Public participation and inclusion should be the bedrock of public policy interventions

The work within public policy arenas, whether it seeks to address just transition frameworks, climate change and resilience, sanitation, public transport or human settlements, can only be beneficial if the voices of people and communities are not simply heard but also included, writes Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar.

Urbanisation continues to extend its roots and tentacles across our cities and is commonplace in the Global South. At the root of the issues confronting our cities, urban planners and local governments must not simply focus on how we avoid creating enclaves of chaos, degradation, and impoverishment. The exponential growth will take place across hundreds of considerably smaller cities in the Global South, and it's important that our thinking and reflections are rooted in participatory processes. What happens in cities and towns across the Global South will have a profound impact on the planet, our environment, and the way we live. It is therefore critical that we reflect meaningfully on the type of planning, thinking, and interventions that are taking place.

Cities are already confronting this challenge by meaningfully considering their resilience and environmental impact but, in many instances, there are cities confronted by systemic, structural and often insurmountable challenges. As we begin to wrestle with these macro issues, it is important for cities, their planners, and the machinery to meaningfully consider how participation can leverage improved models for implementing planning and solutions. Participation should not be seen as a hurdle to implementation but rather as an essential component that cities, communities, urban planners, policymakers, as well as city officials, must adopt.

Image: Daily Maverick.

At the heart of it, public participation must seek to include the participants, constituents and voices. This ought to be the bedrock of public good and must influence how our cities, towns, and communities function. There continues to be a growing trend that acknowledges the critical need for public participation to be entrenched and strengthened, specifically in public policy framing and subsequently, the implementation thereof. Broad participation and engagement with our conceptual and planning phases will not only ensure that the proposed solutions are appropriate but also that a sense of collaboration, ownership, and agency are fostered. People are not the enemy of progress, but rather, poor planning, participation, and implementation — coupled in some instances with greed, self-interest, and malfeasance — are.

The work within public policy, whether it seeks to address just transition frameworks, climate change and resilience, sanitation, public transport or human settlements, can only be beneficial if the voices of people and communities are not simply heard but also included. The positive impact this will have is refocusing the lens by which policy is developed, how resources are prioritised and allocated, as well as the type of society that we are seeking to build. This cannot be done in a vacuum, and it definitely cannot be done by exclusionary practices where communities are simply the last leg of compliance before the machinery gets to do what it wants to do, without any consideration for the views of the community.

Participatory policy and regulatory development will play a fundamental role in confronting the challenges we face, not only at a city or country level but also, globally. To confront the systemic and structural challenges will not simply be overcome by one intervention, but rather roleplayers within cities and towns must root their thinking in principles of representativity and inclusion. The lack of inclusion is at the heart of why public policy is unable to meet the needs and expectations of communities. Fundamentally, a purposeful and direct shift to ensure inclusion is entrenched will counterbalance this structural barrier to achieve meaningful progress and create uplifting and enabling public policy interventions.

Image: Natural Justice.

Inclusion and participation are needed to counter existing special interest groups that often decide how public policy is shaped and implemented. These special interest groups, within the confines of existing frameworks (not to forget those who use alternative and often unethical means), have sought to influence how policy is developed by motivating why certain interest groups should be factored into policy development and implementation. By leveraging new tools, technology, and the ability to create cycles of participation that continue to engage communities and citizens, we can retrofit how participation is enabled. Special interest groups will always exist — in large part due to corporate agendas, but inclusion, representativity, and participation will act as the structural intervention to not simply counter this, but rather to enhance the public policy offering.

The barriers to participation are often interrelated, but often those barriers are about who has available resources to engage, what the medium of engagement is, as well as whether the participants will add value or be included. Governments across the world have adopted various planning tools as part of their budgeting process, and importantly, the frameworks that enable city planning require participation. The existing structural framework for participation is also entrenched in legislation (statute) and regulation that already exists. The only gap is to ensure that the views of citizens and communities are meaningfully factored in. Participation should not be seen as a once-off or isolated intervention, but as a strategy to enrich the public policy offering and refine the implementation plans.

- Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar