Developing a civic intelligence: local involvement in HIA

Public involvement and participation in policy development and implementation is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of social life. However, as politics and policy become ever more concerned with ‘evidence,’ the relationship between ‘expert evidence’ and political judgements and decisions becomes ever more complicated. For this reason, public participation increasingly has to mean inclusion in arguments about information, evidence and knowledge as much as it means straightforward involvement in decision making. Such involvement can involve critical questioning of a kind that can challenge and sometimes debunk expertsʹ claims to privileged understanding. One practical arena in which knowledge-based policy and politics is being expressed is in health impact assessment (HIA). This paper describes a health impact assessment of housing options in a former mining village in South Wales in order to illustrate the contributions that local people can make to both evidence and decision making. This case study exemplifies an emerging civic intelligence that challenges a traditional demarcation between different forms of expertise and creates public spaces that provide the basis for new opportunities of democratic renewal.