassers to knock on doors and tell residents about public meetings or public services available.

By opening up the outreach process, it’s more likely that residents from more diverse demographics know about civic engagement opportunities and have more access to the innovative participation programs that governments have so thoughtfully crafted. Ultimately, “as technology keeps evolving, so, too, should the way we approach democracy.”

A recent Boston Consulting Group study suggests that increasing diversity of leadership teams leads to more and better innovation and improved financial performance.³ Non-homogeneous teams also challenge norms, are more innovative, and can focus more on the facts.⁴ As these case studies demonstrate, all of these benefits are fundamental to successful civic engagement efforts. But more concretely, including diverse leaders in positions of power inside and outside government improves institutions’ ability to understand the concerns of more diverse communities, and thus to create better policy.

In particular, diversifying who serves in local government requires redressing unpaid internships, biased language in job applications, outreach efforts, and reconsidering what kinds of educational and professional backgrounds are prioritized and valued during the hiring process. Another structural approach for encouraging diverse staffing is to implement long-term engagement opportunities such as San Francisco’s Civic Bridge, or learning from other models such as the Presidential Innovation Fellows, Harvard Business School Leadership Fellows, and the AmeriCorps VISTA program.⁵ In particular, Cities of Service has a program that embeds AmeriCorps VISTA members into city halls, most often for one year. The program has seen about half of its participants join city government or a partner organization afterwards.⁶

As the hub for delivering local public services, city halls also offer a unique opportunity for community residents to build stronger relationships with their policymakers based on personal interactions. At a time of dwindling public trust in policy, cities around the world represent the best shot at rebuilding the severed ties between community members and their government. Therefore, thinking creatively about how to leverage this opportunity can help local government become more personal, fun, and effective in addressing twenty-first century challenges.

Several of the examples in this report have already begun planting seeds of a more collaborative future that thinks creatively about the traditional roles of people and their government. But even beyond the reimagined examples discussed here, other cities are incorporating creativity on a smaller scale. In Aarhus, Denmark, for example, the city reimagined phone booths as locations for residents to submit feedback to the local government, merging effectiveness and whimsy.⁷

Ultimately, encouraging this human-based creativity and connection in local government can also help localities have the democratic infrastructure necessary for future challenges—like labor automation and climate change—by tapping into people’s local expertise and energy.

Ultimately, this report offers a starting point for research into the exciting new ideas cities are implementing, but more study is necessary. In particular, it would be helpful to have more research on how the hyper-local variation across budgets, politics, and departments influence the ability to engage residents in decision making, as well as a study on the impact of local-level politics and bureaucracy. Another important area of future research will be to study how cities with especially limited budgets can still apply the ideas discussed in this report, or which small programs offer the most impact with the smallest amount of resources.