Engaging citizens and users

Governance International shows organisations how to re-design participation approaches to achieve better engagement, service quality improvements and efficiency savings through public service co-production with users and communities.

Click here to learn more with the Governance International co-production tree.

In times of scarce budgets, engagement, consultation and involvement can no longer be organised just as ‘extras’, with unclear results. They need to be integrated into mainstream services so that they have a direct impact on the quality and cost of public services. In particular, the public sector needs to harness the assets and expertise of users and communities more effectively to produce better outcomes.

Governance International has an international track record, built up over nine years, in user and community engagement:

• Developing the GovInt Co-Production Toolkit with service professionals and users in different services to provide public service providers with a roadmap on how to get started and roll out co-production, since 2009

• Delivering training courses and in-house training on co-design, co-commissioning and  co-delivery of public services with users and communities in the UK, Germany, Spain and Central and Eastern European countries, since 2006 

• Developing the Governance Audit as a multi-stakeholder co-assessment and community engagement tool in several UK and European local councils, including Calderdale (UK), Barcelona, Ulm (Germany) and Baar (Switzerland), since 2002

• Leading the first European citizen survey on co-production of public services and preparing a report for the French EU Presidency, presented in a keynote speech to 1200 public administrators at the EU Quality Management Conference in Paris, October 2008
• a summary of this research was published in “Public”, Guardian, Dec 2008, 
• key findings of the survey are quoted in a recent discussion paper on co-production by the Cabinet Office

• Consultancy for the National Audit Office for its recent report on “Promoting Participation with the Historic Environment”, July 2009

• Consultancy for the Cabinet Office on international best practice in “Citizens’ and Users’ Entitlements in Public Services”, June 2009