Engaging Citizens in Policy Innovation: Benefiting public policy from the design inputs of citizens and stakeholders as ‘experts’

Abstract

In this chapter I will clarify various ways of engaging with citizens and involving them in the processes of policy-making. I would also like to encourage us, as policy actors, to be more conscious about using citizen engagement to reorient what we do to better meet citizens' expectations as well as capture the benefits from inputs of other important actors and stakeholders. The perspective I bring to this contribution is to ask: how can we really engage citizens to drive innovation in policies and services, and help us to produce better outcomes. As an important backdrop to our discussion, we need to be aware of the financial crisis affecting governments around the globe. It's a 'perfect storm' involving a toxic mix of financial pressures that are driven by multiple winds of change, with the impacts stemming from demographic change, and from the rising cost of new technologies. Governments are still expected to solve tough social issues and deliver services in this context, while meeting the rising expectations of citizens over the quality of delivery. So, for instance, with demographic changes and ageing we are seeing particular sectors, like the healthcare sector and the social services sector, undergoing massive pressures and transformations across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Improving meals at the Hvidovre hospital Let me begin by highlighting what citizen-centric innovation can really mean with an example from the Danish health sector, where a hospital produced significant innovations to the patient experience. At the Hvidovre hospital-a major hospital serving the Copenhagen region-the hospital kitchen serves both the hospital staff and the patients. A few years back, the head chef, Michael Allerup, was irritated because he could see that much of the food his kitchen was producing ended up in waste containers, situated right outside the kitchen window. Patients were not eating what he was producing, there was massive waste and, as a professional chef, this left him dissatisfied.