 My name's Brian, I'm going to pick a fight with you over the next 25 minutes and I look forward to the engagement and some questions afterwards, so sharpen your knives and wits and I hope that towards the end here we can be a little bit provocative and start thinking outside of the box a bit. So many thanks for attending and what I want to tell you is that my research is aimed directly at practitioners. I'm a researcher at the University of Melbourne and what I work on is how you guys understand your jobs and your relationships with the public and so it's really nice to have the opportunity to feedback, findings and analysis. Let me be clear from the beginning that I'm not here to attack people doing the best they can under a lot of pressure and some ridiculous financial and time constraints, but I am here to give you an assessment of how risk managers navigate the challenges, the challenging issues of risk, of governance, with a particular emphasis on your relationships with the public. I study how you, how risk managers understand and portray the public, which has significant bearing on the types of relationships that you then have with them and can have with them and in this context of controversial risk management, like the previous talk about mobile, we spend an overwhelming amount of our time, I say we, the researchers, we spend an overwhelming amount of our time on the public's perception of issue X and I'm here to show you what the your perception of issue X is and I think it's a provocative way of comparing how you guys see issues in the public and how the public, how that fits with how the public sees you. So today's presentation is an amalgamation of two entwined issues. What I'm going to do first in the first, maybe 12 to 13 minutes is provide you with the research basis of participation. Okay, and I'm going to summarize, come on in, I'm going to summarize really recent research that calls into question many of the assumptions and anecdotal ways that we think we do with the public, what we think we know about the public and I'm going to try and challenge some of those using research. In the second part of the talk, I'm going to show you some findings from an engagement project that I ran with flood managers in the state of Victoria and I'm going to show you just very quickly some interview transcripts to provoke some insights for the group. So there are three questions that help organize this presentation and help me contextualize the findings from that Victorian flood study and I've organized the presentation in this way because we need the research to make sense of the findings or I think we do. It gives us a way of interpreting the views of the flood managers and how they approach participation and how they understand the public and the three questions are why is participatory management worth considering and here we're going to talk about some of the challenges that arise. The second question is how we might do participation and here we're going to discuss a classic paper as well as integrate a more recent piece to discuss the techniques and methods of participation and finally we might, when might we get the most out of participatory management and I'm going to conclude with a couple comments but I really want you to consider is this that what we think we know about participation does not seem to fit with what the research tells us and most importantly thinking about the talks that I've seen so far over the last day and a half. I want to take issue with the very common assumption that education equals engagement. I don't think it does and I suspect you know it doesn't and yet what we've been hearing over and over again is somehow that education can mean engagement and I think it's worth challenging that assumption. So as a whole this presentation is divided in two and we're going to do the first part about the research and the second part about the Victorian study. So you know where we're going. So don't worry about reading slides. Don't put a lot of text on your slides. I tell my students. So why should you do participation? And this is work from Sheila Jasanoff is a legendary researcher at Harvard and she kind of summarizes the benefits of participation but I want you to think about this. So here's her list, right? Public participation enables a wider dissemination of what expert opinion is, what the intentions of the state are. Stakeholder engagement is can keep decision makers in touch with changing cultural standards and I would say that the growing emergence of the LGBT community and the rapid change in our culture is a good example of that. Stakeholder engagement can provide beneficial interrogation of the assumptions that we use to work with the community. So it keeps us in line with cultural expectations. And it's that it's neither scientifically nor politically sensible to allow power over decision making to concentrate amongst the small subset of the community. We run into trouble when you know those echo chambers they talk about or you live in a silo or all those ways of saying that when you surround yourself with people who think who think the same, you end up coming up with the same answer. And that doesn't always fit. And lastly, citizens are competent to help frame policies in which a democratic society operates. We live in a democracy. We should hear from the full range of people in our society. And so I've ordered these these premises to the public. And I'm going to take a moment to thank you for your tenets. In line with what I think from easy to accept to maybe a little more challenging. And I've done this so that you can maybe consider the basis of your views on participation. Do you do you share some or all of these or none of these? And that's not to say right or wrong. That's just to say, maybe think about it and figure out where you stand on participation and engagement operating in ways that don't necessarily line up with what