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Citizen Participation Handbook
for Public
Officials and Other Professionals Serving the Public
by
Hans & Annemarie Bleiker
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More Information Limitations
of the Handbook |
Where this Consent-Building approach to Citizen Participation came from... We, the handbook's authors, are a husband-and-wife team. It all started in the mid-1960s when one of us (Hans Bleiker) was doing research for a Ph.D in Community and Regional Planning at MIT, and Annemarie was doing research for a Master's Degree in Urban Anthropology at Brandeis University.
Hans' Public-Sector Decision-Making research focused on developing a practical management strategy that allows public agencies to be both responsive AND responsible. Responsive to the various publics and responsible to its mission. In plain language: "How to be responsive to the conflicting demands of the various publics without compromising the agency's mission." As part of his Ph.D thesis, he did case studies of four of the more complex transportation problems in the United States. As a student of Urban Anthropology at Brandeis, Annemarie studied what happens to community conflict when people who are at each other's throats -- because they have very different values, in fact, clashing values -- discover they have common ground after all.
We, in the course of our research in the late 1960s, made a stunning observation: 1. Most public officials are very frustrated because when it comes to implementing their proposals, their proposals tend to be shelved, stalled, stopped, torpedoed, compromised, . . . etc. 2. At the same time, the Bleikers stumbled across a few public-sector managers here and there who implement virtually all of their proposals; their proposals are NOT shelved, . . . not stalled, . . . not torpedoed, . . . not compromised . . . The Bleikers call these managers "Implementation Geniuses".
We have spent much of our efforts over the last 30 years studying these "Implementation Geniuses". And, we think we have them figured out. We have systematized the methods and tactics of Implementation Geniuses well enough where we can teach them to you in just a few days. We have developed a sequence of management courses to share with people like you what our research with Implementation Geniuses has taught us. We train officials in the entire US in the Systematic Development of Informed Consent (SDIC). Our 2 - 5 day Consent-Building course have been our effort to share with our students the methods, tactics, strategies, and tools we have developed by studying the work of Implementation Geniuses. It is for the students of this course, and the course in Citizen Participation by Objectives (CPO), that wrote this text. [ Top ] |
IPMP
PO Box 1937; Monterey, CA 93942 Tel: (831) 373-4292 Fax: (831) 373-0760
Please send Hans
& Annemarie Bleiker your questions or comments to: ipmp@aol.com.
Visit us at www.consentbuilding.com
or www.ipmp-bleiker.com.