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Community Engagement

  • Place Making and Social Sustainability
  • Estate Design
  • Sustainablity Management
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This fact sheet is designed to help small to medium-sized builders and developers find appropriate ways of engaging with communities about their proposed sustainable developments, while taking into account the complexity of sustainability options. It’s about how to get started, rather than the whole community engagement process with all the detailed planning.

Table of contents

Introduction

The fact sheet outlines the benefits, costs, savings, risks and barriers to using community engagement processes to achieve sustainable development options. The scale of projects referred to is that of developments and buildings, not large-scale projects such as neighbourhoods, metropolitan planning or regional developments. Also, the focus is on achieving sustainable developments, which means that there will always need to be an emphasis on helping local people understand the complexities of sustainable development, which may be quite new to some of them.

It is important that developers and builders accept that, as with sustainability, communities are now highly complex. There is no single community with a single view. It’s impossible to find “one voice” for a community or even to locate representative stakeholders. Communities are in a state of flux and new members are constantly entering them. They are much more culturally diverse than they were a decade or two ago.

For developers, community engagement means actively working to bring all members of local communities into discussions about sustainability and development. For developers and builders to create sustainable developments in good faith, they will have to work to embrace more people – and a wider range of people – than they may have done in the past. This means involving children and young people, as well as adults.

Developers also need to find ways to work with activists, who are now well connected, and, although this may seem surprising to some, are often more valuable sources of scientific and technical information than some government sources. Further, the community is likely to trust them more than they may trust government sources. Working in partnership with activists will be a new way of working for some developers. Achieving sustainable development will require developers to do that.

Everyone is talking about inclusion these days and that conversation will need to influence how developers do business with communities. This means thinking about when and where meetings and workshops are held so that older people and those responsible for childcare can easily attend. If we want to involve people equally, then it’s no good having meetings at dinnertime if all the local women are at home cooking dinner for their children. We will need to make sure that engagement processes are inclusive to avoid bias, elitism, the domination of the “expert” views, non-representativeness of participants and people making decisions without enough information (especially information about the environmental or technical matters related to sustainable development). For example, if people need to understand why water-sensitive urban design (see Landscaping Public Spaces factsheet for more) is a good option, they will need education to do that.

Because the projects we are talking about will be aiming to be “sustainable”, we need to remember that things have changed dramatically in the past twelve to eighteen months. There have been dramatic changes in community consciousness about sustainability in this country and overseas. Everyone wants to understand sustainability now. The job of developers and builders will be to make sure that the communities they work with really do understand the “sustainability” options of their projects, even if they are quite small and not highly visible.

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Community education as part of community engagement

It’s now widely accepted that communities will not be able to make decisions about the sustainability of development projects unless they are provided with educational opportunities to learn what that means and to build their capacity. This means that the material that is prepared for public display and discussion needs to be very clear and designed to help people understand and make informed judgements about it.

Feedback loops need to be built into processes so that people can review new designs or proposals in light of their new understanding and further education. If you can set up processes whereby people can listen to each other and share their ideas, there will be mutual learning as people listen to each others’ perspectives and it will be easier of them to understand the reasons behind your proposals for sustainable development.

Engaging in a community education process will help you, the developer, as well, as you will be able to reflect on your experiences in explaining your sustainability options to the community and adjust your planning and design process accordingly. This will help you to check that your process is on track to meet both your project needs and the needs of the communities with whom you are working.

