Both the final report and the summary report are available to download from the resources section of the website.

Follow #pthwys on Twitter for updates from the launch and to contribute to the debate. As ever, we greatly value your feedback, so please take some time, if you are able, to leave us comments on this post.

To whet your appetite, here is the foreword to the report:

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) and Involve are pleased to publish this important new report about how people participate in society. Pathways through Participation is an ambitious research project that aims to improve our understanding of how and why people participate, how their involvement changes over time, and what pathways, if any, exist between different types of activities.

The project emerged from a common desire across our three organisations to create a fuller picture of how people participate over their lifetimes. It builds on work completed at NCVO on active citizenship, adds to IVR’s research into volunteering by exploring it in relation to other forms of participation, and extends Involve’s research and practice in empowering citizens to take and influence the decisions that affect their lives. National and local governments have grappled for decades with the challenges of how to encourage people to be more active citizens. Their reasons have varied over time, from improving public services to reducing public spending or enhancing democracy. Recent policy developments around localism, the Big Society, outsourcing public services, encouraging charitable giving and the role of the voluntary sector have made questions about participation more topical than ever.

This report provides the practical intelligence that will enable voluntary and community organisations, public service providers and government at all levels to better support and develop participation. It is only through hearing people’s personal stories, and focusing on their individual experience, that the complexities and dynamics of how participation works in practice can be fully understood. We interviewed over 100 people across three localities – their stories of participation provide the powerful body of evidence drawn on in this report.

This research shows that people participate in a myriad of ways, depending on what has meaning and value to them. They participate as individuals and collectively. Their reasons for participating are sometimes altruistic and sometimes it is to achieve something more explicitly for themselves. We have found many stories of how life enhancing participation can be, but also of its negative effects. Participation can be a core part of people’s lives or something they do once in a while. It doesn’t happen in a bubble but connects to different aspects of their lives. And it is shaped by their circumstances and capabilities, as well as the personal, practical and political opportunities and barriers they face.

We hope that policy-makers, practitioners and researchers will find this report useful in developing a richer and fuller understanding of how and why people participate, and what makes them start and continue (and stop) participating. Beyond promoting understanding, we hope that this report will help institutions and organisations find ways in which they can support and encourage opportunities for participation that better meet people’s

Sir Stuart Etherington, NCVO
Simon Burall, Involve
Nick Ockenden, IVR

Rather than just looking at political participation per se, we were delighted to see that the project had adopted the three categories of participation in our literature review (social participation, public participation and individual participation) to capture the full contribution of multi-purpose organisations to community life, social action and political self-confidence. 

The report “suggests it may not always be helpful to divide community activities into ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ types or suggest a hierarchical ladder towards participation. The experiences highlighted in this research indicate that groups which may appear as purely social or leisure in nature can play a vital role in shaping a community’s potential and actual political influence. The experiences highlighted in this research indicate that groups which may appear as purely social or leisure in nature can play a vital role in shaping a community’s potential and actual political influence.”

The findings from the Pathways project which will be made available in September will confirm some of the report’s key messages: many of our interviewees highlighted the importance of multi-purpose hubs in providing spaces for groups to meet, fostering interaction between groups, supporting neighbourhood-level social networks, and linking different organisations and activities.

The authors recognise that, with public spending being cut heavily, it has never been more important to be able to make the business case for engagement. The toolkit therefore aims to help those who manage, design, deliver, plan or commission public engagement projects to understand and make the business case for engagement and present it to internal and external audiences. It can be used for all kinds of engagement from small scale ‘one off’ projects to major exercises across an entire town or wider local authority area.

In a blog linked to its launch, my colleague Edward Andersson (co-author of the toolkit and Deputy Director of Involve) presented his five top tips on how to make the most of the toolkit:

1. Don’t be daunted. Start with what you have. The toolkit was designed for non-economists. You don’t need to do a course before you start, nor do you need to gather all data on everything before you begin.  Assess your benefits and costs using existing information you have, identify things you can’t measure yet and start taking steps to fill in the blanks later on. By thinking creatively you can often come up with proxy measures; you don’t always need to carry out new research. Of course it is also important not to make exaggerated claims. Know the limitations of your work and what can be said and what not based on the evidence.

2. Don’t forget the potential costs of non-engagement. All engagement seems expensive unless the costs of not engaging are measured (or approximated) alongside the costs of your project. In most cases the alternative to public engagement is not ‘do nothing’ but to carry out PR and marketing, limited consultation, market research or other activities – all of which have costs. The comparator excel sheet allows you to make these calculations.

