Usually when people ask us how much a participatory or deliberative process costs we respond with ”it depends”. Now we realise this isn’t the most helpful response — but the reason we say that is because there are so many factors that can influence the cost of the same method. How many participants will there be and what remuneration are you offering for their time? What access needs do you need to budget for? How long do you have to plan and deliver the process? Where are events taking place and will any of it be online? Are you hiring independent facilitators or are you delivering it in house? What follow up will you do to make sure the decisions have impact?
We also say that you should select your method last. You might like the sound of one method, but it might not be suitable for the question you’re asking members of the public. What this means in practice is that the scope and nature of the question you’re asking — and where the decision(s) will land — will determine the sort of approach to take. We advise this so that your process can have the maximum possible impact.
That said, we know how useful it can be to have a ballpark figure about how much participatory and deliberative processes cost, so you can work out if you have adequate resources to even consider delivering certain methods. There is a big range of factors that will affect the budget of your process. The indicative costs we’ve outlined is what you are likely to need to run the process itself. If you want your process to have impact, you will want to think about other costs like follow up activities and actions to make sure the conclusions or recommendations are put into action. Or budget for internal and external communications to share the outcomes and impact of your process.
The most talked about forms of deliberation and participation are citizens assemblies and citizens juries. For longer term strategies or ongoing decisions, there is the potential to use accountability or scrutiny panels, and standing panels. We also outline other methods — public dialogue, community conversations and citizen visioning. We provide you with costings and summaries of the methods in each of the sections below, but you can find out more detail about each of the methods on our methods database.