A Random Man on Planet Earth: Public Participation

Monday, January 12, 2009

Public Participation - Eeyores and Tiggers

Here is some of the interview between Caron Chess and Joe Cone (from Episode 3: Caron Chess from Communicating Climate Change). Caron Chess suggests two different types of government bureaucrat when it comes to public participation:

(i) the Eeyores who said that they didn't have the resources to do public participation; and

(ii) the Tiggers who also said that they lacked resources but felt that their bosses were supportive and that they could do a lot in terms of public participation.
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Caron: Well, we looked at one agency and we looked at people who were doing public participation in various forms in the agency; and that doesn't mean that they were people who were only doing public participation. It meant very often that these were people who were practitioners who dealt with the public on ... in some form or another. Essentially what we found -- and this is in one agency -- two kinds of practitioners.

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One that we dubbed Eeyores; those people who tended to say, gee, there's no support for me doing communication. It's difficult for me to learn about communication. I don't have the resources for communication. My managers don't support my doing public participation and there's no easy way for me to continue this. And it was kind of a ... a ... not only woe is me, but woe is the agency.

And then there were the people we called Tiggers, who, uh, by contrast, uh, were equally committed to public participation, but tended to feel like their managers were more supportive. That they might not have enough resources, but somehow they could do a lot of what they wanted despite that. That they were learning from experience, that there were opportunities to learn. Uh, they were not flip sides of each other, but if you're familiar with Winnie The Pooh, you you know that Eeyore and Tigger were not opposite sides, but it's kind of an approach to the world.

. . . So, that raises questions about, you know, why is this? that there's not a real quick fix. That is, give people training in public participation and we've got this problem knocked. That in fact there needs to be dialogue within the agency between Eeyores and the Tiggers to learn from each other's experience and to see what they see as barriers and ways that they might be able ... able to overcome them.