Acting out policy making

We hosted an energising face-to-face session at our Stratford offices with over 60 people from colleagues from Newham and guests from other councils and organisations from other sectors in London to introduce a new method to involve residents in policy-making - legislative theatre.

Many thanks to Katarina Anderson K?ppi from the Policy Design & Partnerships team at Newham Council for organising and Sanjan Sabherwal from Policy Lab for co-hosting and running the initial workshop on policy design methods that got us here. We were incredibly privileged to welcome Katy Rubin to facilitate how this method works and to simulate a mock legislative theatre on the spot!

Katy Rubin is a Legislative Theatre practitioner based in the UK, working towards a participatory democracy that's joyful, equitable and inclusive. She's collaborating with communities and local councils to co-create policy on housing and homelessness, climate change, and cultural institutions. Originally from New York City, she served as the Theatre of the Oppressed NYC executive director from 2011-2018. Check out her website if you want to learn more about her work or commission her.

We started by warming up around the room and then practising what seemed like very counterintuitive exercises!?This was all about getting us in the mood for practising legislative theatre. Then, after walking through the purpose of legislative theatre and the different steps in how it works, we acted out a situation you could encounter in any policy-making process. Someone was trying to advocate for better involving residents from particular communities and for the organisation to open up their processes. The manager was ably deflecting all these requests to maintain the status quo.

It revealed how it uncovered the power inequalities that exist, the processes or defaults people revert to legitimise their (our) own power. Sometimes, that's subconscious, and they feel like they're just trying to manage risk. Then, a new person acts out a new character?bringing in a new method that could help better involve the residents through human-centred design. And then, another person wanted to bring all the actors in the room together with the residents, so they could better put themselves in the shoes of local communities and see the relationship between the policy and people's experiences. Then, the development of ideas turns into a short set of priorities. We learnt how important it is to work with community organisations to provide that outreach and to work sensitively with people with lived experience.

We've got another session with demonstrator projects embedding participation into policy-making sharing their progress on 9 November, and the London Research & Policy Partnership on 17 November. You can take a look at our other upcoming?events?and?blog.

If you'd like to share ideas on themes and speakers for next year's sessions, if you've got 5 minutes, you can grab a cuppa and fill in this?short survey.

London Strategy and Policy Network

This network brings together people working in policy & strategy in local government across London to learn new insights on cross-cutting issues and new methods for developing insight, policy, strategy & change. This helps them support their organisations make sense of how to tackle the problems that cut across various services and require a whole system approach across local places.