When we were children playing hide and seek the most popular hiding places were behind trees. It's one sign of the way the world has changed that today's conservation managers like to hide behind post-it notes.
Sheffield Moors Partnership (SMP) conducted the most cowardly consultation in 2012 on their Master Plan. It was the worst example of chickening out I've come across in the sphere of public meetings, but it needs saying that the strategy has become increasingly used by public bodies around here despite being discredited.
It amounts to fear of public scrutiny.**
See:
Partner Ploys
Being Scrutinised
It was frankly embarrassing. A consultation that was to finish up with an expensive glossy brochure giving the message that this was the outcome of extensive public engagement, yet a refusal to engage in discussion on real issues. Those partners, or their representatives looked uncomfortable when people did manage to question them. Their faint-heartedness was shocking and their guilty looks spoke volumes as they hid behind post-it notes. Instead of dialogue this was a consultation characterised by absence and cheating. Nobody wanted to talk about anything. They had of course already decided the outcome and were bothered that somebody might try to take their programme off course.
**It's been suggested that there should be a phobia term for this condition. None of the phobia lists consulted have helped so a new word elegophobia has been coined using the first letters for the greek word for scrutiny. I'm awaiting the authority of a greek scholar for this to be confirmed.
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