Terms of Engagement: councils and their communities

Failures of local governance – the case of Canterbury

Christchurch City and Canterbury Region have suffered not just blows of nature.  They have also been suffering ruptures of governance. 

Recent protests against the Christchurch City Council, the appointment of a “minder” to oversee its activities, the establishments of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority by government to take over reconstruction of the city, and before that replacement of elected regional councillors by government-appointed commissioners all raise questions over the effectiveness of democratic governance.  

In the case of the city, the problem has been a seeming inability to respond effectively to the difficult but urgent issues of recovery and rebuilding after the earthquakes.  In the case of the region, the problem lay in an apparent inability to resolve contentious water resource management issues. 

Bigger as better: restructuring Auckland

An assumption of inadequate governance was also the cornerstone of the inquiry by a Royal Commission into how Auckland might better play a role as the economic driver of the nation.  The assumption was made that amalgamation - a structural response - would deliver governance and management improvements.

The  hoped-for administrative or technical efficiency gains pale against the prospect of better – or worse – decisions as a result of collapsing eight councils into one.  How much money might be saved on computer systems, for example, or consolidating staff is largely irrelevant if the quality of decisions about where, why and how public resources are allocated does not improve.

And it’s the quality of the big decisions that lies at the heart of good governance.  This underpins the significance of Auckland's proposed spatial plan (and why I am so worried about it).

Governance and democracy

Governance refers to the capacity to make decisions on behalf of an organisation.   The Oxford English Dictionary gets to the nub: governance is “ruling with authority”.  In democratic institutions that authority is conferred on their representatives by the citizens.   

Things go wrong when the governors forget that they are there to make decisions in the interests of the entire polity (or company, NGO, or agency in the case of corporate governance).  They are not there to push a particular viewpoint on the assumption that they know best because they got the most votes. 

That’s especially so in local government where multiple candidates and low voter turnout mean people frequently get elected by small numbers.  Despite the undue influence of minorities on electoral results, the mandate to govern locally still reflects a responsibility to act beyond the interests of any particular group. 

The alternatives – (1) governing by decree

Contrast this with dictatorships or monarchies, where authority to govern lies in military and subversive powers or arcane traditions, with governance typically benefiting only narrowly defined groups and unconstrained by popular accountabiity.

If elected politicians do privilege particular interest groups the quality of decisions is undermined (by a failure to reflect on all the options) along with the legitimacy of their authority.  (There may, of course, be a place in a constitution for regard to be had to the claims of particular groups.  In New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi plays this role for Maori).

The alternatives – (2) governing by expertise

Good decision-making may be informed by the deliberations of experts.  But allowing technicians to prevail across decision-making is also the way of autocracy, dictatorship by another name.  The cult of the expert ultimately limits individual freedoms.  This appears to be a path that Italy and Greece have adopted after years of apparently deficient democratic governance, but it is a response to crisis, and unlikely to endure. 

In the long run playing to technical expertise to legitimate decisions contrary to community preferences limits democracy.  And it won't lead to good outcomes when implementation encounters community resistance.

The importance of transparency

Communities are hardly homogeneous.  Diversity and division, competition and complexity are attributes of society underplayed in both text books and rule books.  Resource allocation decisions almost invariably favour some groups over others.  That's why transparency is critical to good governance.  Understanding why decisions are made is a big step on the path to accepting their consequences.

People have the right to know the grounds on which decisions likely to affect claims on and access to public resources are made.  More than that they have the right to (seek to) influence them.  That’s where the terms of engagement between governors and governed come into play. 

Beyond the ballot box

There has been plenty written about how councils might engage with their communities.  I want to promote three principles here:

(1)    Engagement can take many forms, each with advantages and disadvantages.  Good engagement will draw across the full range.  Beyond the ballot box it is important not to be captured by any particular programme of consultation.  Politicians can engage with constituents informally and formally on a daily basis and in a number of ways.  Surveys and submissions, protests and petitions all play their part. 

(2)    Smaller structures are likely to be more open to engagement than large structures.  Fewer tiers of management mean that messages about delivery and performance, the feedback needed to inform decisions, have a better chance of getting onto the political agenda.  And smaller councils lift the presence and accessibility of decision-makers generally, keeping the channels open and boosting accountability.

(3)    Decentralised structures are likely to enhance engagement because they tap directly into the diversity of the community. 

Moderation by management

Information from the community is varied in content and credibility, especially in the age of the internet but, allowing for the occasional “idiot factor”, it cannot be taken lightly.  This is where council management has a role to play.  Too much or conflicting information just becomes noise, making it easy for politicians to shut it out and leading to decisions based on partial information at best and preconceived views at worst.  Or else they end up caught up in conflicting information currents, and go nowhere.

Management may moderate (not mediate) the flow of information to the governors.  So managers also need to be close to the community (another argument for moderation in the size of councils).  Their role is not to shape the information councillors receive, but to relate it to the issues at hand and, where necessary, to the interests of the wider community.

Community rules

There is clearly more to making the big decisions than simply listening to the community.  There are financial, managerial, and institutional limits on what councils can do.  And the views of experts about what’s possible and what’s feasible do need to be considered.  But management constraints and expert opinion are just two of the three legs of the decision-making stool.  Community engagement is the third. 

And as councils are beginning to discover, councils that become remote from their communities are on a hiding to nowhere.   Engagement is not just about going through the motions of listening.  If citizens are not heard even apparently logical decisions will come undone and, eventually, councils will come undone with them.

