Engagement as Communication Practice: Discontinuity and Sustainability of Public Participation and Inclusion in A Crisis Situation

Abstract

This article argues that communication is what makes engagement ongoing and sustainable when unexpected and unanticipated events disturb long-term planned programs and events. To this end, we embrace the idea of communication as constitutive of organizational practices situated in particular contexts and distributed between publics and technologies. We therefore address communication as a practice that enacts engagement when every planned activity is disrupted and public organizations fail to sustain public participation and inclusion. Based on a study of the new National Action Plan (NAP) public consultations led by the Open Government (OG) of Canada in major crisis situations, this paper highlights how the managers drew on communication practices and interactions between OG and publics to sustain engagement through space and time, and enacted future practices throughout the crisis.