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Community engagement in Australia to date

The dot points below summarise some of the characteristics of community engagement in Australia over the past couple of decades:

  • Who is the community? Limited view of community: often limited to identified stakeholders (from organisations and government) and not including children and young people.
  • Culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) communities: True inclusion of CaLD (culturally and linguistically diverse) communities is only slowly being embraced by some leading municipalities and state governments.
  • Use of electronic democracy: This has real potential for certain groups, especially younger people, and many people now expect developers to offer website and internet access to advertise their community engagement processes, to access their information and provide feedback mechanisms. Sometimes people may feel it’s a bit difficult but it can be great for teens. Be careful that the internet is not used as the only way to reach people or that it is used simply for marketing. It can be a two-way communication tool if it’s properly used.
  • Developers taking the lead? Little evidence of leadership in community engagement by developers (they have mainly used risk-management approaches). Some notable exceptions.
  • Different approaches: Several different schools or philosophies of community engagement are emerging (overseas developments have influenced this to some extent). See www.iap2.org/au.
  • IAP2: Role of International Association for Public Participation (IAP2): Australian conferences, professional training, raising the professionalism of community engagement. They are a good organisation to keep in contact with.
  • Government authorities: All state governments and most municipalities have engagement policies but few have adequate or experienced personnel to effectively implement those policies or help developers to do so.
  • Councils: Some people argue that the only people you should have to consult with are the staff and elected officials of the local council because they have been elected to represent the community and speak on behalf of the community. This is a view that has been questioned by many people because the fine grain of development approvals needs much more targeted attention. And circumstances change over the term of a Council’s elected members, with some issues being raised that were not known when the member was elected.

    What a council offers or suggests as an approach may not be adequate for your purposes but it can be taken as a minimum to be achieved. Often it’s best to exceed those requirements as a show of good faith and also because you will need the information and advice that a good process can give you. Councils’ approaches are sometimes limited to public relations, marketing and communications and those staff may have limited experience but are nevertheless very influential. If there is only an emphasis on badging and branding, those approaches often backfire with communities.
  • Involving children and young people: A 2004 review of Australian and international community engagement policies found that of the 108 community engagement manuals reviewed, only thirty mentioned children’s participation techniques. There was little mention of community engagement processes for young people and little mention of children. Yet research shows that children are able to express thoughtful, clearly held opinions on relevant matters, are generally willing to give their views, but become disillusioned if community engagement is ill-considered or tokenistic. The most common complaint among children was that they had no idea what happened after they were consulted.

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The Consultation Complexity Chart

There are many sources of information that can be used to help you determine how detailed your approach to community engagement should be and which methods you could use. Most Australian States have on-line checklists and toolkits and many of the larger municipalities have developed them as well. Australian consultants and academics have also written books that can be helpful. The best place to start is probably with your State Government (see the references).

One helpful way for developers to look at participatory processes is to use the Consultation Complexity Chart developed in 1998 by senior Adelaide planner, Angela Hazebroek of the consulting firm, Urban & Regional Planning Solutions.
 
You can use it to visualize a project in all of its critical dimensions before a strategy is planned and engagement processes selected. What the chart shows is that a project that may be technically simple may be socially and politically complex from the point of the view of the community. Therefore, it may require a more complex approach to community engagement than a developer might have considered at the outset.

Consultation complexity chart

The Consultation Complexity Chart
Source: Angela Hazebroek, 1998

This chart reflects a deep understanding of the problems involved in understanding the complexity of a community engagement process. The most valuable aspect is that it requires us to examine social aspects and political and community impacts, as well as technical concerns. Hazebroek’s chart was used to determine the strategy for community consultations about the expansion of a large stadium in Brisbane where complex traffic-management and technical design issues competed for attention with a wide array of local community concerns, including ‘football hooliganism’, crowd management and pollution.
 

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Information resources

“Ten Good Reads”
Not surprisingly, there are lots of sources of information to help builders and developers engage in community engagement processes. What is often ignored, however, is the practical dimension. Here are some “good reads” that might be helpful.

