Project findings: the practice of engagement

Empowerment-lite

Across the 12 organisations, there was a growing feeling of frustration, mainly (but not solely) articulated by the community partners, that engagement in these museums and galleries did not always ‘do what it said on the tin’. At an individual project and organisational level, the actual experience of engagement and participation frequently revealed a level of control, risk aversion and ‘management’ by the organisations that served to undermine its impact and value for the ‘target’ participants. Challenge to the organisation’s plans was typically averted or subtly discouraged. Thus, while an illusion of creative participation is on offer in such situations, decisions tend to be coerced, or rushed through on the basis of the organisation’s agenda or strategic plan, manipulating a group consensus of what is inevitable, usual or expected. In these cases, the experience described by the community partners is frustratingly what international development theorist Andrea Cornwall in another context calls ‘empowerment-lite’, with the concerns, complexities and ‘messiness’ of their everyday lives, their realities, filtered out1.

False consensus

Community partners noted that the organisations tended to reward those whose behaviour was less challenging and more in keeping with the organisation’s priorities, placing them at the head of the queue and so reinforcing what Gaventa calls a “false consensus” among those willing to concede to the museum’s goals. In this way, the organisations succeeded in exercising consensual power, convincing the participants that their interests are the same as those of the institution2 Conflict and any form of difference in opinion – central to democratic dialogue – are effectively avoided. The institution thus maintains order and control, but through an institutional culture in which the values of the institution subtly become the ‘common-sense’ values of all.

The following scene enacted at one of the larger museums in the study and depicted by staff and community partners is based on a real experience. It exemplified a recurring frustration that well-meaning museum and gallery staff continued to remain unaware of the subtle effects of institutional power in the form of coercion and ‘false consensus’:

The aftermath of such ‘co-productions’ frequently left community partners with the unhappy feeling of having colluded in their own marginalisation, disempowerment and even exclusion – an experience they rarely chose to repeat. As one community partner put it: “I perceive some consultation as being cosmetic. The museums have to have public consultation, but are they taking everything on board? I think not.”

A staff member emphatically ‘briefs’ a community partner on a vision for a major new display project, metaphorically portrayed as a basic drawing of a bus, without windows or wheels.

The community partner is given the task to ‘consult’ with the partner’s community group for ‘input’, so as to ‘co-produce’ the big project with the museum. With little obvious enthusiasm, the community partner does so, and it is received by the group in turn without much enthusiasm. However, they dutifully produce a series of drawings, which are then brought back by the community partner to the museum staff member. The staff member looks through the drawings with mounting anxiety – disposing of those that don’t fit her ‘vision’ for the exhibition. Finally, with relief, she finds a couple that will fit, and duly attaches these images – her wheels and windows – to the picture of her vehicle. She has known, all along, where her vehicle is heading.

Local issue-based collaborative work

If brave enough, museums and galleries can use the production of exhibitions as a means to engage people right at the heart of the organisation, in terms of all elements of research, design, writing, storytelling, presentation and programming. Hackney Museum’s Platform exhibitions are based on local issues and co-produced with local people, while Glasgow’s Open Museum facilitates broad access to collections for use in the development of exhibitions based on community ideas and concerns, situated within community locations and co-produced by local people.

Rubber-stamping

For most of the organisations, engagement is ‘contained’ at the level of ‘consultation’ rather than ‘collaboration’, and even consultation is not always what it seems. In another scene at a museum in a different part of the country, a community partner similarly described the museum’s community consultation practice:

The community partner takes the role of the museum director, who is portrayed in London at a high-powered meeting, hearing about the ‘next big thing’. He comes back and briefs a member of staff on a major new project the museum will now be embarking upon.

The staff member asks: “Shouldn’t we be consulting our community partners?” The Director says: “Good idea! Please organise it.” Next the member of staff is seen telling a community partner about the project. The community partner is just at that moment asking about what’s in it for the community, when the Director runs in saying: “Sorry, held up at a meeting. So pleased you are on board for this important initiative.” The community member starts to protest: “But I hardly know a thing about it!” when he is interrupted by the Director who says: “Sorry, have to fly – another meeting – you know how it is.Can’t tell you how much we appreciate your collaboration.”

