Participation outsourcing: should we and can we make use of every proposal?
Moderators:
Piotr Choros, The City Hall of Lublin
Anna Petroff-Skiba The City Hall of Warsaw
Anna Wieczorek, The Workshop for Local Dialogue
Time: 2. Day (Friday, June 3.), hrs 10:45-12:15
Format: experience sharing
Description:
The story goes like this: an organization comes to a city council with an offer of organizing a training session, preparation of consultation, or a new or innovative tool that supports participation. How does this end? Unfortunately, in a variety of ways…
Sometimes it goes the other way – an organization does not bother with a city council but carries out the consultation on its own and the council finds out about it in local newspapers.
Does the third sector have the right to run participation processes, even without the official support? Furthermore, does it have enough broad knowledge on how to run them? Does the fact that those organizations come from outside mean that they can reserve the right to adopt a know-it-all approach?
Sometimes when we want to run such a process we need to choose between a NGO and a private business – the question is whether a NGO is always a better choice than a private company. Could participation be outsourced? What conditions must be fulfilled in order for a local government to give up the control over its participation process in favor of an external entity? What are the situations in which running such processes by a company is a better choice than a NGO? How should we choose, supervise, and evaluate competencies of companies and NGOs?
The session is an ample continuation of the last year’s breakfast session 2 FPP. We invite and encourage third sector representatives to think about their role in developing the participation processes under local governments. We also invite local government officials to discuss what elements of the participation processes could be given to external entities, and whether this should be done every time a chance to outsource comes their way. We do hope that the people who are ordered to carry out participation processes know the expectations of those who order (their constituents).