Desperately Seeking Submissions

The clock is running

Auckland Council issued a discussion document yesterday seeking public input into the Auckland Plan.  It sets out “ideas and initial proposals” and a series of questions.  It asks for responses by the end of May.  There will also be consultation after the plan is drafted in June. 

I’m not going to say anything about the merits of the ideas in the Document – but you might care to look at the New Zealand Herald’s initial take on it here. But I do have some thoughts on the nature of engagement with the people for whom the plan is being prepared.  Seeking submissions in response to a discussion document follows a familiar but not especially encouraging path.

Getting the public to endorse our plans

Growth management strategies are intended to promote the quality of life.  They are justified on the grounds of enhancing liveablity and strengthening communities.  Such high-sounding outcomes sit among other laudable objectives: reducing vehicle emissions and fuel consumption, improving housing affordability, increasing opportunities for walking and cycling, promoting public health, improving urban efficiency, and protecting agricultural land.

It’s hard to disagree with such outcomes.  It must be comforting for the public to read that they are all there for the taking if people will embrace policies aimed at increasing urban densities.

After all, what citizens would endorse a plan that included among its outcomes higher costs for overloaded infrastructure?  Or a lower quality of life, increased congestion, and concentrated pollution?  Or reduced mobility and congestion making it harder to get to work; or urban form that increases the prevalence of heart attacks or diabetes?

In other words, the authors of discussion documents almost inevitably contain the debate and shape its outcomes with the options and questions they present.  So when the document indicates that, say, Option B – usually the compact one –will deliver the goodies, why not just tick the box and be done with it?

The Preference Paradox

But then, why don’t all those people who ticked it go and live in smaller dwellings, closer together, and walk or catch the bus to the shops, the movies, or work if that’s what Option B is all about?  Unfortunately, while the majority might say “Yes, that’s how it should be done” only a minority translate that into their personal behaviour.

Of course, that’s a bit on an over-simplification.  Whether the favoured growth management tools of the last twenty years  – which are usually about making the city more compact – can deliver on the outcomes claimed for them is a moot point, not one I am going to go into here. 

However, there is an interesting paradox at work which frustrates those planning outcomes: what people say is not necessarily reflected in what they do[1].  And as long as people resist the rules that they seemed to support in submissions, then those rules will not even be tested.

NIMBYism is the reality

So what is it that goes wrong?  Well, we shouldn’t be surprised by a tendency to behave in ways which prioritises personal or family benefits over collective community benefits.  We are also familiar with NIMBYism – resistance to change in one’s own backyard, change which we are nevertheless happy to see others wear.  Or perhaps people tick the box in expectation that the better public transport Option B promises means that with more people taking the train they will be able to drive to work quicker.

Why don’t planners take the reality of apparently contradictory behaviours into account when they write plans or draft options?  Or why not plan for real behaviour?  Or find ways to encourage the adoption of more “socially responsible” behaviour?  Pricing comes to mind as an option, along with education. 

(To be fair, planners and policy makers do promote education as one of the tools in the toolbox, but usually adopted somewhat half-heartedly and almost always after regulation).

Are planners disengaged?

The answer may be that planners are just not very good at identifying with the community.  Planning is intrinsically patronising.  As planners, we favour prescription based on principles that are no more than abstractions or feel-good statements in the minds of the people we address them to. 

Engaging with the public in planning is frequently too structured and calculated to offer true insight into how communities work, their spontaneity, emotionalism, irrationality, inconsistency, diversity.  This shows in discussion documents which encapsulate and simplify planners’ views of how the world should work.  That’s not surprising; by definition planners premeditate, calculate, extrapolate, and prescribe.  We seek generalisations to make sense of disorder.  We dismiss the outliers and focus on the averages.  We try to reduce the chaos and dismiss the exceptions. 

That’s not to knock what planners try to do.  It is important to see and respond to patterns, distill movements , and paint the big picture.  But let’s not be surprised when the formulaic plans, the orderly maps, and the rational rules that we impose on our disorderly society don’t produce the results we hoped for.  When we get down to implementing our plans, we better have listened very carefully to what people are saying and not just to how they react to what we say.

Just occasionally we may have to think like the communities we work for; decide when to accept apparent disorder and when some bottom lines are needed; when can we allow for individualism and diversity and when collective needs (including environmental needs) should prevail.

Seeking submissions: the end point of engaging the community

This is all a long-winded way of saying that seeking submissions on options is a highly constrained if not distorted way of engaging with the community on development matters.  It will not reveal people’s preferences.  It is no basis for understanding behaviour.  And it will not tell us how people, households, and businesses will respond to our plans.

Submission-based engagement constrains dialogue, limits public input, and stifles creativity.  It plays to the articulate, active, and informed.  Responses are self-selecting, often self-serving, and unrepresentative. 

At the very best, submissions can be used to check that our draft plans reflect what the community has already said it wants or could live with.  But first those questions have to be asked.  People need to be listened to before they are quizzed.  And seeking open-ended information from communities requires entirely different methods of engagement from submission-seeking if planners (and the politicians who employ them) are going to win the trust and occasionally the compliance of the communities they serve.  

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[1]               Of course, that goes for the planners and policy-makers, too, many of whom live on or beyond the city edge (or enjoy coastal second homes) while prescribing intensification for the average citizen.