- Authorization refers to formal or official approval, in this case to undertake the feedback loop process (and make use of necessary resources, data, and staff time).
- Buy-in relates to political will, and is meant to capture the interest, motivation, incentives, and other factors that - in this case - will get stakeholders to initiate a reform process and stick to it. Buy-in is never fixed, and matters for high ranked officials, but also the public and civil society who are participating.
- Civil society organization is an organizational structure that operates distinctly from government and business, often playing a role in advocacy, service-delivery, or participating in and supporting other social, economic, and political causes and activities.
- Citizen assemblies and citizen juries use representative sampling to select a representative group of residents (often around 100 or so for assemblies and fewer for juries) that is tasked to consider a predetermined problem or issue. The group then generates recommendations (which are sometimes binding for the government). A good process involves dedicated time for education and learning, where experts and stakeholders present facts or viewpoints to the assembly, who then deliberate on the best paths forward and arrive at recommendations through consensus. Dissenting voices may generate their own recommendations.
- Co-creation or codesign is a process through which stakeholders (in this case, government, civil society and the public) convene to discuss, deliberate and reach consensus on a particular subject. In the spirit of the feedback loop, rather than informing the public of the problems they face and how to solve them, stakeholders enter into a dialogue that, through a process of consultation (through meetings, surveys, discussion or other platforms), generates consensus on the way forward.
- Core team refers to the individuals chiefly responsible for the design, implementation and follow-up of the feedback loop process. These individuals may include government staff and bureaucrats within the local government administration and assembly, as well as civil society representatives, experts, academics and any other members of the public involved in supporting the process.
- Feedback loop is a type of structured two-way communication designed to enable a local authority to gather, analyze and address the opinions, concerns and suggestions of community residents. Feedback loops are, in essence, a form of ongoing dialogue between members of the public and local government officials that can drive continuous improvement in services, policies and programs. They are designed to help local leaders identify and address community challenges in an iterative and participatory way; in other words – to “find, solve and tell.”
- Focus group discussion (FGD) is a gathering of carefully selected, demographically homogenous participants to discuss participants’ beliefs, opinions and views on a particular issue.
- Inclusion is an approach to governing and organizing people that accounts for and seeks to address the power imbalances between various groups, identities and members of the community.
- Key informant interview (KII) is a qualitative research method in which someone (likely a person from your team, or possibly a contractor) poses a standard set of questions to stimulate an in-depth discussion with individuals about their observations and perspectives on the issues, processes and challenges impacting the community.
- Leadership refers to the individuals primarily responsible for approving or authorizing the feedback loop process and, often, ultimately deciding on the course of action to be taken as a consequence of feedback. This may include elected or appointed leaders or managers of a given subnational government unit or agency, such as the mayor, governor or local executive; officials in the mayoral or executive administration; heads of local agencies; elected legislators (such as councilors, alderpersons or other representatives); and, potentially, representatives of national ministries responsible for subnational development or oversight of local and regional authorities.
- Local authority is the catchall term used throughout this guide. It refers to any subnational government at any level. A feedback loop can realistically be deployed by any government with governments above and below it. Generally, we are relying on the experiences of the very lowest formal governing authority, such as the mayor and local council of a municipality.
- Participatory and deliberative democracy (PDD) practices sit between direct democracy (where citizens make decisions directly) and traditional representative democracy (where elected representatives make decisions on the public’s behalf) and can be used as part of or in conjunction with a feedback loop process to codesign solutions to address complex community challenges.
- Participatory budgeting is a mechanism where a percentage of the local authority budget is set aside for members of the public to propose and submit ideas for funding. After a vetting process to remove impractical ideas, residents vote on their favorite projects, which are funded.
- Public participation or engagement in a democratic governance context involves the extent to which members of the public have access to and influence over decisions made regarding the affairs that concern them and their community. Participation can be facilitated by the government or demanded by community organizers and civil society. There are degrees of public participation, ranging from ignoring the public entirely and denying their access to decisions on one end to deferring to the public through community ownership on the other.
- Qualitative data represents information and concepts that are not represented by numbers. This information is generated by your context analysis collected from interviews, free-form responses or focus groups.
- Quantitative data can be represented numerically and includes anything that can be counted, measured or assigned a numerical value.
- Residents, the community or the public are catchall terms for people within the jurisdiction of a given local authority. This includes people who live, work or generally inhabit the geographic jurisdiction. It includes citizens and voters, but also those who are temporarily or permanently under the jurisdiction but may not be citizens or voters in that locality, such as migrants, refugees or internally displaced persons, and those unable to vote (such as youth and children). The terms also include individuals who do not have a formal address in a particular area, such as unhoused people or workers who commute daily into a particular jurisdiction and regularly rely on its infrastructure or access its services. As will be discussed, the targeted population under a feedback loop process will likely be more limited than this and will be influenced by the goals of a given feedback loop and the outreach capabilities of the government unit in question.
- Responsiveness (in governance) involves governments not just committing to change (with the commitment being an example of a response), but actually meeting its commitment and recognizing the legitimacy and relevance of the public’s input into the process; responsiveness can be enhanced when governments take the additional step to justify and explain their actions.
- Sampling refers to the methods by which researchers create a random and representative sample of individuals to increase the accuracy and limit bias in the survey results. In surveys and public opinion research, a sample is the subset of the larger population you are seeking to understand. Because it is impossible to survey everyone, a good sample allows researchers to feel confident that their results reflect those of the broader population.
- Wicked problems in public policy are uniquely challenging, and can be contrasted with so-called “tame” problems of engineering and mathematics, which can eventually be solved. A wicked problem is characterized by: a) complexity, in that its constituent elements are hard to track or disentangle, are influenced by external factors and trends, and may shift or change over time; b) uncertainty, in that you cannot predict all of the consequences or risks of proposed solutions, and it is difficult to tell when the problem is truly solved; and c) divergence between stakeholders, in that opinions on the problem and the ideal solutions differ, reflecting stakeholders’ unique values, intentions and contexts.
