LIST OF PANELS

Facilitation is a general term used to indicate an interaction where someone helps someone else or a group of people to accomplish something by assisting them to share knowledge and resources amongst themselves. It includes two kinds of facilitation. The first is more minimalist where facilitation means supporting citizen initiatives by giving a little helping hand. In this kind of arrangement, facilitators support self-organized actions while remaining outside actors in the bottom-up initiatives they contribute to. The second form of facilitation concerns facilitating public engagement processes. Facilitators are public participation professionals who are in charge of the design, implementation and hosting of participatory processes. Facilitation is understood as a top-down action where one set of people invite others into an open-ended forum in order to help them interact. However, the two kinds of facilitation have been rarely compared in order to develop a global approach of facilitation. Furthermore, although there is growing research on the role of facilitation in public policy-making processes in very different fields (theory of organization, local governance, public deliberation, innovation policy, collaboration, etc.), these different fields rarely speak to each other. The objective of this panel is to start a discussion between several academic approaches to better understand the challenges of facilitation. We will look especially at papers regarding 1) the job of facilitation and its professionalization process (the art and craft of facilitation); 2) the methods and practical challenges to include citizens; 3) the ethical concerns that guide facilitation. Understanding facilitation is important because it is increasingly being used by governments to involve citizens in public decision-making. The first type of facilitation raises the question of how direct citizen action interacts with state institutions because citizens accomplish public projects instead of the state. In the second type of facilitation, the main issue is how facilitators negotiate fair and open participatory arrangements with their sponsors.

In the last decade, several methods facilitating citizen engagement in public-policy making have flourished. Facilitation is a general term used to indicate a situation or an interaction where someone helps someone else or a group of people to accomplish something by assisting them to share knowledge and resources amongst themselves. Facilitators are not acting on behalf or in lieu of someone, nor are they initiating someone’s action. They rather create enabling conditions, fostering an environment that makes an action possible in the first place, widens its overall impact, or both. Facilitation is a mechanism used in several social intervention practices, like community organizing, innovation process, etc. In this panel, we put the emphasis on facilitation that helps citizens to engage directly in public policy-making process.

We can differentiate two families of facilitation in the context of policy-making. In the first one, facilitation means supporting citizen initiatives by giving a little helping hand. This support is usually not intrusive because citizens keep the lead. In other words, facilitators (organizations or individuals) do not create, initiate or organize the initiative in their own terms, from the top down. They rather support self-organized actions while remaining outsider actors in the bottom-up initiatives they contribute to. Facilitators therefore work with participants on initiatives that already exist or are burgeoning. Facilitation can take very different forms to help citizens achieving their goals through a sustained form of help (financial, organizational, material), but sometimes, the assistance is very episodic and non-programmatic. Facilitation is seen as a strategic tool to make sure creative citizen initiatives achieve their goals.  It is based on the assumption that individuals have the resources and capacities to realize their own projects. Facilitation is there to create the incentives and an enabling context, building these capacities and increasing the overall impacts of such initiatives.

The second form of facilitation concerns facilitating public engagement processes. Facilitators are public participation professionals which are in charge of the design, implementation and hosting of participatory processes. Facilitation is understood as a top-down action where one set of people invite another in an open-ended forum in order to help them to interact. The objectives of facilitators are twofold. First, facilitators need to foster dialogue and a better understanding of the differing viewpoints of the various  citizens and actors who attend a participatory forum. Second, they create the conditions for a fair dialogue by: giving citizens non-biased information on specific issues, including all voices; articulating a position and reflecting it back for approval; asking speakers to sum up or clarify points; asking who agrees or disagrees with a particular position; etc. To do that upstream, public participation professionals design the best participatory processes according to a specific context, they animate interactions between citizens during the participatory process, and downstream, make sure that citizens preferences are well communicated to the sponsors of the participatory forum.

The objective of this panel is to know more about the role of facilitators have an invisible but pivotal role in public policy-making process where citizen inputs are important. The organizers of this panel would like to invite papers on three kinds of questions concerning facilitation. First, mapping the practices and actors of one of the forms of facilitation. Who are the facilitators that help citizen initiatives? What is the role of public engagement professionals? Second, what are the main issues facing the practice of facilitation? Third, how do facilitators negotiate their ethical role with the political context of citizen engagement?