you might be trying to do. So it's just a way of kind of pulling apart your assumptions and getting at the basis for your activities. So let's let's just do some caveats, because I'm going to cover my mask. Before we dive into the research, I should be clear that I'm discussing the planning and response phases of risk management. And I'm not advocating that we start taking votes on how the ambulance finds its way to the hospital. But that said, the last talk in particular in this room in Moreland really brought to the fore for me that emergency managers are being drawn into issues, not like that this kind of planning event recovery division is no longer valid. You guys are being swallowed up in before and after in a way that I think challenges much of what your identity has historically been. And so this this talk is my way of trying to open that box just a little bit and maybe give you a sense of how things are done differently in the planning recovery phase and how we might think about you being as a community as a sector being drawn across those phases of an emergency management. I should also say as a caveat that I'm talking about socio technical controversies and not jargon. You don't really need to know. But what I mean is that these kinds of problems, the Moreland fire floods, all these kind of community engagement problems around risk don't have an answer. There is no answer. And I don't need to tell you this. I'm sure this is just commonly known risk managers are are involved in a constantly fluctuating mess of people, interests, values. Sorry, I'm trying to keep track of time values. And it is interesting precisely because there are so many different legitimate and value ways of skinning that cat. That is the question. Another way of saying that is is to recognize that there are no solutions out there to be found and implemented. There's no right answer, but rather a need for a constant process of resolution, no solutions, resolutions. And so how do we then do that? How do we go down that path? So what does the recent what does recent research tell us about participation? Well, in general, there are four up divided, a lot of kind of synthesized down into four issues, authority, knowledge, communication, we'll call that education, worldviews and behavioral change. Okay. And I'm going to use examples in the coming slides to go into those four bits, and I'm going to make you interact with me. I apologize. I hate it too. But I kind of like doing it to you. So you just have to curse me out there. It is important what I'm going to ask you to do. And I'm going to come back to it. It's not just for giggles, although I get giggles. Let's talk about authority. So part of my life, my background is flood management in a country called Bangladesh. And I've spent years working on research and researching flood management there in one of the most flood prone, impoverished nations on earth over the densely populated country on earth. I've spent years working on this thinking about the issue, consulting with practitioners and publishing and academic journals. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. I'm great. The question I have for you is whether you think a flood management plan developed by me or a flood management plan developed by you as a group is likely to be better. Okay. So let's have a show of plans. Who thinks with all of my expertise Dr. Cook, by the way, that that my plan is going to be best. Show of hands. Yep. No, I'm talking for Bangladesh. Is it my plan? Show of hands. Thank you. My mom's proud. And so who and the rest of you think it's your plan? Show of hands. Well done. Confidence. I like it. Okay. So the way I phrase that question biases thing in order for me to make a point. So instead, what if I asked which plan is more likely to be accepted and implemented by the public? Show of hands. My plan. Your plan. All right. And finally, what if I asked which plan is more likely to be accepted by the government of Bangladesh? Come on, hands. All right. Now, what we have here is a demonstration of the problem of authority. In this case, I have it, but the likelihood of a middle class Caucasian Canadian male understanding the range of lived experiences of 150 million Bangladeshis living in poverty in South Asia. That information that we need to make a plan is pretty unlikely. I might come up with a better plan. In fact, I'm pretty confident I would come up with a better plan that would work in a vacuum without people or conflicting values, but the group, you, you are more likely to recognize and appreciate the diversity of knowledges and lived experiences that are needed for a flood management plan. And what I mean here is you have the cultural backgrounds, the gender differences, the racial differences, the experiential differences that are needed to make effective emergency plans risk plans. So the research supports this claim. When a wider range of views are heard and incorporated, the results are more likely to be accepted by the population. They're more likely to be effective in risk reduction. And this is particularly true when the people who have been incorporated feel as though their knowledge has been treated as legitimate. And you don't need to see where I'm going here for your work in the context of risk management. So there's authority. Let's talk about knowledge communication because I have this point that I really want to discuss and there's a rapidly growing body of research on knowledge communication. And broadly, this work revolves around the idea of knowledge deficits. That people have blank spots or knowledge gaps in their minds and that the associated education to kind of fill those gaps is how we affect behavioral change. Your whole bloody conference has been this. Let's hand out information, let's get better at doing it, and that'll lead to some utopian place where people will do what we think they should do. Okay, so let's have