Engagement is a subject that hardly gets a mention in many consultancy books. Perhaps this is because the preparation of the contract seems to many people to be the most important phase of the work, before the major implementation of the consultancy. We regard the need to engage with the clients and citizens involved in different ways in public services as absolutely crucial to the success of a consultancy. It is important to take time to consider carefully the different individuals and groups with a stake in the particular area of public services being tackled. That is why this chapter is one of the lengthier ones in this book.

The phases into which we divide consultancy in this book are a somewhat artificial contrivance that enables us to discuss separately things that in real consultancy practice are often not separable. In this chapter and the next we make a distinction between engaging and empowering, as though they follow each other, which they often do not in a clear-cut fashion. Reassuringly, perhaps, when we encountered the book by Gunn and Durkin (2010, p 167), we found that our division of the phases corresponds closely with their four stages of social entrepreneurship: analysis, instigation, sustaining and reflecting. Although there is some overlap between the focus of social entrepreneurs and that of consultants in public services, there are good reasons why we have located the activity of gathering information rather later in the process – after engagement takes place – than they do. As already noted, most of the phases of consultancy we deal with in Chapters Two to Six overlap and on occasions coincide, or are even repeatedly revisited. However, despite the overlapping nature of engagement and empowerment, they are distinctively different. Engagement in the field of public services is the term used to refer to the early stage in the involvement process where citizens and workers begin to interact significantly. Empowerment goes beyond engagement and is defined in the next chapter. Engagement is part of the process of participation by people – staff and citizens. Participation is often used interchangeably with involvement, but these terms have different, if related, meanings.