Participatory policymaking

A citizens’ assembly is the showpiece of public participation, but most government decisions never get one. The quieter, larger prize is participatory policymaking: making it normal for the people who’ll be affected by a policy to help shape it, inside the everyday machinery of the civil service. A 2024 UK blueprint, the Citizens’ White Paper by the think tank Demos and the participation charity Involve, tries to make that practical, taking government from why to what to how.

The problem it’s answering

Drawing on conversations with ministers, ex-ministers and senior civil servants, the paper (presented by Demos’s Miriam Levin and Involve’s Sarah Castell) names four chronic faults in how policy gets made:

• The Whitehall bubble — rooms of people who don’t reflect the communities a policy will land on.
• Disempowered policymakers — even very senior civil servants feeling they lack the levers to make change.
• The usual suspects — engagement that keeps reaching the same well-connected stakeholders.
• Political turbulence — churn at the top that makes long-term policy thinking nearly impossible.

Underneath sits a trust deficit: people don’t believe decisions are made in their interest, and hard choices (tax rises, trade-offs with no win-win) can’t be sold to a public that feels done-to rather than done-with.

The four ingredients

Whatever the format, the paper argues every good participatory process needs the same load-bearing parts: independent facilitation, balanced information, enough time, and the right people, recruited and onboarded fairly so they feel able to take part. Two more are the ones central government has historically got wrong:

• The right question — one with real traction, where the public’s input can actually change something.
• The right promise — a credible commitment that someone with the authority to decide will come back and say this is what we did with what you told us, and why. Closing that loop, in a format people can actually engage with rather than a 57-page annex, is what separates participation from participation-washing.

Done well, the payoff is concrete: the Devon Climate Assembly turned a room of mostly anti-wind residents into 89% support for onshore wind once they could shape how it was done and where the benefits went; deliberation on Brexit moved both staunch leavers and staunch remainers toward the middle.

Embedding it in the civil service

The white paper’s nine recommendations are less about set-piece assemblies than about wiring participation into routine government: a standing citizens’ pool (a large, demographically managed panel departments can draw on cheaply), a central hub of participatory-policymaking expertise, citizens’ panels alongside mission boards, training, departmental participation units and senior champions, citizen involvement in post-legislative scrutiny, and independent oversight to set standards.

Two cautions from senior civil servants sharpen the picture. The Department for Education’s permanent secretary argued the field should “kill off the traditional government consultation document” — a costly ritual that attracts only the usual suspects, adds little, and makes people cynical, and instead match the method to the problem (form follows function). And the recurring risk is producer capture: talking to the lawyers, not the court users; the teachers, not the pupils; and to a standing panel that quietly fills up with people unusually keen to talk to government. The fix is to design for the voices the system normally misses, and to push participation down to the right level of government rather than hoovering local concerns up to the centre. The NHS 10-Year Health Plan engagement is the largest live test of these ideas.

This is the everyday-government end of the same project as institutionalising deliberation: making participation, as Demos puts it, “a normal part of public life.”

Sources

• “The Citizen’s White Paper and the Civil Service” — Demos & Involve Collaborative Democracy Network event (Miriam Levin, Sarah Castell, with senior civil servants), 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=eAkcea8rO7E
• Demos & Involve, The Citizens’ White Paper (2024): demos.co.uk