Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Involving citizens in the recovery planning and development process can lead to more effective policy outcomes and build trust and a two way dialogue between citizens and government. COVID-19 has had diverse impacts on the lives of individuals and communities, and their involvement in deciding the routes to long-term recovery following the pandemic is crucial. Consider the good practice principles for deliberative processes offered by the OECD, which will support the achievement of "high-quality processes that result in useful recommendations and meaningful opportunities for citizens to shape public decisions":

• Clearly define the issue as a question that is aligned with the concerns and challenges faced by different communities
• Invite people to make recommendations for addressing the issues that affect them, respond to recommendations in a timely manner, and monitor and feedback regularly to people on the progress of their implementation (e.g. Scotland's Citizens' Assembly)
• Ensure the process is inclusive and representative of all people in the community, e.g. stratified random sampling to select a participant group which fully represents a community's demographic profile
• Make information easily accessible through public communications. Include the purpose, design, methodology, recruitment details, experts, recommendations, the response, and implementation follow-up
• Establish a mechanism through which people can request additional information, ask questions and keep up to date on progress of activities
• Appoint a liaison person who can feed information in from and out to the community
• Take time to reflect on and evaluate deliberative processes, to ensure learning, help improve future practice and understand impact

Time is a main barrier to learning lessons and implementing actions from those lessons. However, learning lessons while an event is still unfolding provides contemporaneous thinking to help guide actions. Organisations or all sorts can identify and learn their own lessons, feeding into industry/association calls for learning. Consider:

• Appointing someone to identify lessons during events
• Maintaining an up-to-date log of lessons to capture learning and support institutional memory
• Using the log of lessons dynamically and reflectively to asses performance and guide debriefs
• Coordinating the lessons learned across an area or industry to pool learning for greater effect, to bring the system together to share context specific learning through:
  • Holding workshops and industry seminars
  • Liaising with academic institutions, networks/associations, and business centres
  • Promoting information widely through various medias e.g. online and in print
• Guidance on collating lessons to assess performance and processes for debriefing can be found in TMBs 18 and 22