  1. Carson, L and Gelver, K 2001, 'Ideas for Community Consultation: A Discussion on Principles and Procedures for Making Consultation Work',  Sydney: New South Wales Department of Urban Affairs and Planning, February.
  2. Davidson, S 1998, 'Spinning the Wheel of Empowerment', Planning. April.
  3. Driskell, D in collaboration with the Growing up in Cities Project, 2002. Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth: A Manual for Participation. London: Earthscan, UNESCO Publishing and MOST.
  4. Grogan, D and Mercer, C with Engwicht, D 1995, The Cultural Planning Handbook: An Essential Australian Guide. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
  5. Hart, R 1997, Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care, London: Earthscan.
  6. Kaner, S with Lind, L, Toldi, C, Fisk, S & Berger, D 1996, The Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making,  New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada.
  7. Kins, A & Peddie, B 1996, 'Planning a Complete Community: A Cultural Planning Guide for Local Government' Perth: Community Arts Network.
  8. New Economics Foundation, 1998, Communities Count! A Step by Step Guide to Community Sustainability Indicators,  London: Centre for Community Visions.
  9. Sarkissian, W & Stenberg, B & Hirst, A 2003, Community Participation in Practice: New Directions, 2nd ed, Perth, Western Australia: Murdoch University, Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy.
  10. Wates, N 2000, The Community Planning Handbook: How People Can Shape their Cities, Towns and Villages in Any Part of the World, London: Earthscan.

ACT GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
ACT: Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services, 2005 Public Consultations and Forums: Access Guidelines. Disability Act, Version 2.

ACT: Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services 2005, Your Guide to Engaging with the Community: ACT Government Community Engagement Manual, Canberra: Community Engagement Unit, Department of Disability, Housing, and Community Services.

National Capital Authority 2006 Consultation Protocol: Planning Information. Canberra: National Capital Authority, August.

NSW GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
Planning NSW in partnership with NSW Department of Local Government (LGov NSW), Institute of Public Administration Australia (NSW Division), Planning Institute of Australia (NSW Division), International Association for Public Participation and NSW Premier’s Department 2003, Community Engagement in the NSW Planning System (referred to as The Community Engagement Handbook). Sydney: Department of Planning, February.

Carson, L & Gelber, K 2001, Ideas for Community Consultation: A discussion on principles and procedures for making consultation work.  A report prepared for the NSW Department of Urban Affairs and Planning, February. Sydney: DUAP.

NSW Regional Communities Consultative Council 2002, A Summary Guide to Consulting with Rural and Regional Communities, Sydney: NSW Premier’s Department.

NSW Department of Local Government, Youth Consultation Research Project 1999, Youth Consultation Checklist, Sydney: NSW Department of Local Government, May.

Strategy and Planning Directorate, Communities Division, NSW Department of Community Services.

QUEENSLAND GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
Queensland Department of Communities 2007, Engaging Queenslanders: A guide to engaging people with a disability, Brisbane: Queensland Government Department of Communities, May.

Queensland Department of Communities (n.d.). Engaging Queenslanders: A guide to community engagement methods and techniques, Brisbane: Queensland Government Department of Communities.

Queensland Department of Communities 2005, Engaging Queenslanders: Introduction to working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Brisbane: Queensland Government Department of Communities the Office for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, August.

Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and Development 1999, Protocols for Consultation and Negotiation with Aboriginal People. Queensland Government, Brisbane: Queensland Government, October

Queensland Department of Communities 2003, Engaging Queenslanders: Get involved: Improving community engagement across the Queensland Public Sector, Brisbane: Queensland Government Department of Communities, July.

Queensland Department of Communities 2005, Engaging Queenslanders: An Introduction to Community Engagement, Brisbane: Queensland Government Department of Communities, August.

Queensland Department of Communities 2005, Engaging Queenslanders: Community engagement in the business of government, Brisbane: Queensland Government Department of Communities, August.

Queensland Environmental Protection Agency and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (n.d.). Public Consultation Policy and Guidelines. Brisbane: Queensland Environmental Protection Agency and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.

Engaging Queenslanders website: Get Involved, Queensland:

VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
McRae-Williams, Dr P (Centre for Regional Innovation and Competitiveness, University of Ballarat) 2006, Community Consultation Toolkit: A Good Practice Guide for Victorian Explorers and Miners, Melbourne: Minerals Council of Australia, Victorian Division, February.

Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment 2005, Effective Engagement: Building relationships with community and other stakeholders. Book 1: An Introduction to Engagement. Melbourne: Community Engagement Network, Resource and Regional Services Division, Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment, September.

Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment 2005, Effective Engagement: Building relationships with community and other stakeholders. Book 2: The Engagement Planning Workbook, Melbourne: Community Engagement Network, Resource and Regional Services Division, Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment, September.

Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment 2005, Effective Engagement: building relationships with community and other stakeholders. Book 3: The Engagement Toolkit, Melbourne: Community Engagement Network, Resource and Regional Services Division, Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment, September.

Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment: Effective Engagement Planning Kit:

Youth Affairs Council of Victoria Inc. 2004, Taking Young People Seriously. Consulting Young People about their Ideas and Opinions. A handbook for organisations working with young people, Melbourne: Youth Affairs Council of Victoria Inc.

E-community Networking Association Inc.

WA GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
WA Department of Indigenous Affairs 2004, Engaging with Aboriginal Western Australians, Perth: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services, WA Department of Indigenous Affairs, WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet Citizens and Civics Unit.

WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Western Australian Government 2002, Consulting Citizens: A Resource Guide. Perth: Citizens and Civics Unit, Policy Office, Department of the Premier and Cabinet, April.

WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Western Australian Government 2003, Consulting Citizens: Planning for Success. Perth: Citizens and Civics Unit, Policy Office, Department of the Premier and Cabinet, June.

WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet 2005, Guidelines for Community Engagement Using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Version: 1.2. Perth: WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet, 30 September.

WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet 2006, Consulting Citizens: Working Together: Involving Community and Stakeholders in Decision-Making. WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Office of Citizens and Civics.
Citizenscape, WA

Community Wise Toolbox, WA: (Website temporarily closed: under review, 23/01/08)

SA GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES

South Australian Environmental Protection Agency 2004, Information Sheet: Industry and Community Consultation. Adelaide: SA Environmental Protection Agency, March.

AUSTRALIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
Parramatta City Council 2003, Five Examples of Innovation that Engage the Community, Parramatta, NSW: Parramatta City Council.

Warringah Council (NSW) 2000, Community Consultation Toolkit. Prepared by Suter & Associates Leisure & Tourism Planners with Warringah Council Strategy Unit. Sydney: Warringah Council, December.

Warringah Council (NSW) 2000, Community Consultation Matrix: A Guide to Community Consultation. Sydney: Warringah Council.

Aslin, HJ & Brown, VA (2004). Towards Whole of Community Engagement: A Practical Toolkit, Canberra: Murray Darling Basin Commission.

Sarkissian, W, Walsh, K & Campbell, A 2001, Improving Community Participation in the City of Port Phillip: a Toolbook of Participatory Techniques CD-ROM, St Kilda, Melbourne: City of Port Phillip.

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Key Issues

Benefits

  • A value in its own right. Ethical reasons for community engagement
  • Reconnaissance: no secrets or surprises
  • Information at a fine-grain, detailed local scale
  • Building of trust (on all sides)
  • Learning how this community “does business”
  • Scoping: early issues identification
  • History of engagement of this community
  • Identification of cultural and linguistic dimensions of this community and implications for community engagement
  • Build partnership potential
  • Educate the community about the project (and/or wider sustainability issues)
  • Risk management:
    • identifying champions
    • identifying future problems
    • find any outraged people and including them
  • Find good people to work with the team/in the team
  • Stable and flexible outcomes if wide agreements can be reached
  • Communicate intentions clearly (scotch rumours early)
  • Can get product targeted for local buyers with local experience
  • Market research benefits.

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Risks

  • Within organisation: lack of support for community engagement
  • Inconsistent behaviour by different staff or agents (consultants)
  • Developers (or partners) may not be totally frank and could be exposed
  • Requires levels of accountability and transparency that could be hard to achieve if corporate culture has been closed in the past
  • May not be able to satisfactorily answer community questions
  • If project falls over or is on-sold, upfront costs may not be recouped
  • Councils or governments may not support a consultative approach, preferring to ride roughshod over community views or keep community in the dark (this can create difficulties with approval authorities)
  • Technical consultants may have to resile from previous advice
  • Unable to secure budget from partners or shareholders for unfamiliar expenditures (see Costs)
  • Some people may act inappropriately in public forums or even small group community engagement sessions
  • Bad weather, traffic congestion or natural disasters on the day
  • Logistical failures
  • Poorly functioning teams

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Savings

  • Fewer delays in approvals due to objections-re: inadequate community engagement
  • Chance to check expert views with local knowledge
  • Faster passage through statutory processes if politicians and bureaucrats are confident that all bases covered
  • Massive potential cost of failed or blocked project: don’t need to restart trust-building
  • Detailed design stages easier with community that understands (and trusts)
  • For housing: goodwill can lead to actual purchasers from the neighbourhoods
  • Save on scattergun approach to marketing and public relations, if local issues are carefully scoped at the start

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Costs

  • Staffing and staff training (as well as expert consultants)
  • Preparation of materials specifically for community engagement processes (most need to be redesigned specifically for community engagement purposes and cannot be recycled)
  • Specialist consultants
  • Where needed, interpreters and translators
  • Regular communications, discussion papers, newsletters, websites and reports
  • All costs associated with process: venue hire, catering, childcare
  • Trained and briefed facilitators and recorders
  • Senior staff attending events, weekend or week night attendance
  • Modifying processes to reflect community views/ negotiated agreements
  • Special processes for children and young people
  • Targeted processes for hard-to-reach groups
  • Regular and ongoing liaison: can be time-consuming and unwieldy
  • Community education and capacity building
  • Continuing as you began

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Barriers

  • Unrealistic time expectations (lenders, local political realities -election forthcoming - budget timeframes) means you try to proceed faster than the community can accept
  • Community expectations that you should undertake more complex and detailed community engagement processes than are warranted by the size and scope of the project
  • Weak sustainability or engagement policies, nothing to tie your processes or ideas to (rapidly changing landscape here)
  • Funding constraints: no budget allocation
  • Organisational culture prevents approval for new model
  • Smallness of project seen not to warrant extensive community engagement
  • Inexpert “experts” who act inappropriately
  • Isolation: unable to get skilled help
  • Inexperienced or unconvinced authorities
  • Angry local communities, unable to trust any proponent because of previous bad experiences with developers, municipality or government agency
  • Strong activist organisations with agendas that are strongly opposed to proposal or project
  • Communities that have experienced manipulation
  • Passive and disempowered communities
  • Weaknesses in the sustainability credentials of the project itself
  • Good project, wrong location
  • Resistance from the community that cannot be managed
  • Strongly polarised communities where a common view or agreement is hard to achieve
  • Negative media
  • Incompetent or inappropriate public relations activities by your staff, the proposing or approving authority.

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Benchmarks

The benchmarks for community engagement processes of developers largely relate to the appropriateness of the process chosen for the complexity, scope and scale of the project. A wide range of online sources can help you check that your approach is consistent with leading practice. The best sources for benchmarks are either IAP2 or your State Government planning department. Some local municipalities have benchmarks or guidelines.

International Association for Public Participation (IAP2)
Founded in 1990, IAP2 is an association that seeks to promote and improve the practice of community engagement. It has a strong presence in Australia. 
IAP2’s Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation - the purpose of these core values is to help make better decisions that reflect the interests and concerns of potentially affected communities.

IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum
The Spectrum demonstrates the possible types of engagement with stakeholders and communities: consult, involve, collaborate and finally to empower. It shows the increasing level of public impact, as you move through the spectrum from the left to right, from inform to empower. It shows an increase in expectation for community engagement. When they are only ‘informing’ stakeholders, developers are not expected to receive feedback and they can expect a low level of public impact. Many projects may require little more than “informing”. At the other end of the spectrum, “empowering” stakeholders to make decisions implies an increase in expectations and therefore an increased level of public impact.

