Keep off the grass: stakeholder consultation in parks services

This paper considers how the requirement for stakeholder consultation which was enshrined in the Local Government Act 1999 was implemented in the case of Parks and Green Spaces. It examines three Local Authority cases in depth, through archival materials and interviews with employees and politicians. It notes considerable variation in the extent of practical organisational commitment to the policy. It concludes that even where the organisations assembled some of the paraphernalia of implementation of this important political initiative (training, methods of sampling and data collection, standard approaches to information analysis) officers were left to make sense for themselves of how to engage with users, how to use their feedback and how to reconcile this with internal practical and political conflicts.