Boards and Commissions
How Governments Can Get the Most From Advisory Boards
What the evidence supports, what practitioners face, and what nobody has studied yet.
A mid-sized American city might have twenty advisory boards. A federal agency might have dozens. Thousands of people give up weeknights to serve on planning commissions, park boards, health advisory councils, and citizen review panels. Most managers do not choose whether these bodies exist. They are created by ordinance, charter, and statute, and they outlive the problems that produced them.
So the practical question is rarely whether to build an advisory board. It is what to do with the ones you inherited, several of which may struggle to make quorum.
That question framed a recent American Society for Public Administration webinar, Calling All Experts: Advisory Boards in Public Administration, where I joined Valerie Lemmie, a former city manager and Senior Advisor for State and Local Government at the Kettering Foundation. We discussed how these bodies influence government, where they break down, and what helps them succeed. Each section below draws on that conversation. It summarizes what the research supports, offers practical advice for administrators, and names a research gap that scholars and practitioners could close together.
Start by deciding what the board is for
“Advisory board” covers bodies with almost nothing in common. A planning commission exercising quasi-judicial authority over rezoning is not a sustainability commission that can only recommend, and neither resembles a pension board, a scientific board, or a civil service commission. The webinar’s framing captures what is at stake: advisory boards bridge technical expertise and public decision-making, shaping everything from environmental regulation to public health guidance. The bridges they build differ, though, and governments get the most from a board when they are specific about which one they are asking it to build.
Archon Fung’s (2006) “Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance” offers a usable sorting tool. Any participatory body can be described along three dimensions: who takes part, how participants communicate and decide, and how much authority they hold. Those three choices determine most of what follows.
John Clayton Thomas’s (1995) Public Participation in Public Decisions adds the decision rule managers most need. The more a decision depends on public acceptance rather than technical quality, the more influence the public should have. Choosing a library’s cataloging software and deciding which branch library to close are different problems. Giving both the same participatory treatment wastes effort on one and courts failure on the other.
Practical Advice: Write a charge that names the questions the board will answer, whom it advises, and by when. Susan Moffitt’s (2014) Making Policy Public, a study of FDA advisory committees, found that agencies use public advisory processes most when facing high uncertainty and credibility problems. That is a reasonable test for whether a board is the right tool at all.
Research Gap: These frameworks tell governments how to match a board’s design to its task, but we know little about whether cities do so. Fung and Thomas offer normative guidance, and Moffitt studied federal committees. Local boards may instead arise from federal and state mandates, symbolic responsiveness, or the desire to create appointments. A study could code local enabling ordinances on Fung’s three dimensions and on how specific each board’s charge is. It could then classify the decisions each board touches by Thomas’s distinction between technical quality and public acceptance, and test whether boards with clear charges and a good fit are more active and more influential.
Time the input before the decision is made
Timing may be the highest-leverage change available to most governments, and it requires coordination more than money.
Boards asked to react to finished proposals have little to work with. Boards involved while options remain open can shape them. Chris Ansell and Alison Gash’s (2008) “Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice,” which synthesized 137 cases, identified facilitative leadership, clear ground rules, and a shared understanding of the problem as conditions for effective collaboration. A shared understanding is hard to build around a proposal that is already finished.
Practical Advice: Build each board’s calendar backward from the budget and the council agenda, not forward from its own meeting schedule, so its advice arrives before staff finalize their recommendations.
Research Gap: Early involvement may not simply increase a board’s influence. It may also increase the staff’s influence over the board. Philip Selznick’s (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots showed how organizations absorb outside participants into their own framing, a process he called co-optation. A board that helps define a problem alongside staff may come to share staff’s view of it, and the shared understanding Ansell and Gash describe may be staff’s understanding. We do not know which stage of involvement lets boards change proposals without being co-opted: defining the problem, generating options, or choosing among them. A study could follow boards brought in at each stage and compare how often their recommendations depart from staff’s original options, and how often members dissent from staff.
Take the representation problem seriously
The strongest objection to advisory boards is that they can narrow the range of voices government hears while appearing to widen it.
The Urban Institute’s (2023) survey of land-use boards in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas found persistent overrepresentation of white residents, men, homeowners, and real estate and planning professionals. Public meetings show a similar pattern. Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer’s (2019) Neighborhood Defenders, drawing on thousands of public comments at Massachusetts land-use meetings, found that the people who speak are older, more likely to own their homes, and more likely to oppose new housing than the communities they speak for. Even well-designed systems struggle with this. Jeffrey Berry, Kent Portney, and Ken Thomson’s (1993) The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, a study of five cities with citywide neighborhood participation systems, found that those systems deepened the involvement of people who took part but did not broaden participation among low-income residents.
Birmingham, Alabama, was one of those five cities, and I watched that pattern up close as vice president of the Five Points South Neighborhood Association. Under Birmingham’s Citizen Participation Plan, neighborhood associations advise the city on matters such as zoning and alcohol licenses. Five Points South is home to roughly ten thousand residents, yet for years the same ten to twenty people made most of the association’s decisions. I support the association, and I believe in my neighbors’ good intentions, but like any advisory board, we had room to grow in living up to the ideals of participatory democracy. That is the core critique of advisory bodies: they can become insular groups holding a public credential.
