Battling Indifference: Creating Meaningful Engagement Through Accountability
Creating incentives which orient those with authority to achieve a community’s goals, not just their own. Part 6 in our series on Engagement and Accountability.
Do you ever get the feeling that those in charge of resources or a major change to a public or shared space don’t really care much about what the end-user wants, even if they are asking what people want as part of a formal engagement process? You’re not imagining things, and you are not alone: you’ve found yourself caught in the trap of someone’s disregard.
How, and why, are these decision-makers finding themselves in positions to make important changes to places when they largely disregard those who use them the most?
Abstract Goals from Absentee Authority
The further the source of authority is from a given place or action, the more likely an agent of this authority will have goals that differ from the needs of those “on the ground”. The further one is from the real action, the more they are incentivized to meet the needs of their bosses, peers, or other agents first, and the more likely they are to be relatively detached from the day-to-day life of the place in question.
The metaphorical (but often physical) distance removes their “soul in the game,” leading to authority not having relationships in the place, and therefore eliminating their ability to discern the best goals to orient towards. Without real connections to the people or ecology of a place, goals become perverted, becoming myopically inward-looking, or focused on an even more absent constituent.
Too often, those who are most present in a place - the visitors, nearby residents, small businesses, employees of tenant businesses, and even the maintenance team - have little, if any, meaningful authority over anything but minute changes within a shared space.
Continually orienting goals away from the needs of those most present creates the conditions for place-decline, no matter how well-intentioned or skilled the people in those distant offices are.
Examples of this might include:
A public employee and their consultants prioritizing timely project approval and completion over attunement to user needs;
An out-of-town property owner who is maximizing short term profit before selling a building, and can only act through 3rd party agents (property managers) even if they want to try to serve end-user;
Subordinates of higher-up holders of authority being oriented far more to the needs of their bosses and fellow employees and agents than the people in the places they formally charged with serving.
When asked, many of these folks would say they do care about those most impacted by a place project; but their actions, incentives, and the systems they’re working within, lead them to a have little or no actual accountability to communities impacted.
From Top-Down to Bottom-Up
Systems that are accountable from the ground-up rather than top-down are the remedy to trap of disregard.
Within current structures, the remedy to “disregard” is to create incentives which orient those with authority to achieve a community’s goals past the ribbon-cutting moment.
As we’ve covered previously in this series, this often requires lengthening the timeline for resource allocation to allow the space to adapt past the typical project “completion date”. Community members and invested practitioners can deploy the following methods to engender greater accountability from people with more formal power:
1. Better data | (lowest impact)
Enhance data collection by working towards generating the fullest picture of what is happening throughout different hours, days, seasons, and participant types with sufficient sample sizes.
2. Continual Use of Tests & Pilots | (medium impact)
Create even more value by utilizing real-time tests and pilots. These provide far more robust information on the impact of a potential change. Strong positive or negative experiences provide hard-to-ignore evidence to pursue - or not pursue- a given decision.
3. Reconnecting Maintenance and Design | (highest impact)
Perhaps the greatest way to ensure accountability in placemaking projects is to ground authority with those who have the responsibility for the ongoing care of places. Unless those with authority actually are frequently in the place in question, how else can they expect to know what to do and how their changes are actually playing out?