A number of similar examples in the study showed that when museums use public participation simply as a means to rubber-stamp existing plans, they are in danger of not only disillusioning participants but robbing people of their active agency as citizens, and preventing them from realising their capabilities. A community partner noted: “I think people would like to be more involved in the actual processes – they don’t always feel that their ideas are listened to.”

In contrast, Hackney Museum’s Platform exhibitions put Hackney people and their issues of concern at the centre and see the museum’s role as supporting them through collaboratively producing exhibitions: “I don’t feel happy putting on an exhibition that has nothing to do with the people of Hackney. The idea comes from communities – they approach us and we collaborate on it,” one Hackney Museum staff member said. “We need to be a museum that’s relevant to people…”

Collaboration and recruitment

During the development of projects and exhibitions, consultation and collaboration might open new opportunities for participation. At Hackney Museum, an examination of the process prompted  ew recruitment from within the community.

“When we chaired the meetings, it just didn’t work,” said one staff member. “Then we employed a well known and respected local artist, activist and facilitator to chair. He knew what we were doing and has enormous understanding of where people are coming from.”

This need for an external chair has prompted further recruitment of community members to work on the museum’s behalf, including people working as ‘facilitators’ in this more intellectual sense.

Community partners as passive beneficiaries

For most community partners in the study, however, the reality of being on the receiving end of a museum’s or gallery’s distribution of resources left them feeling as if they had little voice and no control. This raised a further discussion that questioned the active agency of the participant within the ‘invited space’ of the museum or gallery3 How are such decisions arrived at?

The workshop participants have been set the challenge of creating an image of the current relationship between the gallery and its local communities. One community participant – the leader of a local group involved in training opportunities for the young unemployed – walks over to a side table and grabs a plate of sliced cake.

Handing the plate of cake to a senior manager of the gallery, the community participant proceeds to arrange the mixed group of workshop participants (gallery staff and their community partners), asking them to stand in positions so that the staff members are grouped around the senior manager, all holding the plate of cake. The staff members are thus seen to be offering the cake. He then has the community participants form an orderly queue, awaiting their turn to receive their allotted piece.

This young man had eloquently demonstrated, without words, what it felt like to be a ‘participant’ or community ‘partner’ of this gallery. For him, the utopian rhetoric of mutuality and shared authority that ran throughout the gallery’s policy documents and funding reports, placed, in reality, the community member in the role of ‘supplicant’ or ‘beneficiary’. Following decades of UK government investment in public engagement in museums and galleries, he had wordlessly described what it can feel like to be on the receiving end. Afterwards, someone asked: “whose cake is it anyway?”

Invisible power in the museum as ‘invited space’

It became evident in discussions with staff members that there is little understanding of how power influences the development and delivery of this complex work4. normal or acceptable. The more overt use of institutional power includes decision making and agenda-setting that clearly influence outcomes through inducement and persuasion based on the institution’s authority. But, as the study found, power also acts in invisible ways on those upon whom the practice is based, as well as on those charged with its delivery.

“I’m here to help you”

The study was frequently forced to return to the purpose of the work for each of the organisations involved. The best indication of purpose and of how these relations are configured was to be found in the language of the policy documents on engagement and participation from the 12 museums and galleries within the study.

Consider the following words taken from an analysis of one museum’s policy document (since revised). These words are typical of a variety of organisational documents in the study (and within the sector as a whole), including vision, mission statements and engagement strategies:

  • we believe
  • we have a responsibility
  • we have a strong sense
  • we can make people’s lives better
  • [we are] generators of well-being
  • we play a leading role
  • [we] increase racial tolerance
  • we nurture a sense of belonging, cohesion, identity and pride

And we:

  • provide
  • develop
  • expand
  • foster
  • ensure
  • target
  • encourage
  • promote
  • pursue
  • enhance
  • articulate
  • tell

One can acknowledge that the ambition here is genuinely to be of service, to help those in need. The organisation’s self-image in relation to its partners can come across in such terminology not only as patronising, but continuing to undervalue the potential breadth of knowledge of its community partners. It invites – and often receives – the response from community partners that they are better able to think and act for themselves than they are being given credit or scope for. The meaning behind words can be very subtle. In the language of the policy document quoted above, the museum reveals a centre/periphery view of its communities, in which the organisation is firmly placed in the centre. Despite its undoubted wish to be of service, it displays an almost nineteenth-century view of a passive subject, outside the institution, awaiting improvement. The rhetoric of service within the policy documents of the organisations in the study too often places the subject (community member) in the role of ‘supplicant’ or ‘beneficiary’ and the museum and its staff in the role of ‘carer’.

