Policy Webinar: Beyond Town Halls
The webinar attempted to unfold emerging models of citizen engagement, moving beyond traditional town hall meetings and exploring innovative approaches, including co-creation, artistic engagement and other engaging forms of public consultations in the context of urban local governance.
The key outcomes were:
- Active in-person engagement, although time consuming and effort intensive, and requires active participation from citizens and government, is the key to enhancing citizen participation and engagement
- Technology driven platforms and youth led movements are on the rise, however, there is still a digital divide as far as urban poor and women are concerned which needs to be addressed
- Creating safe spaces for civic participation requires: (i) combating information asymmetry: institutional formats need to be created for knowledge dissemination (ii) dedicated resources that need to be set aside by the government as part of each project/scheme that they undertake (iii) collective leadership from both local governments and active citizen leaders
- Integrate participatory research methodologies into government practices to enable communities to actively contribute to local self-governance
To read more about the webinar, refer to the Beyond Town Halls Webinar page.
Overview
The webinar attempted to unfold emerging models of citizen engagement, moving beyond traditional town hall meetings and exploring innovative approaches, including co-creation, artistic engagement and other engaging forms of public consultations in the context of urban local governance.
Key Outcomes
Informational
- Active in-person engagement, although time-consuming and effort-intensive, and requires active participation from citizens and government, is the key to enhancing citizen participation and engagement
- Technology-driven platforms and youth-led movements are on the rise, however, there is still a digital divide as far as urban poor and women are concerned which needs to be addressed
Actionable
Integrate participatory research methodologies into government practices to enable communities to actively contribute to local self-governance
Creating safe spaces for civic participation requires: (i) combating information asymmetry: institutional formats need to be created for knowledge dissemination (ii) dedicated resources that need to be set aside by the government as part of each project/scheme that they undertake (iii) collective leadership from both local governments and active citizen leaders