Keep off the Grass: Stakeholder Consultation in Parks Services

1
Keep off the Grass Stakeholder Consultation in
Parks Services Sidney Sullivan, Martha Mador,
Kent Springdal, Jonathan Gander
Context and aims The Local Government Act 1999
(hereafter LGA) established a framework for
planning, delivery and continuous improvement of
local authority services to achieve best value.
This marked a retreat from the Compulsory
Competitive Tendering favoured by the preceding
government. The overriding purpose of best value
is to establish a culture of good management
through a combination of economy, efficiency and
effectiveness (LGA). The LGA set a new
requirement for the consultation and involvement
of stakeholders in decision making. The LGA
privileged stakeholder consultation as a duty of
local authorities, requiring the results of
consultation to influence strategic policy. This
is the first time that stakeholder consultation
had been enacted as a duty directed by
legislation and subsequently audited, with the
outcomes of the audit then being published to
allow stakeholders to assess the extent of
compliance. There were no provisions or redress
for stakeholders within the LGA in the event that
their preferences are ignored. In the UK, local
authorities manage or have responsibility for
parks and green spaces. There are an estimated
27,000 parks in the United Kingdom (Cabe Space
2010), covering 140,000 hectares, or about 14 of
the developed land mass of England. Estimated
annual spend on these services is between 655m
(Barber, 2005) and 692m (National Audit Office,
2006). Despite the size of the activity, there
is no accepted or consistently applied method for
collecting data on spend or service provision
(Barber, 2005). Cabe Space (2010) and the
National Audit Office (2006) have commented on
the fragmented nature of managerial
responsibilities for the service, the paucity of
data about the sector, the absence of budgetary
information attributable to individual parks and
the involvement and management of stakeholders.
Freeman (1984), Kaler (2002) and Phillips (2003)
contend that not all stakeholders claims or
requirements can be or should be treated equally
or canvassed. They argue that policy makers must
determine what it is they are consulting about,
the stakeholders that they will consult and the
salience that they will attribute to those
stakeholders views. It is, in their view,
inconceivable that a consensus will emerge a
choice between and weighting of the stakeholders
views will be necessary. The LGA requires all
stakeholders views to be canvassed, but provides
no explanation of how to value the views of the
hard to reach. This study responds to the lack
of information about the sector, examining how in
fact the best value regime was implemented.
Analysis and Discussion Our research shows that
each of the three organisations had a
comprehensive normative consultation policy in
place. These indicated who, how and when
stakeholders should be consulted. However, the
implementation of consultation diverged from the
policies, and varied from organisation to
organisation. Organisation A was the most
comprehensive in implementing its own policies.
It had adopted a commercial consultation tool,
which was however used on only the largest
consultation projects. Organisation C had adopted
consultation software, and employed consultation
specialists to look after this important area.
Some training in consultation was undertaken.
However, the use of the software was sporadic and
the data it generated was not widely shared this
was attributed to lack of expertise. Organisation
B used neither specialist approaches nor
consultation specialists. Nor did they train
their own staff in consultation. A significant
difference between the three was the Head of
Services oversight of implementation. In
organisation A, management prioritised both
implementing the consultation policy and ensuring
that the agreed policy was quality assured by
reports to SMT outlining the process and outcomes
of the consultation. In the remaining two
organisations there was no consistent formal or
informal process of quality control or reporting
of outcomes. Quality and reporting were generally
reliant on the managers conscience and integrity
to implement policy, with no obvious feed-back
loop. Analysis of the cohorts archive data
revealed examples of strategy and policy, single
issues and complex multi layered issues, which
they have consulted about and where policy
changed. In these instances they have succeeded
in resolving simple and sometimes complex matters
of concern to stakeholders. However, policy
arising from consulting with stakeholders is not
commonplace. Stakeholder views that are
unambiguous, uncontroversial, or that do not
significantly challenge the prevailing
professional and social norms are most often
incorporated into policy. In addition,
stakeholder activism effectively silences the
hard to reach. Ultimately, councillor power is
decisive, mitigated by the strength and
positioning of the stakeholders groups. The most
common outcome shown by the empirical data from
the case studies is of a process of short-term
gains and pragmatism.
Implications and Impact There is systematic
inconsistency in implementation across all three
organisations, but particularly in organisations
B C. The inconsistent enactment of the policy
raises questions concerning the validity of their
outcomes. The view of council officers as
non-partisan and disinterested actors is not
supported by the empirical data from the case
studies. They are, according to the interview
data a partisan force and stakeholders in their
own right. This is a key finding and raises
serious issues concerning the consistency of
stakeholder consultation and the reliability and
thoroughness of the outcomes. Central to
stakeholder consultation is the question of the
role, expertise and decision making rights of
politicians, the professional managers and the
stakeholders consulted. The possibility that some
members of stakeholder groups can exercise power
over political representatives by wielding
unelected but significant and unrepresentative
views is an expressed concern in the case study
data. In particular, that the power they have may
be used to oppose democratically agreed council
policies and to skew the results of stakeholder
consultation processes. Exacerbating this issue
is the lack of training in stakeholder
consultation provided by the cohort, especially
organisations B C. A great many of the
interviewees said that they had not been trained
to undertake stakeholder consultation and that
their CPD scheme was not focussed on that
requirement. In this regard, stakeholder
consultation in the cohort organisations has
become a debate about quantities, the number of
people consulted and the circumstances in which
they are consulted. There is an urgent need for
the debate to be extended to include the
qualitative issues surrounding stakeholder
consultation. This includes the issue of the
representativeness of consultees when compared to
the local demographic of the area. Greater
attention is required to ensure that the hard to
reach are included in the dialogue from which
policies are evolved.
Methods When the research was begun, the
knowledge in the area of stakeholder consultation
within parks and green spaces was very limited.
This made rich case studies of a small sample of
organisations an appropriate choice of research
approach. As the overarching question was How
was the requirement to consult implemented?, the
relevant unit of analysis became organisations.
A sample of 3 Local Authorities were selected
for study. Audit Commission reports were used to
inform selection one high, one mid-range, and
one low-performing Local Authorities were chosen.
Several types and sources of data were accessed
organisational information in the public domain,
for instance on websites and Audit Commission
reports policy and procedure documents within
the organisations reports from other third party
organisations, like Greenspace and the Civic
Trust (total 155 documents). Depth interviews
lasting between 45 and 75 minutes each were
conducted in each organisation including
frontline officers, senior managers, and a small
number of politicians and external stakeholders
(15 per organisation, 45 in total). The main
question related to the introduction and
management of stakeholder consultations, and the
main perspective sought was that of the
organisations employees. Data was collected over
several days at the host organizations premises,
in order to accommodate the work programmes and
priorities of those organisations. Interview
transcripts and documentary evidence were encoded
using thematic analysis to produce a rich picture
of how implementation occurred. The analysis was
reviewed after a two week break in order to bring
refreshed eyes to the material. Each case was
written up individually, and a cross-case
analysis was also produced to draw together facts
and themes. Thus the analysis triangulated
between the various sources of information, and
between the cases themselves in order to produce
a more robust analysis.