Jane Mansbridge’s (1999) “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women?” explains why this matters. Descriptive representation is most valuable where trust is low and group interests are not yet clearly articulated. Those are the conditions many advisory boards are meant to address.
Practical Advice: Recruit actively rather than waiting for applications, and use staggered terms to prevent entrenchment. Note and alleviate the practical barriers that determine who can serve, such as meeting times, childcare, transportation, and language.
Research Gap: Some studies document the composition of local boards, most notably the Urban Institute’s 2023 national survey of land-use bodies, a 2025 statewide census of Missouri municipal boards, and Iowa’s Gender Balance Project, which has tracked local boards since 2012. We know of no study, however, that has assembled a multi-state dataset spanning board types, coded how members are appointed, and tested how appointment method shapes who serves.
Build a place for recommendations to land
The webinar asked what separates a board that checks a box from one that drives change. Much of the answer lies in what happens after a board makes its recommendations, and the problem is usually neglect rather than rejection. Recommendations rarely die in a vote. The report is received, thanked, and filed, and six months later nobody can say what became of it.
John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s (1977) “Institutionalized Organizations” describes a pattern called decoupling: organizations adopt structures that generate legitimacy while insulating their actual operations from them. That is a hypothesis borrowed from organizational sociology, not a tested finding about advisory boards, but it fits what many practitioners describe. Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky’s (1973) Implementation explains the mechanics. Each additional decision point multiplies the chance of failure, and a recommendation that no one owns, passing informally between offices, faces many.
Practical Advice: Assign one staff member to track the board’s recommendations in the agenda management system. Have the council approve each board’s annual work plan, so that doomed projects are caught before work begins. Adopt a default rule: any recommendation with no recorded action after 90 days goes on the council agenda automatically, presented by the board chair rather than by staff. Silence then triggers a hearing instead of a burial.
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Research Gap: Auditors routinely track whether their recommendations are implemented, but we do not know how often local advisory board recommendations are received and filed with no recorded action. We also do not know which remedy works best: tracking systems, rules requiring the council to respond in writing, or rules placing recommendations on the council agenda. Written-response rules deserve particular scrutiny. If the department that staffs a board also drafts the council’s reply, the rule may route the board’s advice back through the staff it was meant to check. A study could trace recommendations through agendas and minutes in cities that use each approach and compare how many reach a documented outcome.
Weigh the costs honestly
Renée Irvin and John Stansbury’s (2004) “Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It Worth the Effort?” remains the clearest accounting of what participation costs. The costs include staff time, delayed decisions, the risk of domination by unrepresentative interests, and the damage done by raising expectations and then ignoring input. The authors also identify conditions under which participation is not worth its cost.
The largest cost never appears in a budget. A board that is created and then ignored can damage trust more than having no board at all.
Administrators’ attitudes help determine whether that happens. Kaifeng Yang’s (2005) “Public Administrators’ Trust in Citizens” found that administrators who distrust citizens are less likely to pursue participation in earnest. Kaifeng Yang and Kathe Callahan’s (2007) “Citizen Involvement Efforts and Bureaucratic Responsiveness,” using ICMA survey data, found that administrators’ values and attitudes strongly shape how seriously participation mechanisms are used.
Practical Advice: Run periodic sunset and consolidation reviews, and share staff across related boards. In most cities, a smaller number of well-supported boards will serve residents better than many unsupported ones.
Research Gap: Governments are told to run sunset and consolidation reviews, but there are no tested criteria for deciding which boards justify their cost. Irvin and Stansbury describe when participation is not worth its cost, but no one has turned their conditions into a checklist that reviewers can use to evaluate a specific board. Yang’s findings suggest that some boards fail because their staff liaisons distrust citizens. If so, a review might eliminate a board that needed new staff support instead. A study could code boards on Irvin and Stansbury’s conditions, survey staff liaisons on their trust in citizens, and test which factors predict recommendation uptake, member retention, and staff cost.
Do not mistake legitimacy-seeking for cynicism
It is easy to dismiss a board used for political cover as cynical. That judgment may be too quick. Routing a contested fee increase or facility closure through a board with a genuine charge spreads judgment on a decision that benefits from more than one set of eyes. Moffitt’s finding points the same direction: uncertainty and credibility problems are exactly the conditions under which outside judgment is worth having.
Seeking legitimacy is a worthy goal, and advisory boards can help achieve it. The problem arises when officials seek legitimacy from a board after they have already decided the outcome. Donald Moynihan’s (2003) “Normative and Instrumental Perspectives on Public Participation” calls this pseudo-participation. It carries most of the costs of participation and few of its benefits.
Practical Advice: Before sending a contested decision to a board, state in writing which options remain open and what the board could change. If the honest answer is nothing, don’t refer it; announce the decision and explain it instead. When a referral is genuine, send it before staff finalize a recommendation, and give the board the same data staff used.