3. Use the business case to tell stories about why engagement matters. Equations and spreadsheets won’t shift people’s thinking on their own. We are all emotional animals and it is as important to place the data in a compelling narrative as it is to gather the data in the first place. Don’t forget that people are motivated both by opportunities and threats and in the current environment many managers are driven by the latter. If you can point to real cases where no engagement led to real negative impacts (conflict, costs etc) it can be very persuasive and make a convincing case for engagement as a risk management technique in difficult times.

4. Tailor your argument to fit your audience. Your business case is not an end in itself; it is a tool to get a message across and to convince. Make sure you understand your audience and what is most persuasive to them. Will cost savings over a longer term or budget savings that accrue to different budget-holders be persuasive? Are there non-monetary measures that matter to your decision makers, such as health outcomes, an improved reputation or less conflict? Often (even in the midst of cuts) it is not just pounds and pence that matter to people. You need to understand this to make a persuasive case.

5. Finally, if you really want to persuade people, give them the opportunity to see engagement first hand. I have found few things as persuasive as being a firsthand eye witness. A dry report is no substitute for a lived experience. The business case is only part of a wider process of educating colleagues and partners in the merit of engagement.

• Who participates?
• Where do people participate?
• What do people participate in?
• Why do people participate?

It looks at whether there has been decline in participation over the last decades and includes some international comparisons. It also examines in more detail a number of specific participatory activities (membership, giving, volunteering, timebanking, ethical consumerism, political participation, local governance, campaigning and direct action and protest).

I was especially interested in the report’s description of a shift away from a traditional pathway into politics to a new trend in political pathways. The ‘traditional pathway’ – usually taken by older political candidates – generally involves a long history of engagement with a political party and local-level politics. The ‘new pathway’ is generally taken by younger candidates who tend to have a university education, be accomplished and have developed relevant skills in their career, and have experience campaigning or lobbying. According to the report, this new route into politics could potentially be even more exclusive and inaccessible to under-represented groups than the traditional pathways.

We have interviewed people representing a range of ages for the Pathways through Participation project and it will be interesting to see whether we discover similar age- or generation-related shifts in terms of people’s participation more broadly (not just in politics). I have just finished reading through people’s comments on their experience of school in relation to their subsequent participation, and it seems as though young people today are being more actively encouraged to participate in their communities through things like community service programmes and the Duke of Edinburgh award than was the case for older generations. For me, this raises important questions about how ideas about participation – its value, form and function - get formed in childhood and the role that institutions like schools play in shaping people’s pathways over time.

Download it for free here

The research resonates with literature on volunteering and other types of participation: that many people get involved (or are more likely to become involved) because they are asked personally. The research also confirms that only a small proportion of the population get involved in local decision making and that when people do, it is often a ‘reactive’ engagement about something that they are unhappy with such as front-line services.

My recent experience of interviewing people in Enfield as part of the Pathways through Participation project agrees with this – several people have said that they are ‘not political’ and haven’t been involved in any type of civic activism…until they remember the time they contacted their MP about the traffic outside their house, or the council about proposals to cut down a favourite tree or build something nearby that they don’t want (be it a car park or, in one case, a mental hospital). This reactive involvement, the TCC report says, doesn’t correspond with many of the ‘proactive’ engagement mechanisms, which try to address broader issues, on offer in most local authorities.

To encourage and increase people’s involvement, TCC recommend that local authorities should communicate better with their residents about the opportunities for involvement, and that local authorities should target their messages so that they will be receptive to every segment of the population.

What is great about this approach is that people’s attitude, personality, values and world view are factored into the analysis – of the problem and solution. It seems sensible that whether someone is inclined to see the glass half full or half empty will affect their feelings about their local council and representatives. However, it is essentially a behaviourist approach that doesn’t factor in broader socio-economic or demographic factors, which are essential to understanding people’s behaviour and views around participation and involvement. Two books that continue to get a lot of interest – Nudge and The Spirit Level – sum up this dichotomy well for me. Both bring value to debates about citizen participation, which in light of the Big Society’s stress on community involvement, will surely remain high on many people’s agenda.

Find out more here

 Interestingly for the Pathways project, the research found that individuals’ perceptions of influence change over time and that experiences and circumstances throughout the life course has an impact on perception of influence. The research found that events or incidents such as a successful or unsuccessful attempt to influence decisions, joining a community group, starting university, becoming less interested and having children all have an impact on feelings of influence. The report also finds that the more urban an area is, the lower the feelings of influence; the region that the local authority is in also has an impression; and the higher the ethnic diversity, the higher the feelings of influence.

Click here to download the report.

Calling on employers (from across all sectors) to allow and support staff to undertake volunteering in work time, the report includes a ’myth buster’ about employee-supported volunteering to help emphasise its message: that volunteering benefits the employer, the employee and wider civil society.

Read the report here.