Understanding the words we use

Sometimes an examination and revaluation of language can invigorate discourse around engagement. At the Museum of East Anglian Life, staff members examined the words they used to discuss participation, and saw these ‘terms of engagement’ as a continuum. The language used includes: engagement – “inviting people to make a connection with us and our activities”; participation – “enabling people to take part” and form that connection they’re invited to make; and co-production – “enabling individuals or groups to shape or modify an activity so that it becomes a different thing”. Museum staff describe the process as one that’s “fluid” and “organic”, in which the organisation “lets go and lets fly”.

Words matter – this was made abundantly clear once people involved in the study were given the chance to examine them. It was necessary to re-examine the assumptions within the wording of the policy statements, to see how the museums and galleries in the study explained the work to themselves. It is important to make such policies, and the processes by which they are arrived at, transparent, so that others can help museums interrogate them and, ideally, reconstruct them collaboratively. In this way, the implications of such wording may be more clearly understood and match the intended purpose of participation. Such an interrogation inevitably leads to the question: what is the purpose of this work, and how central is it to the museum’s goals?

As one museum staff member noted: “People confuse consultation and collaboration…It’s a different power relationship.” The point demonstrated within the discussions is that the 12 museums and galleries needed to mind their language, or at least understand the terms they used, and consequently the promises and claims made, and make sure that they are appropriate to what the organisation is truly prepared or able to offer.

Who really matters? What is core and what is peripheral in the museum’s work?

The centre/periphery relationship between the museum or gallery and its communities was clearly exemplified by a scene created by one of the organisations:

A senior manager is given the task of describing the museum’s present relationship with its local communities. She gathers her staff into a circle, presenting each with an empty water glass she took from a side table.

The senior manager then takes the full water jug and pours water (resources) into each glass. There is very little left over.

She then approaches a group of empty chairs, which represents the public who are not present. Having placed an empty glass on one of these chairs, she drains the very small amount of water that remained in her jug into this glass. This represented the little left over for ‘the public’, she explains.

The manager had clearly demonstrated that in order to get more water to give to the ‘public’, she would have to go back to one of the curators and take water from his or her glass. This was presented by the manager as an unsolvable dilemma – simply not enough money to support community engagement programmes if the organisation is also trying to support its ‘core’ work. Thus the notion of ‘core’ did not include the museum’s communities.

Need for visionary leadership

The dependency on project funding obscures and, in the long term, avoids the lack of a sustainable, strategic plan for engagement work, which in turn hides a serious lack of vision – the kind of vision required to develop the longterm partnerships noted above. As one staff member put it: “If it’s not believed at the top as a core value, it will not work.” According to many staff members in the study, there remain, internally and externally, unexamined assumptions and differences in points of view regarding the purpose, use and success of the institution’s engagement practices. The need for leadership that places public engagement at the core of a museum’s or gallery’s values was frequently expressed by participants in the study as a prerequisite for effective public engagement. A clear direction for the work was often assumed – but when examined, was frequently very unclear. Ensuring that engagement is brought into the centre of the organisation and that all are involved in the development of a strategic plan so that there is consistency of commitment, purpose and direction was noted as essential. Too often staff members reported on an inability to make decisions on projects and a lack of guidance on how to say yes and how to say no. Consistency in supporting the organisation’s engagement work was raised as an ongoing issue within some of the organisations.

Yet, many noted that leadership is caught in a trap of opportunism and advocacy, with rhetoric disconnected from the reality of staff and community partners’ experience. In one-to-one interviews with senior management, there was frequently a lack of awareness of what was happening on the ground, and a lack of self-reflection, partly because of the pace needed to constantly keep up, and come up, with new programmes for funding agendas as opposed to staff capacity and real local needs. Clear, value-led leadership committed to engagement and participation became a prerequisite expressed by the majority of participants in the study.