some fun here. Stand up. Everybody stand up. Yep. I'm that guy. All right, thank you very much. Sit down if you've never driven a car. Sit down if you've never gone over the speed limit, not once. Sit down if you were unaware that speeding is against the law. Are there cocks here? Sit down if you were unaware that speed determines the chances of you killing yourself. Right? More speed, more death. Sit down if you were unaware that speed determines the chances of you killing someone else. Sit down if you were unaware that there are fines for speeding. Sit down if you were unaware that you would feel shame if you hurt or killed someone. Sit down if you didn't know that the police were monitoring you for speeding. Did anyone sit? No. Okay, you can sit. Oh, one. Why did you sit? Oh. If only we were all. Okay, you can join our medically unfit person and all sit down. Thank you. So what do we learn from the speeding example? We know speedings against the law. We know speeding increases the chances of killing ourselves. We know speeding increases the chances of killing someone else. We know that if we get caught it will cost us with a significant fine. We know we would regret being caught. We know we would feel shame if we can't kill or injure someone. We know we are being monitored. We know and we know that floods are coming. We know that fires will happen. We know that we're in danger and we know that services aren't guaranteed and we know that much of the risk is of our own making. Right? The question becomes not whether people know and need to be educated, but rather how we change risk management if we do not presume and ignore the public. What changes when the public is viewed as knowledgeable? By you. What I want to get at is that behavioral change does not happen through knowledge communication and education. Outside of really really elementary activities it just doesn't work. When there are interests, when there are values, when there are conflicting views as all risk management issues are full of then education doesn't work. Let's talk about world views but I want to just reiterate that this is about everyone. This isn't just about the public. It includes risk managers and risk emergency practitioners as well as academics. Rather than just the public. We are all human. So let's talk about these world views. World views are the lenses through which we see the world, right? Their dynamic collection of preconceptions of beliefs of experiences of history of religion and culture of values that shade our knowledge and our behaviors. A central finding from research on world views critical to risk management is that world views often unconsciously cloud incoming information. In order to shield our very personal and strongly held beliefs. So when you're providing information that's not just some some innocent thing. It goes through people's filters. They interpret. They hear what they want to hear. They hear things that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs and they're able to discredit or ignore the things that really challenge them. Perhaps as you're doing right now. So all individuals hold world views. World views demand a reconsideration of the differences between publics and risk managers. It is as likely that when we encounter differences with the public. That a different world view is at play rather than some incapacity to understand or know something. People aren't stupid. They're not lazy. They're not incompetent. They're not disinterested. All the other excuses that we've heard. Or maybe a better way of saying that is that we are all stupid, lazy, incompetent, disinterested and whatnot. And recognizing that we're all like that means that risk management and emergency management is a different activity. So as part of world views I want to talk about cognitive dissonance. And we're really good at this. We are exceptionally good at rationalizing our own egregious behaviors. We're very quick to judge others for doing horrible things and then excuse ourselves for doing it. Run a yellow light for you. And you see someone else run a yellow light and you think that bastard needs to go to jail. This is a human tendency. We do this. We all do it. And it's not just yellow lights. It's in all walks of life. And so I raise the cognitive dissonance just to get at don't judge people for doing things that we do. And I'm going way too long here. So finally I want to present some research on behavioral change. More specific. This is actually the most important point. More specifically on efforts to incite behavioral change. And I suppose we might ask if people don't change their behaviors in the ways that we would expect, as I just tried to say, then how do they change their behaviors? Because they do change in the answer to this question. There are some who think, and I've heard over the last 48 hours or so, better risk management can be realized if only we could be able to compete for the public's attention given all of life's distractions. Be scarier and more visceral in order to shock people into action. Speak with less jargon. Enroll opinion leaders. Control the media. Use social media. Avoid discussions of uncertainty and embrace digital modes of communication. I suspect we've all heard advice of this nature in terms of how we can convince people to do what we would like them to do. There's a lot of advice out there. And I suspect each of you has come across it in one form of another. And in each case, these examples are representative of a common underlying commitment to educating the public. And for each one, long-term successful behavioral change is highly unlikely. How then do people change their behavior? The answer is through experience. The easiest way to understand this is to think of your mom and dad. My mom is forever telling me what to do and I never do it. In fact, I go out of my way to do the opposite even when I know she's right. More seriously, though, I