Post in Is it worth funding ICELE, asks Coleman

Apr 03 14:37 UTC

I'd love to see a real cost-benefit analysis too, Steven. The question is,
how do you do it?
Involve performed a useful literature review of attempts to evaluations of
public participation in policy-making, and concluded that "actual
cost-benefit analyses of participation are, as far as we have been able to
discern, virtually non-existent", largely due to the difficulty of
disaggregating intangible benefits like social capital and improved
relationships, or finding ways to taking into account the distribution of
costs and benefits, including to non-participants and society as a whole.
These can be very long-term, diffuse processes. See
http://www.involve.org.uk/civilrenewal
They call for some detailed economic appraisals of flagship projects which
would help develop criteria for analysing costs and benefits. Their focus
was not on eParticipation and eDemocracy, but the same difficulties surely
apply whether online or off.

Simon Smith