New directions for neighborhood democracy.

The question of how local governments interact with the neighborhoods they serve has become an increasingly important question over the last few years. Many local officials are concerned about new tensions between citizens and government, and excited about new ways to strengthen that relationship.

The state of neighborhood governance was a major focus of two gatherings over the last year. The first was the "Democratic Governance at the Neighborhood Level" meeting, organized by Grassroots Grantmakers and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) during the November 2008 Congress of Cities in Orlando.

The second, a conference entitled "No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy," was held at the University of New Hampshire in July.

Among the presenters at the July conference were NLC members Mark Linder, director, parks and recreation, Cupertino, Calif., Hannah McKinney, vice mayor, Kalamazoo, Mich., Rodney Locks, council member, Brevard, N.C., and NLC staffers Bonnie Mann and Leon Andrews.

The report on the first meeting, entitled "The Promise and Challenge of Neighborhood Democracy: Lessons from the Intersection of Government and Community," can be downloaded from NLC's website from the Governance and Structure webpage at www.nlc.org.

The following are some of the themes from the report:

Conclusion 1: "We know how to do a lot already." Some of the most common, basic worries about involving citizens are unfounded.

The concerns that "we don't know how to bring a diverse set of people to the table," or that "we don't want to set up yet another shouting match" are not the main challenges we face.

Local leaders are increasingly able to deal with these concerns by applying:

* process knowledge about recruitment

* process knowledge about structuring meetings (giving people a chance to feel heard, and keeping outspoken participants from dominating the discussion)

* knowledge about how to encourage and coordinate public work

* leadership training to impart process knowledge to a broader array of people

As one person put it, "We know how to do a lot of this stuff."

Conclusion 2: This work has to be jointly "owned" and directed. Some of the difficulties and tensions center on the question of who should to be in charge of, and accountable for, neighborhood governance work.

It is evident that every community needs people with the kinds of skills listed above, but there are no easy or universally applicable answers to the question of how the people with those skills ought to be supported, funded and legitimized.

Should public employees working out of City Hall, or district offices, be the main neighborhood governance workers? Or should neighborhood leaders, either through paid positions or volunteer efforts, be doing most of the work?

The consensus seemed to be that either of these variations (and others) might work as long as a broad array of neighborhood and community organizations and leaders all had some significant degree of ownership and authority within the system.

Conclusion 3: We need ways to ensure that democratic practices are being used by neighborhood leaders and groups. Though it may be true that, when it comes to productively involving residents, "we know how to do a lot of this stuff," many leaders feel that neighborhoods still aren't using enough of that knowledge.

For a variety of reasons, neighborhood council members and other neighborhood leaders are still operating in fairly undemocratic ways.

Conclusion 4: We need these democratic practices to be applied in the workings of government--not just neighborhoods.

Many of the tensions that emerge in this work are related to the difficulty of maintaining 'pockets' of democracy--in neighborhood settings, or in temporary processes dealing with a particular issue or decision--within communities that tend to operate in more undemocratic ways.

There are three ideas that emerge consistently in discussions of this challenge:

* Providing democratic skills, and more facilitative understanding of leadership, to public officials and other public employees, rather than just a select group of public engagement specialists.

* Changing the way public meetings (city council proceedings, school board meetings, land use hearings and so on) are run, so that they foster more deliberation and give more people a chance to be heard.

* Developing new mechanisms that will connect neighborhood structures with city-wide decision-making.

Matt Leighninger is executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and an active participant on NLC's City's Futures Panel on Democratic Governance.

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