Research Gap: We do not know whether sending a contested decision to an advisory board makes the public more willing to accept it. A study could compare fee increases and facility closures that went through an advisory board with similar decisions that did not, and ask affected residents whether they accept the outcome.
Expect translation, not just expertise
The webinar’s title, Calling All Experts, reflects the conventional view of advisory boards: they import technical knowledge into government. That is half of it. Sheila Jasanoff’s (1990) The Fifth Branch showed that science advisory committees do not simply deliver neutral facts. They negotiate where the technical question ends and the value question begins. A board reviewing a corridor study is weighing engineering standards and deciding who absorbs the costs of a design at the same time.
The advisory contribution runs both ways. Boards make legal and technical constraints understandable to residents and elected officials, and they make community knowledge visible to staff. Frank Fischer’s (2000) Citizens, Experts, and the Environment argues that residents hold real knowledge that professional analysis misses, such as how a street is actually used or which bus stop is unsafe after dark. That is expertise without credentials.
Practical Advice: Ask boards to separate the technical findings in their recommendations from the value choices, stating which parts rest on engineering or legal standards and which reflect judgments about who should bear the costs. Appoint members for local knowledge as deliberately as for credentials, and give them ways to contribute it, such as site visits or walk audits. Ask staff to explain constraints in plain language and to report back which resident observations changed their analysis.
Research Gap: We lack evidence on which board practices bring local knowledge into policymaking effectively, efficiently, and equitably. That means knowledge that changes plans, at a reasonable cost in member and staff time, drawn from residents beyond the homeowners and professionals who dominate many boards. A study could compare transportation boards that use different practices, such as walk audits, neighborhood listening sessions, reserved seats for affected groups, and written staff responses. For each practice, it would measure how often local knowledge changes the final plan, what the practice costs in time, and whose knowledge it captures.
Earn trust through visible results
Xiaohu Wang and Montgomery Van Wart’s (2007) “When Public Participation in Administration Leads to Trust” found that participation is associated with greater trust mainly through perceptions of ethical conduct and competent service delivery, not merely through the act of participating. Their data are cross-sectional and cannot establish causation, but the implication holds: people do not become more trusting because they were invited to a meeting.
Ansell and Gash (2008) emphasize “small wins,” early and achievable successes that build confidence. Cheryl King, Kathryn Feltey, and Bridget Susel’s (1998) “The Question of Participation” argues that authentic participation requires involving residents early, before issues are framed, and changing how administrators see their role, from experts in control to partners with residents, helping to facilitate the processes in which they work.
Practical Advice: Give a new board a problem it can influence, show how its input shaped the outcome, and be honest about its limits from the first meeting.
Research Gap: Because Wang and Van Wart’s data are cross-sectional, we do not know whether seeing an advisory board shape a decision causes the public to trust local government more. A survey experiment could give residents a news story about a local decision, randomly varying whether the story reports that an advisory board shaped the outcome, that a board was consulted and ignored, or no board at all. The study would then compare residents’ trust in the agency and their views of its ethics and competence across the three versions.
Why advisory boards are worth getting right
Most of this article has been about how advisory boards fall short. They can be designed without a clear purpose, consulted too late, filled with the same familiar voices, or thanked and ignored. Like the rest of democracy, advisory boards have problems, but they are also worth investing in, because few institutions in American government can contribute what they do.
Most forms of public participation are brief. A public hearing gives a resident three minutes at a microphone, and a survey asks for a few clicks. An advisory board asks for sustained judgment over months or years. Members learn how budgets, codes, and legal constraints work, and government learns what residents know about their own streets, parks, and neighborhoods. That two-way exchange is democratic participation at its most useful, and it happens in nearly every American city.
The evidence suggests the effort pays off. Berry, Portney, and Thomson found that residents active in strong neighborhood participation systems got their issues onto the public agenda and developed a stronger sense of community, greater trust in government officials, and more confidence in the political system. Boards also widen the circle of people who govern. A board seat is often a resident’s first formal role in public life, and a place to build the knowledge, relationships, and confidence that lead to further civic leadership.
The practices in this article share a common thread: they take boards seriously. Give each board a clear charge, involve it before decisions are made, and recruit beyond the usual participants. Give its recommendations a place to land, be honest about its limits, and show residents what their input changed. None of this requires much new money. It requires governments to treat advice as input rather than ritual. When they do, boards bring technical expertise and lived experience to the governing table before decisions are made, and they give residents good reason to believe that participation matters.
The research gaps above show how much we still do not know. Many of them can be closed by scholars and practitioners working together, using records governments already keep: ordinances, agendas, minutes, and staff reports. For the administrator who has inherited twenty boards, the task is to make each one worth the weeknights its members give, and to make it more effective, efficient, and equitable along the way.
Christopher Tyler Burks is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He serves on the City of Little Rock Sustainability Commission and previously served on the City of Birmingham Planning Commission. He appeared on the American Society for Public Administration webinar Calling All Experts: Advisory Boards in Public Administration with Valerie Lemmie.
