by Alex Scales, Franklin De Vrieze, Halyna Shevchuk, Maria Mousmouti and Tetiana Feshchuk
Below, we share five lessons on parliamentary public engagement in post-legislative scrutiny (PLS), drawing on experience from Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and provincial assemblies in Nepal.
Globally, PLS is increasingly becoming part of how parliaments listen to citizens, learn about how laws work in practice, and act to improve legislative quality and oversight. Rather than focusing only on how laws are passed, PLS asks more grounded questions: What is the impact of this law, and is it working as intended, for whom, and why (or why not)?
Whilst there is no single blueprint for how parliaments undertake PLS (find different examples of practice here), effective public engagement is a cornerstone. When public engagement is deep and meaningful, it helps PLS inquiries generate the insights and ownership required to meaningfully inform legislative reforms or implementation. When public engagement is done poorly or not at all, PLS becomes a technical exercise, diminishing the voice of citizens and leading to perceptions that parliaments and law-making are disconnected from people’s lives.
Drawing on a recent WFD-IPEN webinar that discussed public engagement challenges in PLS, this blog distils five practical lessons for parliamentary public engagement practitioners, drawing on experience from Ukraine and Nepal. In Ukraine, the nature of parliamentary work is profoundly challenging as citizens’ attention is primarily focused on personal security and well-being; in Nepal, the remoteness of many regions limits accessibility, which is often exacerbated by climate threats. While the contexts differ, the challenges and trade-offs discussed will be familiar across many parliaments.
Lesson 1: Effective public engagement is a design challenge, not a technical one
One of the clearest lessons from both Ukraine and Nepal is that there is no “right” engagement model for PLS, since every public engagement approach involves trade‑offs. Online engagement can dramatically increase reach, but often privileges more connected or confident voices; in‑person engagement builds trust and legitimacy, but is resource‑intensive, time-consuming and reaches fewer people. Likewise, surveys can be a useful tool to gather public opinion efficiently, whereas field visits help generate understanding and context. Rather than seeing these tensions as problems to address, it’s important to view these as design trade-offs that public engagement officials will need to consciously manage.
To understand the real impact of legislation, it’s important that parliaments don’t try to maximise participation at all costs. Effective public engagement is more about aligning methods with purpose, context, resources and political realities, as outlined in the Guide on the Principles of Parliamentary Public Engagement, and a sharp awareness of how a balanced design can provide a relevant evidence base to support legislative reform.
Lesson 2: Structural constraints are not exceptions – they are operating environment
In Nepal, geography, infrastructure, seasonality, and political coordination shape where and how engagement can happen, or not. In Ukraine, war‑time conditions and martial law impose restrictions on movement, public access to parliament, electricity supply and working patterns. In both cases, these barriers represent ongoing challenges that need to be managed and taken into account when planning engagement activities.
Public engagement strategies that assume ideal conditions rarely survive first contact with reality. Instead, practitioners should adopt hybrid and adaptive approaches, combining online and in-person engagement with flexible timelines. Designing with constraints in mind and under active review has proved far more effective than trying to work around them later.
Lesson 3: Trust and relevance matter more than volume
It’s important to identify and mitigate key structural barriers to public participation, such as low trust in institutions and limited public awareness of laws. In some cases, PLS has functioned as a form of delayed consultation, offering people their first opportunity to comment on legislation already affecting their lives. It’s therefore essential that officials provide the right conditions for them to participate, which requires proactive and consistent communications, before, during and after any engagement that addresses structural barriers head-on. Outreach needs to be politically-informed, with particular attention to why systematically marginalised voices may be reluctant or unable to participate.
Our experience from Ukraine and Nepal reveals that when laws are perceived to be highly relevant to people’s daily priorities, engagement rises. In Ukraine, where people are understandably focused on personal security and wellbeing, PLS inquiries on labour and energy legislation saw steep rises in engagement levels. But the choice of topic alone doesn’t explain this shift. People were more willing to engage when they understood why they were being asked for input, how their views would be used, and what difference engagement might make, as outlined as best practice in the Guide on Engaging Underrepresented Groups. Transparency about purpose and limits helped manage expectations and sustain credibility in the short and longer term.
Additionally, in contexts where public trust in political institutions is under pressure, field visits can help counter perceptions that elected representatives are distant from everyday public concerns by creating visible opportunities for direct engagement.
Lesson 4: Having a clear purpose and question design are critical to promote participation
We’ve learnt that poorly designed questions risk driving weak engagement, often stemming from diffuse engagement priorities. Long questionnaires, legal language, excessive open‑ended questions, and one‑size‑fits‑all surveys tend to discourage participation. This is especially true in fragile or crisis‑affected settings, where public attention is naturally divided by other priorities.
By contrast, our experience suggests that participation improves markedly when practitioners:
- Kept surveys short and realistic (around 10–15 minutes)
- Used plain, accessible language
- Limited open‑ended questions
- Tailored questions to what specific stakeholder groups could meaningfully contribute
In Ukraine, carefully designed questionnaires helped committees gather tens of thousands of responses during wartime, while still producing usable insight. Therefore, treat establishing a clear inquiry purpose and a clear question design as a critical factor, core to good public engagement. This lesson, alongside others, is reflected in WFD’s PLS Manual for Parliaments: Parliamentary innovation through post-legislative scrutiny
Lesson 5: Public engagement builds credibility when it shapes learning and action
We’ve seen that effective public engagement changes how legislators think and act, not just what appears in committee reports. In Nepal, field engagement has influenced and supported Members of Provincial Assemblies to raise issues in the Assembly that extend beyond the immediate PLS inquiry, bringing in broader concerns encountered during these visits, including the everyday challenges faced by citizens. In Ukraine, public engagement activities (such as hearings on children’s and youth sports on 30th April 2024 and 16th October 2025) have helped to reshape committee perspectives by grounding discussions in how laws are working in practice, highlighting gaps in awareness, uneven implementation, and resource constraints, and informing committee recommendations and proposals to amend legislation.
These sorts of behavioural impacts often extend beyond the immediate inquiry. When engagement is designed as a learning process, rather than a data collection exercise, it strengthens PLS as a tool for adaptive oversight. Public engagement begins to build understanding, which supports legislators to see clearly how laws are experienced and inform action.
Institutionalising PLS through laws, committee work plans, rules, and procedures helps to protect this kind of responsive governance from political changes. However, it’s not enough to only formalise PLS in parliamentary business: PLS engagement must continue to demonstrate value to parliamentarians, staff, civil society, and citizens, or it risks becoming a tick‑box exercise. Credibility depends on relevance, transparency, and visible use of public input.
Summary
PLS is reshaping how parliaments relate to the public: by creating structured opportunities to listen, learn, and act on evidence and lived experience, parliaments are better placed to act in the public interest. For public engagement practitioners, the task is not to eliminate trade-offs, but to navigate them with purpose and design engagement activities that align with requirements, context and local realities. Together, this focus encourages the type of engagement and learning that leads to action.
To continue the conversation, join the International Parliament Engagement Network and WFD’s Global Community of Practice on Post-Legislative Scrutiny. You can read more about how WFD is supporting PLS activity in Ukraine here: https://www.wfd.org/news/supporting-scrutiny-wartime-ukraine
Featured photo credit: : Forum: Veterans in Politics. Building Ukraine’s Democratic Future. Westminster Foundation for Democracy. All rights reserved.
Note: This article is jointly published on the IPEN and WFD websites.
