The pace of life continues to speed up, contributing to jobs that are often more about reacting to impossible deadlines when we could really do with slowing down and reflecting on what truly gives us life in our roles as local people, citizens, consumers and professionals. Gandhi observed that “there is more to life than increasing its speed” and movements like ‘slow food’ are demonstrating that at the heart of a creative and participative culture is a celebration and love of life which values ‘being’ as well as ‘doing’.

Participation is about much more than a tick-box. It’s about a radical challenge to a culture that isn’t working – at local, regional, national and planetary scales. A culture that has valued profits over people and planet, and limitless consumption over sustainable relationships between people and places. The emerging, participatory, ecological culture requires that we find the time for community and conviviality. Practically, that means getting together with our friends and colleagues who we can trust to learn together about both doing participation… and being participative. It means having the confidence to tell each other stories that matter to us in our job-roles as well as people concerned for people and the planet. This needs some practice. And practice needs good, reflective time and a good, reflective space.

This is the message of this short piece, and I’ll repeat it in three ways below!

Not change for change’s sake…
Many people are working with organisations that have inherited ways of working designed decades ago to meet very different needs than those that are pressing today. Recently, there has been a lot of institutional ‘modernisation’ and restructuring. Agencies are told to ensure that ‘participation’ happens and lots of professionals have experienced a lot of turbulence and stress as a result. This isn’t exactly conducive to creating a resilient and lively working culture, and shows that you can’t change only the structures, but you have to pay attention to the feelings and values and community of people within them.

The best way to do this is to recognise that participation isn’t just something that professionals do with others. Instead, we must also see our organisation as a community and practice on ourselves. In this way, we can step outside our ‘comfort zone’ and begin to be more confident in taking risks and mastering the art of choosing the right participative tool for the job (it’s easy to be trained in a particular ‘tool’ and forget it may not be right for every situation). 

Participation is about listening, learning and letting go
As participation moves beyond rhetoric into action, it implies a shift of power. It’s about professionals and other power-holders letting go of control enough to allow community leaders and ‘bottom-up’ initiatives enough oxygen to breathe. It’s also about recognising the long history of marginalisation that many people have experienced – sometimes for generations – and being ready to engage with the psychological and cultural impact of this legacy. This is a long-term project that requires that we ask ourselves a lot of good questions on the way. The quality of the questions is more important than the answers!

Some questions I find helpful are connected with understanding participation as a journey of personal and community development. I believe this journey is about inquiring into our personal and collective history, of where we’re at now, and of the future we would like to create together. I also ask about how do my – and your - values shape our understanding of ‘participation’? How do we ensure we respect each other’s interpretations? How do I make sure I’m not forcing someone into my understanding of what it means to participate?

For me, participation suggests ‘trusting the process’ of building relationships with other people, with places, with nature. I see this as helping to heal a broad tendency expressed by professionals and organisations to want to control local people, places and nature, often without being very conscious that this is what’s happening. Furthermore, I sense both tendencies – of letting go and wanting to control – in me. When I’m afraid, I tend to revert to want to control things. When I feel supported and confident, it’s easier to let go into allowing what’s trying to emerge from the ‘grassroots’ to do just that.

This can feel scary, but with practice I have learned to rely more on my intuition and ‘gut-sense’ as well as my more traditional training about what’s right. Often, all that’s getting in my way are some out-dated assumptions about what it means to be a ‘professional’ left over from growing up in a ‘pre-participation’ era, as well as having had to pick up some core skills that weren’t prioritised in my education. These skills include learning how to listen deeply; learning about how power works and systems change; and learning how to learn. Without good friends who are able to give me feedback on what I’m good at, and what I need to improve on, I wouldn’t be going anywhere fast! Without this strong network of support – an on-going ‘community of practice’ – I might burn out or lose touch with the more radical (meaning ‘of the roots’) potential of participatory culture where power is shared.

Ecology and a culture of participation
Finally, I have come to understand that participation and ecology are two sides of the same coin. Ecology is the science of relationship, and participation is about ensuring that people are not cut off anymore in an atomised and globalising world, but able to play our part in building the relationships that sustain healthy communities in a healthy environment. An ecological – or participatory - ‘world-view’ is one that sees a radical inter-connectedness between all things. Some may associate a particular spirituality with this insight; others may associate it with being in nature and learning her lessons. I like to see it as an opportunity to shape a better world and enjoy the journey!

This article has been about creating a participatory culture of learning by doing where failures are understood as the best teachers. This is a culture of celebrating successes, of projects that emerge organically as participants slowly build the confidence to accomplish small things first, and then be surprised at how the seedlings flourish over months … years … decades. This is a long-term culture, a culture with its feet and hands in the soil - and its heart and head working together to nurture ecological and community regeneration. This is a culture where the expert is ‘on tap, not on top’. Most of all, this is a culture of (as the Buddhists might say) ‘beginner’s mind’ – that is to say, a culture of learning and inquiry where it’s not the answers that matter but the quality and depth of the questions that we learn to ask of our own practice.

Resources and Follow-up
Why not invite some colleagues or friends to get together to learn more about participation together over, say, six months, meeting for a couple of hours every month? The ideas and resources in this article draw from popular education, community development, human ecology and systems and complexity theory.

Nick Wilding is a culture change consultant and action research facilitator.  He is a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology.