Ingredients for Success
The Implementation of the Community Advisory Council System in the City of Detroit
Kyu-Nahm Jun (Wayne State University) & Juliet Musso (Univ. of Southern California)
Recently, there has been renewed interest in engaging citizens locally. While political motivations vary, a common goal is to enhance participation and representation by creating formal bodies of community representatives to play an advisory role in policy processes. While these intentions are laudable, the best-intentioned reform can flounder if not designed properly. Yet there has been little attention to design, and in particular, to overcoming the challenges that confront the implementation of most participatory designs. This study contributes to this participation literature by illuminating how to design for more effective implementation. We pay particular attention to the substantial costs and administrative burdens that community stakeholders face when trying to activate participatory institutions. The findings underscore the importance of designing participatory systems with attention to the local context, which often has unequal access to resources in community organizing. Good statutory design is also important to reduce administrative burden, meaning the costs to participants in creating and engaging in participatory institutions. The proposed framework offers a practical guide that can be used by scholars and practitioners in assessing the design and implementation of participation systems in urban governance.
Specifically, this research develops a theoretical framework for assessing the implementation of a participation system, focusing on the barriers and prospects for its success. We apply this framework in an analysis of Detroit, which adopted a charter-mandated Community Advisory Council (CAC) system within the new city council districts in 2012. The newly established CAC system sought to provide stakeholder opportunities to communicate their needs and preferences to the city government. This participatory reform occurred when Detroit was undergoing a recovery process following the filing of Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2013, a moment in which participation had important value and faced critical barriers. To date, the CAC system remains only partially realized. This research illuminates the limitations of Detroit’s system, explaining why citywide implementation continues to lag.
A qualitative assessment based on our theoretical framework of Detroit’s CAC system demonstrates the importance of statutory factors, especially the clarity of objectives, the initial design of the participatory system, and the institutional reform to achieve coordinated efforts. A particular limitation is the design of the system to reflect city council district boundaries, rather than organizing smaller units, which is a crucial feature of success. The conflation of CAC and city council boundaries created confusion regarding their function and may have contributed in part to a perception that they would serve as gatekeepers between council members and stakeholders, as opposed to a community-based forum for deliberation and communication.
This study also emphasizes the need to account for the substantial costs and administrative burdens associated with activating participation mechanisms. Our findings suggest that the statutory rules that govern the establishment of the CAC system created significant barriers to residents without direct support from the City. The two-stage procedure of collecting petition signatures to first establish their CAC and second to run for the CAC board election has posed a substantial administrative burden and costs to resident volunteers. This, in turn, seemed to imply that political ambition and considerable commitment were required to overcome these burdens. Considering the economic stresses that Detroit has been addressing since 2012, it is reasonable that resources could not be provided for the development of the system that involves high participation costs. That said, the Detroit case signals the importance of financial and staff support to foster engagement at the grassroots.
The case highlights in particular the extent to which participatory reforms can reify inequalities embedded in communities and places throughout the implementation process. In the case of Detroit, not only the creation but also the maintenance of the established CACs will be contingent on the availability of resources. The uneven development of CACs has the potential to deepen existing inequalities across districts. Particularly where statutory designs are weak, dedicated political support and leadership are essential to overcome collective action problems.
Overall, the implementation process of Detroit’s CAC system illustrates the challenges that arise in establishing a participation infrastructure in a shrinking urban landscape. This research contributes to the public participation literature by developing and empirically exploring a theoretically informed implementation model that highlights the institutional design features required to make place-based participation work in urban governance. Theoretically, our study shifts attention to the implementation stage within the growing literature on participation mechanism design. The ability to establish and sustain the system will continue to depend on the statutory and non-statutory factors shaping place-based participation. If local leaders seek to create authentic participatory governance, they must design to overcome the high costs of implementation, administrative burdens imposed on participants, and resource constraints, with explicit attention to underlying inequality across communities.
Kyu-Nahm Jun, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Wayne State University. Her research examines community-based public participation and local government responsiveness within urban governance. Currently, her work focuses on the various forms and effects of decentralization in municipal government.
Juliet A. Musso, PhD, is an associate professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on state and local governance, community-based institutional reforms, government performance, and intergovernmental finance and service provision arrangements.