Public Participation Practitioner Ethics: Can you be friends with stakeholders?
Public participation practitioners often work with a core group of stakeholders over several months (sometimes years). Stakeholders build trusting relationships with community engagement facilitators through intense exchanges, sharing hopes and aspirations, and many heartfelt conversations. Sometimes those relationships become friend-like, which can help or hinder the process depending on how things are handled.
In this discussion, we’ll explore how close relations with stakeholders can impact the public participation process, what facilitators should be aware of regarding the IAP2 code of ethics, and red flags that can alert you to potential problems.
How lines can blur between practitioners and stakeholders
Many years ago, I was part of a community engagement process involving a public utility organization and a predominantly Indigenous community. This was no simple engagement — with decades of conflict, mistreatment, and broken relationships — there was a severe lack of trust. While the organization we were supporting was not responsible for the many years of hurt, they inherited the relationship with the purchase of a local area dam.
The public utility invited Dialogue Partners to work alongside its engagement team with the goal of rebuilding relationships and regaining trust from the community. This 18-month engagement process was intense and involved many sessions where community members shared past hurts, experiences of discrimination and dashed hopes. Our team spent long hours working through several issues and had made considerable progress toward building a more positive relationship between the community and the utility company. We had all shared a lot of ourselves in the process and got to know one another well.
The day before a critical event involving a big announcement, emotions were running high. The community was buzzing with expectations and speculation. While preparing for the event, some of us learned that a member of the organization's engagement team attended a couple of social events at the invitation of a few community members.
The situation raised a red flag immediately.
In a low trust, high conflict community context, I feared that the public engagement practitioner’s decision to socialize with a select group could jeopardize our months-long efforts.
The pros and cons of developing relationships with stakeholders
Part of being an effective public participation practitioner involves making a personal connection with stakeholder participants. Our role is to create the space and environment for participants to feel comfortable and willing to share what they value and what is most important to them. It means getting to know people very well. And because we bring our whole, authentic selves to the job and listen with empathy and compassion, the relationship can spill into being friend-like. This can work to everyone’s advantage in certain circumstances.
Building close working relationships — human to human — creates trust and encourages genuine sharing of emotions, which helps get at the heart of what’s needed to move forward. In many community engagement initiatives, it’s impossible to achieve the goals without this type of intimate relationship-building.
As public participation professionals, close relationships become problematic when they single out participants for special attention, distort our objectivity as facilitators, and threaten public participation best practices. Participants may come away with the perception that their new “friend” will represent their interests regarding the outcome of the public engagement, which can quickly alienate others in the larger group.
Forming friendships crosses an ethical boundary
As we absorbed the information that one of the engagement team practitioners had been socializing with some community members, my Dialogue Partners colleagues and I discussed the risk of crossing the line from professional to social relationships.
What exactly is the problem with it? Is it a problem? Was I making a big deal about something that shouldn’t be an issue?
We can find insight by looking at the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) Code of Ethics for Public Participation Practitioners. Three of the standards apply in this situation:
TRUST: We will undertake and encourage actions that build trust and credibility for the process among all the participants.
ACCESS TO THE PROCESS: We will ensure that stakeholders have fair and equal access to the public participation process and the opportunity to influence decisions.
RESPECT FOR COMMUNITIES: We will avoid strategies that risk polarizing community interests, or that appear to "divide and conquer."
By socializing with community members who are part of a public engagement initiative, we risk equitable access to the process (or, at the very least, the perception of equity). Stepping into that friendship zone opens another avenue for that person or group to convey their views and desires to us apart from the formal community engagement processes everyone agreed to.
The engagement practitioner in the scenario might not have attended the social event with the intent of giving this select group a special platform, but it could certainly have been perceived that way by the larger group. Accepting the invitation was not respectful of the needs of the community.
The practitioner’s behaviour had significant potential to break the community’s newly forming trust that all involved had worked incredibly hard to repair. How could they trust our community engagement process, and by extension, the organization we were representing, when some people in the group got an exclusive audience with one of the facilitators and perhaps had found favour with them?
How do you know if you’re crossing a boundary?
Often it’s my gut that gives me the first indication that something isn’t ethical about a situation but answering the following three questions can help clarify what’s going on:
Who is this choice, action, behaviour, or strategy serving?
Am I able to offer this same experience to all stakeholders?
How will my behaviour impact the larger community? Is there a ripple effect I haven’t considered?
At a basic level, we need to ask ourselves what the line is between being a professional and being a friend. Friends socialize outside of a work context, but those with a strictly professional relationship generally don’t. There’s a difference between attending a social event celebrating a milestone the community or group has achieved, for example, and going out on the town with a few community folks on the down low. Context and purpose are essential to consider.
How to navigate social invitations
So how should that practitioner in my scenario have responded to the social invitation? No doubt it’s a delicate situation. The community members most likely had no cynical agenda and acted as a result of the positive connection they made with the practitioner. How do you decline without causing hurt feelings or awkwardness that could spill over into the engagement process?
My answer is that it depends on the context, but I would suggest trying one of three responses:
Make an excuse for being unable to attend. I would try this approach if I thought the invite was a one-time thing and the person would take the hint.
Suggest a “social” activity that’s more appropriate. If a person or group wants to head out for beers one night to talk about some things, suggest that instead, you grab a coffee together during a break at the next session. Meeting this way would take place in the context of the engagement process and be transparent to the larger group.
Decline with the explicit explanation that getting together as friends would conflict with your professional engagement role. You could suggest getting together as friends once the engagement process is complete if that’s something you want. If you sense simply declining with an excuse will result in repeat invitations, being blunt is likely your only option.
Conclusion
The nature of community engagement means that facilitators and participants often interact on an intimate level usually reserved for friends. That dynamic is what allows the process to be transformative. It’s critical to be aware of the pros and cons of this friend-like relationship, ensuring that we are serving the best interests of the community engagement issues, goals, and process at all times.
Over to you: Have you had to navigate friendship vs professional relationships in your public participation practitioner experience? I’d love to learn how you handled it. Let’s connect.