learn and change through experience, through getting my hands dirty, by having control of a situation, by having autonomy, by having the opportunity to meaningful meaningfully contribute to something. That's how people learn. That's how people change their behaviors and it's why meaningful participation needs to be at the center of risk management. So returning to my forcing you to stand up and engage with you, I made you move and I made you act and I made you think while you were doing it. And it's through this experience that I hope that my talk is a little bit more memorable. It's through these actions combined with learning, of being active, that we are more likely, not without fail, just simply more likely that it will filter through your worldview and that it might seep into your beliefs and that it even, you know, this is progressively less likely, that it'll get into your behaviors. But that's how it's done. It's through experience. So how do we do it? I'm going to have to skip participation. All that you need to know about this lovely graph from Shelley Arnstein in the 1960s is the middle bit, right? The degrees of tokenism and what I want you to notice is that in forming consultation and application, what I would argue is the 99% of engagement that goes on is tokenistic. Okay? And there's a lot of research behind each of these and you can follow that up. I'd love to chat with you after it, but we're just going to skip along. So I'm going to give you some research findings. These are themes that came through this project in Victoria flood management, my discussion with them. Don't worry, we're only going to do two and I'm going to just jump right in because I really want to have time for questions. So community engagement, I asked them all about flooding and one of the themes comes to you is how do you do community engagement? Don't necessarily have to read it. I'm going to tell you what to think about it. So these are people telling me about how they've thought about an implemented community engagement following the massive drought flood period in Victoria. So for each of these presented excerpts, these are representative, right? So I've chosen, I've cherry picked obviously, these are the best ones, but these are representative of what the group has said. So in the first excerpt we see with someone telling me about how to control who contributes to whom and in what way. They use the anger of the public forums and shouting and the Murray-Darling Basin fire, bonfire of Murray-Darson planets. He's always raised as an excuse not to engage with the public. And don't get me wrong, I understand why, but I want us to consider how people will actually contribute in such a situation. In the second excerpt we see a gain, control over who gets to contribute, whose knowledge is legitimate, what they call reliable. We see that the public is directed in such a way that they reinforce or made to reinforce what the managers and experts think and want to do. In the third excerpt we come across another pretty common view, which is that no one wants to participate. And I know that each of you have probably experienced an empty forum and felt personally stung and upset that no one wants to come and partake in community engagement forum. But I ask whether you would want to participate in a situation when a situation is under such control by one group over another. Why bother participating under the conditions of the first two excerpts? I know that I wouldn't. So another theme to come through is if another flood were to reoccur whether we'd be better off or not. So there are mixed views on whether managers think that we're better off than before if another flood would are to occur. And what we see in the first excerpt is the view that people might do a better job of listening to the managers and experts because they're still in shock, but that with time the public will go back to its disobedient ways because they are preoccupied with whatever is directly in front of them. In the second excerpt we see an explicit description that plans and decisions should be made by government and experts and then communicated to the public. There's clearly no room for alternate views in that way of framing things. And finally in the third excerpts we see again a process of disseminating results rather than meaningful engagement. Okay and I know you don't want to just kind of run through data like this. So I'm going to draw the conclusions. There's a lot more data and I'm more than happy to chat with you afterwards about it. So what can we learn about the future of flood management and the views expressed by these flood managers? Well we should be careful. It's a small sample size. We don't want to start painting with too broad a brush. I'm going to cover myself again. But amongst the flood managers the findings suggest that a highly constrained form of process is paramount. So what I mean by this is that most managers were really keen to ensure that the correct process was followed, i.e. that there had been opportunities for comment, that the publications have gone out of the newspaper ads, that there would have been enough time elapsed and that notice was posted. But rather in terms of the outputs of the engagement those were a pain in the ass for the managers, right? And so what their form of engagement was kind of a box-ticking exercise. Did you follow the proper protocol? And then what was produced through the engagement was nowhere to be found. That was actually a burden on them in terms of time and energy. And so the question that I come to then is why are you doing participation? And it's a good question to ask yourself. Are you aiming to generate specific forms of acceptance, of trust, of legitimacy, of agreement? Is that your goal for participation? Because we heard about how trust is so important. Is your goal trust? Or are you aiming for substantive knowledge generated through socially