Breaking the funding merry-go-round

It became clear that, by encouraging museums continually to access short term project funding for public engagement, there had been a shared failure in effectively addressing the public role of the museum as a whole. Yet it was clear from the study that, rather than finally tackling this, there is a growing danger that some of the museums and galleries in the study (large and small) will simply rush headlong to find alternatives to Renaissance and other national sources of project funding. As one staff member noted, echoing many others: “The area where we fall down is legacy and long-term. We work intensively with groups and move on. That’s the issue with project funding – you move on to the next thing.”

For many of the museums and galleries, the dependency on project funding has left them scrambling for new sources of income, with ideas currently under development for replacement project funding. In danger of simply replicating the cycle of project funding, some of the museums and galleries in the study have already seized upon opportunities such as Service Level Agreements with local authorities to deliver health and social services. These organisations must be mindful that while attempting to reinvent themselves through these new types of partnerships (social enterprises or statutory service agreements), they may find themselves bidding against third sector organisations for the same local authority budgets, and moving from possible partners to possible adversaries. They may also simply replicate the old problem of short-term project funding and its unsustainable impact, this time from a new source.

However, the current lack of project funding could present a genuinely new opportunity to negotiate new equitable partnerships with other social agencies – negotiated from the ground up. This would necessitate the museum or gallery identifying what it uniquely has to offer the partnership in terms of resources and skills development.

Long-term strategic partnerships

For many museums, an extended relationship with particular groups created a very real manifestation of participation. “Lots of people want to work with offenders, but with many it’s all lip-service,” said one partner of Open Museums in their Scottish Prison Service work. “Many see it as getting ‘brownie points’. Open Museum is so different – they are really committed.” In a similar approach, the Ryedale Folk Museum in Yorkshire works closely with the probationary service around the notion of offering real opportunities for shared work. At the Museum of East Anglian Life, a mental health partnership has seen ‘Social Enterprise’ volunteers running agricultural and horticultural work, making decisions, and maintaining, developing and producing products for sale as part of a long-term rural enterprise development plan.

Restricted resources offer new opportunities for local partnerships

The study saw excellent examples of how the present funding crisis can be an opportunity for museums and galleries to refocus on their locality, and the contribution that these museums and galleries – with their community partners – can make in helping to increase people’s capabilities within their local area.

For some in the study, increasing people’s capabilities has always been the central point of their work – being useful and being used by their community partners. They say: “We are not social workers – our skill is in skilling people in using us”. With up-to-date and reliable local intelligence and working collaboratively within its locality, a well-informed, strongly networked museum or gallery becomes a “space for creating citizenship, where in learning to participate, citizens can cut their teeth and acquire new skills that can be transferred to other spheres – whether those of formal politics or neighbourhood action”, as Cornwall puts it5.

As the influential Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, argues, such “active agency” must include the “capabilities for functioning” that enable people to exercise effective freedoms to choose and do what they value or have reason to value6. This would require museums and galleries such as those in the study to work with their local partners to re-examine the opportunities for people to make free choices, the organisation loosening its grip, sharing authority, and being open to challenge – and above all offering real opportunities for shared opinions and shared work.

Footnotes

  • 1 A. Cornwall, Democratising Engagement: What the UK Can Learn from International Experience, London: Demos 2008. www.demos.co.uk/publications/democratisingengagement
  • 2 J. Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, Illinois: University of Illinois Press 1980, p.3
  • 3 N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992, pp. 109–142.Who decides which resources are to be shared?
  • 4 The seminal work of political and social theorist Steven Lukes outlines the visible and invisible ways that institutions such as museums exercise their power. In Power: A Radical View, London: Macmillan Press 1974, Lukes describes the dimensions of power in the following way; ability to get its way despite opposition or resistance; ability to keep issues off the political agenda in the first place; the shaping of the public domain through beliefs, values and wants that are considered
  • 5 A. Cornwall and V.S.P. Coelho (eds), Spaces for Change? The politics of citizen participation in new democratic arenas, London: Zed 2007, p.8. The quotation is in the context of civil society institutions as part of international development, but it is argued here that the point can be equally applied to museums and galleries and local development
  • 6 Amartya Sen, Annual DEMOS Lecture, 2010