The problem with public consultation

Recent court challenges in South Africa over major policy issues have prompted an important question, why is public consultation failing to deliver functional policies?  This question exposes a deep and persistent problem with the capacity of institutions to meaningfully engage public inputs at scale.

Let’s take the challenge to the National Health Insurance Act as an example. We learned from arguments before the Constitutional Court that Parliament received 330,000 written comments from the public. One of the core issues in the case is whether Parliament genuinely considered these inputs or just collected them.  This takes us right into the heart of the problem with large scale public consultations - how does any decision maker meaningfully engage with 330 000 written comments?

If you’re wondering what happens in the normal course, the analysis of public comments is usually delegated to a team of support staff, who are tasked with reading the comments and creating summaries to flag issues and evaluate submissions for decision makers. In well-resourced institutions, teams of analysts might be engaged to do this work in a detailed and rigorous way, but in over 20 years of working in policy and regulation across the Continent, I’ve rarely encountered anything even remotely resembling a rigorous analysis of public comments. The approach to analysing submissions could, most generously, be described as uneven.  Institutions still rely almost exclusively on small teams to review individual submissions, compile summaries and write reports for decision-makers.

The reality is that our approach to reviewing public inputs has not changed in decades. Even where best efforts are applied, there are always constraints on time and resources and, as a result, summaries have become normalized as a “good enough” approach to analysis.  However well intentioned, summarisation will only get you so far in a process involving hundreds of thousands of submissions and this approach is simply no longer adequate for the complexity and scale of consultation processes today.

The core limitation with the current approach is this - we are not finding the critical patterns emerging from the totality of public inputs received. Decision makers and stakeholders alike deploy teams to review submissions, but everyone works on summarising individual submissions and misses the vital connections that exist across submissions. We are not unearthing the crucial insights that only emerge from connecting the contributions distributed across hundreds of thousands of public inputs.

Historically, we didn’t have the tools to do this, but we now have the technology to systematically analyse large-scale public participation in ways that were previously impossible. This is one of the most useful applications of AI, because if used carefully and judiciously, this technology can help decision makers to discover the distributed contributions emerging from large volumes of public input. This is an impactful, real-world use case in which AI augments human decision capacity, by finding and structuring patterns that would be impossible to detect by manual methods alone.

Neith exists to work on the problem of achieving meaningful participation in decision making at scale. We are Africa’s first participatory intelligence company, building the digital infrastructure needed to support collective decision making. Our core thesis is that valuable contributions are being generated through public consultations, but institutions lack the systems to extract, structure and synthesize the patterns emerging from these processes. We help institutions with this problem by using supervised AI to identify patterns, find core tensions, reveal areas of consensus or divergence and extract collective insights that are not apparent from any single submission, but emerge from the consultation as a whole.

We believe that the inability to meaningfully engage with large scale public inputs is one of the most important problems facing institutions today. The complexity of our challenges exceeds the resources and expertise of any single person, party or organisation and our success in addressing these challenges will depend on whether we can unlock the knowledge emerging from participatory  processes. This is critical, not only for restoring trust and legitimacy in institutional decision-making, but for pragmatic and effective problem solving. If public consultations continue to be treated as a mere compliance exercise, we will fail to extract the real value of these processes as an exercise in collective problem solving.

Public consultations are one of the most under-utilised information resources in governance today.  Buried inside the huge volumes of inputs that institutions are so diligently collecting from the public is a mix of  experience, expertise, insights and opportunities – all valuable contributions that we are currently squandering.