Civic engagement is the process through which people come together, as members of a community, to pursue shared goals. This process can take different forms. It may be geared towards influencing the actions of the state – such as when people organize to provide inputs into policy making. Or it may be more community-focused – for instance, when people tap into local knowledge and relations to generate new solutions to shared development challenges. In all its different forms, civic engagement is a human right. Protecting people’s ability to meaningfully engage in public life – beyond the delegation of power to office holders – is essential to upholding human dignity and freedom. Civic engagement has, therefore, an intrinsic value. However, at the same time, it also has an instrumental value as an enabler of collective intelligence, which, in the right circumstances, leads to better collective decisions and unlocks benefits for human development.< When people pool together insights, skills and ideas in a collaborative process, their contributions often become more than the sum of their individual efforts. This enhanced capacity – which we refer to as “collective intelligence” – can be very powerful and has always been central to humanity’s ability to solve problems quickly and at scale. Civic engagement, by mobilizing members of society beyond the confines of public institutions and by building bridges between communities and public institutions, is a major driver of collective intelligence. By this term we mean the enhanced capacity that is created when people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilize a wider range of information, ideas and insights. Especially when it is truly inclusive – when it creates space for people from all walks of life to contribute – collective intelligence can have a major impact in harnessing our world’s collective brainpower and unleashing human ingenuity.

We find that the mapped experiences tend to gravitate around three primary areas of focus:

Consider a very simple model of collective outcomes as the result of a linear process that consists of first, acquiring information; second, making decisions based on that information; and third, taking action to execute those decisions. With another simplification, consider the citizenry’s collective intelligence and formalized governance processes as the two main forces that drive this process. The three patterns described above can be classified in terms of the phases of the process where collective intelligence has a role to play.

Five years of bottom-up R&D on participation by the UNDP Accelerator Labs Network have resulted in many innovative approaches that are now tested, have shown significant promise, and are ready for scale. At the same time, it is important to stress that the search for effective participation pathways is a never-ending process. Many questions remain wide open, when it comes to the promotion of meaningful citizen participation in public decision-making processes.

The central proposal of this document is that five years of bottom-up innovation on participation provide us with new tools for a direct attack at some of these questions. UNDP is committed to continue to pursue a bottom-up approach to R&D, in collaboration with a wide range of partners, to address these and other questions that are central to the promotion of civic engagement and the facilitation of collective intelligence.