Accountability to the people has long been an issue governments and civil servants struggle with. Making sure the public are engaged with and consulted on major decisions affecting their lives and livelihoods, while ensuring that important projects aren’t sidetracked or railroaded due to public opposition is a challenge.

“One thing that tends to happen is governments host some events — town or church hall meetings — or put a survey on the back of a local paper,” explained Ian Johnson, an academic at Newcastle University who researches community engagement. “Often, the same sorts of people get involved. You end up getting a narrow view from a narrow slice of a community.” And more often than not, that view is small c-conservative — opposed to anything put forward.

The coronavirus has made what was already a strained relationship worse

It’s an issue that has become even more challenging of late. Community engagement is important, but it’s harder to do as global circumstances shut down economies, divert away resources, and challenge those tasked with delivering change. The public risk being left alone, without support from the people they trust to act in their best interests.

The coronavirus has made what was already a strained relationship worse. “Looking at development projects where it’s important things are communicated, even before Covid-19 there were significant external barriers to that conversation,” says Samer Araabi of Accountability Counsel, a campaign group that aims to make sure governments properly communicate with and are accountable to their people. “It was a rarity at best.”

But the ability to pawn off the need to keep in contact with and consult communities has grown worse because of the coronavirus. Araabi sees it as a convenient excuse to not engage with ordinary people — a way to claim it’s too hard to try, so they won’t bother. As a result, Araabi foresees two separate problems: one a temporal one, tied only to the coronavirus outbreak, and one a deeper-rooted structural issue about how to counteract the general lack of community engagement historically.

“The former, I think there are a number of ways we can try to reach communities that are otherwise hard to reach,” says Araabi. He’s been part of a trial in Haiti with community farmers representing a group of 4,000 people affected by the development of an industrial plant on land they used to farm without their permission. The Kolektif, as the group were called, engaged with an Accountability Counsel to find a way of communicating their worries and alarm that would work for them. In the end, the Kolektif were happy to be called and to answer pre-recorded voicemail messages sent by trusted local leaders, and to asynchronously respond in their own way. Eighty per cent of calls that rang through to the Kolektif were responded to — a huge number.

“What’s needed is an engagement with communities to make sure their voices are heard about decisions that affect them”

“This felt like their opportunity to say something back,” says Araabi. And it’s a way for governments, as they begin to realise the scale and number of the people who perhaps have previously been overlooked as they try to connect with them to warn about the dangers of coronavirus, to try and bridge that connection gap. Araabi is hopeful that out of a terrible global tragedy, a rethinking of the way elected officials and governments interact with the people they’re answerable to may occur.

So too is Johnson, who wishes that the whole issue was reframed. Rather than bringing people together to vote or decide on an issue that has a binary choice, the community should be engaged earlier and asked to help shape ideas or policy. “The best kind of community engagement comes from people talking to each other,” he says, pointing to an example from Porto Allegro in Brazil, which threw a barbecue with children’s entertainment and music for the local community, before then asking them questions about what their budget should be spent on. “The onus should be on people designing community engagement to find ways people can get involved, rather than set up a way to get people involved and if people don’t engage, saying it’s apathy,” says Johnson.

“What’s needed is an engagement with communities to make sure they’re consulted and their voices are heard about decisions that affect them,” agrees Araabi. “It’s so simple it sounds trite, but it’s such a rarity that needs to be said a thousand times over – particularly now where giant international institutions are funnelling billions of dollars of coronavirus funding.”

The alternative isn’t worth considering. “Absent local context about where the money should go and how it can impact local communities,” says Araabi, “there’s a strong possibility not only of failure, but of harm.” — Chris Stokel-Walker

(Picture credit: Death to the stock photo)