Best Practices

1. Successful public participation requires designing iteratively, in response to specific purposes and contexts.
2. Grassroots participation leads to more relevant identification of impact goals and measurable indicators.
3. Participatory processes are about letting go of preconceptions to learn from the wisdom of community members. This means being prepared to unlearn what has already been learned.
4. It is always a good practice to have a backup plan in place while designing a participatory process. Changes in the context for decision making e.g: a reduced budget for implementing the decisions reached, increased or decreased political support for public participation, or new developments in the policy problem the process is addressing may demand a concurrent change in the scope or timeline for the participation process.
5. While analyzing data, processing some numeric values in itself may not be sufficient to identify problems or desired actions to address them. So having quantitative data only may not capture or reveal all the complexities that may exist surrounding a problem. Having a mix of quantitative and qualitative that gathers people’s views, desires, and priorities can provide much deeper insights into the complexities involved.
6. A participatory process should be designed to scale by default. There can be a case where it might not be completely possible to set or identify the exact purpose from the get-go and may change as the public participation process unfolds. So it is important to iteratively design and redesign the process to accommodate the change in scope or objectives.