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INTERNATIONAL PARLIAMENT ENGAGEMENT NETWORK OFFERS COLLEGIALITY FOR MEMBERS AND PRACTICAL SUPPORT FOR PARLIAMENTS
from The Parliamentarian: 2023 Issue Two: Parliamentary learning from networks across the Commonwealth
By Professor Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Dr Sarah Moulds and Dr Elise Uberoi
The growing impetus to connect the people with their Parliaments has generated a flurry of activity and investment in the last few years, both inside and outside of parliamentary settings. Elected Members of Parliament, senior parliamentary staff, community organisations and commentators are all hungry to learn more about what works and why. This appetite for evidence-based information about parliamentary public engagement and the need for a safe forum for sharing best practice gave rise to the establishment of the International Parliament Engagement Network1 (known as ‘IPEN’) and has fuelled its rapid expansion and impact ever since.
The International Parliament Engagement Network was established in 2020 as a collaboration between the Centre for Democratic Politics2 at the University of Leeds3 and the UK House of Commons Service and has grown rapidly. It currently has over 300 members from over 50 countries across the world, combining academics, parliamentary officials and representatives of civil society organisations. IPEN provides a virtual network to facilitate research and develop evidence-based resources for parliamentary staff seeking to engage the public with Parliaments’ work — an area of increased public and academic interest in the context of a decline in trust and a rise in populism and political disengagement.
While organisations such as Involve 4 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 5 offer resources on public engagement, these are not specific to the context of Parliaments. Parliaments are complex organisations that balance the needs, values and intentions of different actors, including (party political) Parliamentarians and (impartial) officials. Public engagement activities in this context need to balance political and impartial requirements: political support is crucial and the involvement of Parliamentarians in these activities can really help their public appeal, but Parliaments — as institutions — need to appeal to all citizens and reflect Parliamentarians from all political parties. Many Parliaments deliver these activities with small budgets and teams who may be new to this emerging area, generating a need for lesson learning and sharing resources. In addition, with (usually) only one Parliament per country, opportunities to share lessons have been limited.
This is where the International Parliament Engagement Network comes in. IPEN aims to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration between officials, civil society representatives and academics from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, to enhance research and practice in parliamentary public engagement. IPEN connects its members through the sharing of research and reports, facilitating introductions, discussions and exchanges via MS Teams and hosting professional development seminars online. Its membership is open to parliamentary officials from all jurisdictions who are invited to join as individuals (with or without associated membership from their respective institution), in addition to academics and third sector organisations working in the area of public engagement with Parliaments.
These unique features of IPEN mean that it offers both formal and informal opportunities for people to connect, removing barriers sometimes associated with institutional hierarchy and enabling empowering, supportive professional relationships to form between scholars and practitioners from around the world.
IPEN includes members associated with Commonwealth Parliaments, for example from the UK, New Zealand, Canada and Australia. But other parliamentary traditions are also represented, for example through members from Brazil, Nigeria, Germany and the USA. IPEN organised a pioneering online conference in 2021,6 hosted across three global hubs in Australia, Europe and Brazil, and its international membership has grown significantly since.
Every month, IPEN delivers at least one online seminar. Some of these are delivered through the new global Public Engagement Hub,7 which is co-hosted by IPEN and the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Centre for Innovation in Parliament. While IPEN seminars take place in IPEN’s MS Teams, Hub seminars are hosted on Zoom and aimed at wider audiences interested in public engagement with Parliaments, often featuring IPEN members as presenters.
Our online seminars8 have covered topics including parliamentary broadcasting, engaging children and using citizen input for parliamentary business. We have heard from people all over the world, including Australia, South Africa, Brazil and Ireland. IPEN members are invited to help shape the seminar programme. This means that seminars offer members the opportunity to hear about new ideas they could try themselves, but also give them the chance to showcase their own successes and innovations. IPEN members say that these seminars result in ongoing engagement with officials from other Parliaments and researchers.
IPEN’s MS Team hosts a wealth of resources including academic research and recordings of all our seminars. Our website also includes the public engagement toolkit9 that we produced based on an online interactive workshop with input from 60 IPEN members. If you ever have time, you and/or your team might like to try to put into practice key public engagement principles through the online ‘escape-room’ game we developed, Terra Nova,10 also available on our website.
IPEN is open to all parliamentary staff involved in or interested in public engagement. You can apply to join via our website 11 to start capturing the benefits of this vibrant network for your own institution.
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Professor Cristina Leston Bandeira is Chair of IPEN and a Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds. She has conducted research on Parliaments for nearly 30 years. Her research focuses on the relationship between Parliament and citizens, particularly public and digital engagement.
Dr Sarah Moulds is a senior lecturer in law at the University of South Australia and an Executive member of IPEN. She is the editor of the Australasian Parliamentary Review and her most recent book ‘Committees of Influence’ explores the important role that Parliamentary Committees play in rights protection in Australia.
Dr Elise Uberoi is a statistics researcher in the UK Parliament's House of Commons Library and Deputy Chair of IPEN. She works on statistics on elections and the UK Parliament, including public engagement.
References:
1 https://ipen-network.org/
2 https://cdp.leeds.ac.uk/
3 https://www.leeds.ac.uk/
4 https://involve.org.uk/
5 https://www.oecd.org/
6 https://ipen-network.org/ipen-2021-conference/
7 https://www.ipu.org/innovation-hub/public-engagement-hub
8 https://ipen-network.org/recent-seminars/
9 https://ipen-network.org/public-engagement-toolkit/
10 https://ipen-network.org/terranova-game/
11 https://ipen-network.org/contact/