deliberated publicly-reasoned activity? And this is, it boils down to this. If you're setting out for legitimacy, if that's what you want from the public then you're not doing engagement, okay? Stop pretending. If that's all you want. If you just want trust and legitimacy, if that's your goal, I think you should reconsider. And stop pretending. People see through. If what you're after though is knowledge that you know only the community has, this room contributing to Bangladesh's flood management plan. Very culturally and sensitively by the way. If you're after that legitimate knowledge then I think go forward with engagement. So in general we see a group, oh my second conclusion, we see a group of people keen to work in partnerships with the public but reverting to methods and assumptions discussed in part one that are unlikely to lead to meaningful participation or behavioral change. The flood managers demonstrate a clear knowledge deficit approach. They see the public as in need of understanding what the council and experts want them to know and they see themselves as in need of knowing what the public thinks. They apply the knowledge deficit model to everyone. But unfortunately the research tells us that when we apply a knowledge deficit model, we end up reinforcing pre-existing power hierarchies. What we see is that the experts' world views and associated approaches are established and then introduced and compared to what the public thinks. But the expert views come first and everything then is compared to that. So knowing what we know about world views, you can see how the managers will hear particular things as they engage with the public that align with their pre-existing thoughts and views. And that they'll be able to just kind of discredit and maybe not hear alternate voices. When you come with pre-existing thoughts, it's very hard to upend them, particularly when those thoughts are based on your own experience and world view and culture. And so I caution you about that. And so what we get from this approach is exactly not meaningful participation but as that ladder showed us a kind of tokenistic form of it. Let's skip the last conclusion and just move to the part that I was writing about this group in particular in this time. So finally I think the time is right to confront these different challenges in the context of participation. Craig Lapsley seems to have embraced the language and publics certainly want more input into government and governance. And the keynote yesterday suggested that emergency management sector was in danger of being circumvented and made obsolete and I concur with that view. But it is a sad turn of affairs. There is invaluable knowledge among the public and outside of the room. But it will not be heard nor appreciated until we begin to respect the public as well as accept their foibles and accept that meaningful participation needs to be the basis of risk management. Thank you very much. I've shown three fingers. I'm glad it wasn't one. Does anyone have a question? Or a rebuttal? Chickens. Oh good. Are you using the wrong language to generate interest in public engagement? I know that like I'm an academic right language is important. I would suggest though that your intent is more important than the specific terms. I don't actually think people will be fooled by terms whether we you know the connections now rather than engagement previous education informing whatever it is it's always going to be new forms. I think if you very explicitly start a movement that says we value what you have to say. You are our partners. You are necessary to this and we can't do it without you. We'd like to hear what you have to say. I think that'll fill the room. But I actually think forums are probably not the greatest way of doing it. And I think we need to start engaging with the with a wider scope of the spectrum of the community and in different ways. Come on, some more. Yep. Yeah, yeah, so a lot of the research so my take I specialize in risk I do do risk management in other contexts. The research that I open with a lot of that is not from floods right so there's risk more generally. And so I would say that well we can't just assume that it applies perfectly in every risk context. There's a lot to think that it should be considered. Yeah. I saw another couple of hands. Yeah. Yeah. So I've been a part of a couple flood studies one in the UK and one here and actually we're just waiting for a grant proposal to come through across our fingers. And the way that they did it and it was revolutionary is they went into a community and they said what would you like? And actually I went to the violet town is it whose violet town people that was amazing talk that showed us exactly what they did. They went and they said what do you mean right? Like they start with the community and when you start with the community and I know I'm running out of time so I'm going to end on this. The project in the UK that we did when we went into the town and we talked about flood management and things of those nature is when you start with what do you want oftentimes the public turns to you and says oh can you answer X, Y and Z and you end up giving them the same information that you're trying to give them right now more often than not and the only difference is that they asked and they value it. They value your knowledge. You are respected members of the community and it's the difference between imposing your views and values on a group of people and waiting to be asked for it and providing an opportunity for the community to take advantage of you and the conclusion then is that when they do that your job as community engagement people is no longer about convincing them. They're already convinced they're part of it then and your challenge completely changes. It comes on something else it's not just done but it's no longer about convincing. Thank you very much for your attention.