"Lack of evidence" is a recurring theme in Think Tank and policy material on involvement. Reports on community engagement lament the thin and uneven evidence base, or over-state the value of the limited evidence they can marshal, before laying out a few small-scale examples where principles and policy appear to have sparked. Even the more buoyant "Engagement Ethic" report from the Innovation Exchange withdraws into a list of advice for "public services" on tactics for successful engagement.  The audience for all this stuff is inward-looking - often, the very people who have power and authority and for whom an evidence base is really not the issue - for too many it is about what they need to do to retain the imbalance of power which prevents involvement. Keeping the status quo requires little effort on their part.

So this makes the real obstacle to greater involvement an inability to fight where it really matters - over authority and influence, right at the centre of participative democracy, fuelling social movements in action more than redefining a shift in what the state does.  Social movements rarely look for a neat body of evidence, relying more on the unifying energy of the self-evident impact of the current state of things on people's lives. Such change happens more by securing hearts, than it does by cold, logical persuasion.

The impact of people not being fully involved in what matters to them is visible and evident enough. Given the profound lack of trust in public representatives the trick is surely to do rather than describe; to articulate issues which need to be changed with passion and then be at the forefront of making the change happen, rather than bloodlessly describing a few safe examples where involvement has worked, in the hope that this might inspire a mind-shift in well-embedded public leaders.

If we allow it, the hunt for an evidence base is a distraction.  No equivalent evidence is required for the status quo or for staff engagement, or for many other policy developments.  Fontis seeks better evidence for involvement, but the profound shift in power and models of accountability needed for profound and lasting change will be driven more by doing from outside than describing change for those already inside to adopt.  So where do we start?