Articles

Local e-democracy needs a boost

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by Ian Kearns and Jamie Bend
Local government chronicle - 19 June 2002

Local government is undeniably busy on the e-agenda. However, there is one area, namely e-democracy, and in particular e-participation between elections, where little systematic policy or practice has been developed.

This matters for two reasons. First, because more and more people are spending more and more time online. If opportunities to behave as citizens are not moved online with them then local political processes will increasingly be out of touch. Second, because e-participation can help to engage citizens in consultation exercises, and can be used in the work of scrutiny committees and on issues such as community planning, and can consequently provide new, more convenient and less intimidating ways for citizens to become involved.

To add value, however, e-participation schemes need to be shaped by certain principles. At a minimum, if they are to be seen as legitimate and worthwhile they must involve a commitment to being inclusive of hard to reach groups on the one hand and a clear commitment by authorities to respond to citizen communications received over the internet on the other.

At the moment, despite some examples of good practice, local authorities appear to be falling short when assessed against such criteria. A recent survey, conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research in collaboration with the LGA, for example, found that fewer than 20% of responding authorities had access policies in place for most hard to reach groups. Even fewer authorities, around 17%, made any clear commitment to respond to citizen communications received over the internet.

Given this, there is a clear need for new policy development at three levels. First, local authorities need to review their activity to ensure that certain core principles are informing any e-participation efforts. Upon the basis of such a review more serious experiments with online consultation should be attempted. Second, local government support bodies need to form a community of practitioners and an online resource so that e-democracy experience can be shared and lessons learned right across the local government community. Third and last, central government needs to offer a supportive framework aimed at rewarding leading authorities for their e-democracy efforts while also funding a new series of e-democracy pathfinder projects aimed directly at re-engaging the disengaged. Such measures would fill a current policy gap and would lay the foundation of a democracy genuinely ready for the digital age.

Ian Kearns is Senior Research Fellow in Digital Society at the ippr and Jamie Bend, also at ippr, is a Researcher in Digital Policy.

e-participation in local government is available at www.ippr.org