​Each workshop provides a practical, learning-intensive introduction to the Canadian Public Policy Forum’s approach to public engagement, based on first-hand experience through original case studies.

The process will focus on six basic questions:

• What’s wrong with the policy process
• What is public engagement
• How do public engagement processes work well
• How can we evaluate them
• How can we begin using them to change policy development, communications and service delivery
• What are new ways of engaging citizens in service delivery

Policy-making is in trouble. In a simpler, slower world, a top-down approach served us well enough, but in the fast-moving, highly interdependent world of today it often lacks legitimacy and results in overly simplistic solutions to complex issues.

The traditional policy process was designed for a different world and it is time for a change.

Public engagement is a new way of thinking about how government works together with citizens, communities and stakeholders to achieve a wide range of goals that it cannot achieve through the traditional policy process such as population health, adjustment to climate change, building a highly skilled labour force, or national security.

Goals like these require genuine collaboration.