Many councils use the IAP2 Spectrum in their assessment of the appropriateness of community engagement processes proposed by developers so it’s wise to become familiar with it.

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Development phase actions

Feasibility

It’s important to involve the community in the early stages, to find out who the key stakeholders are and get them onside. You will need to use different approaches, depending on the complexity and scale of your project but the local community can always help you in developing your methodology. Some approaches work well with some communities and backfire with others. Early reconnaissance means that you can target your approaches to be successful in individual communities.

When you are working on a development in a greenfield site, it’s often tempting to decide that there is no need for community engagement because there are no neighbouring residents. But there are always local people – stakeholders in organisations and government departments, for example – who have a lot to say and can provide very good advice. And it’s often possible to speak with people in neighbouring communities who will tell you about some of the issues your development is likely to face from their experience in the neighbouring area. In greenfield sites this approach really does add value and helps to convince approval authorities that you are sincere about gathering the best information and sharing information as well. Getting in early and speaking with everyone who might have a point of view or whose services and facilities might be affected by your development is a wise strategy. It also means that a council is more likely to accept your advice if you can back it up with the information ad opinions you have gathered from others through community engagement.

You could find that the relevant legislative authority may not accept your advice simply because it’s arisen from consultations that you’ve consulted as the developer.  Therefore, it’s really important to consult early with the relevant authority, go through the necessary steps and agree on terms of reference before you begin your community engagement work.

If the early processes recommended in the IAP2 Spectrum are followed, you are not likely to encounter so much difficulty with a noisy minority that appears to be opposed to everything you propose. There are lots of materials that can help you ensure that your processes are culturally appropriate and inclusive, that they are creative, that they allow for people to have ongoing participation and influence and follow-up opportunities for involvement, that they contain opportunities for people to learn and build their own capacity.

In this first stage (and into the planning stages that follows), your main tasks are to:

  • Gather local information and scope issues
  • Understand how this community does business
  • Determine others that need to be involved/consulted
  • Explore a considered range of approaches
  • Prepare a communications and/or public relations and marketing strategy and
  • Seek advice from the relevant authorities about how to proceed.

While providing information to the community in this early stage is largely controlled by confidentiality concerns, these are often used as an excuse or are overestimated, as projects are often in the public realm at an early stage these days. It’s best to share as much information as you can as early as you can. This helps to build trust with communities.

Secrecy can backfire at this and the planning stage and often does. It’s probably best to have some initial community contact (such as an information night). The most efficient approach is probably to share at least some information rather than maintain secrecy.

This stage and the planning stages present the opportunity to establish an Accountability Group that can assist the process throughout the project

Budgets will need to have realistic allocations, not token dollars. Be appropriate, and set budget for each stage (including reporting and disbursements).

Before you proceed much further, you will need to find expert community engagement assistance. In small businesses, this is unlikely to be in-house. The amount and level of service you will require will depend on the factors illustrated in the Complexity Chart, e.g.size of project, complexity and political sensitivity of the project, etc.)

Two methods that could be used at this stage are surveys and focus groups. While generally regarded as research methods, they can also be used in the preliminary stages of community engagement.

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Planning

In this stage:

  • Major stage for community engagement
  • Statutory regulations and requirements must be addressed
  • Be alert to public relations focus
  • Set up Accountability Group to assist
  • Need to define set of evaluation criteria or benchmarks for measuring success
  • Need to watch timing/tempo/pace

There are a wide range of models for various stages of the project but advice depends on a wide range of factors (including the skills of the practitioners). You might consider a stakeholders workshop or a search conference in this stage.
There are techniques and methods for every stage of the planning process.

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Design

In this stage:

  • Potential for community engagement is often underestimated and can be used to effect with marketing benefits as well
  • Needs community capacity building and education to understand issues such as site planning, design, traffic management and housing density
  • Many excellent models of participatory design available for this stage.

This could be an opportunity to use a participatory design workshop.

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Construction

In this stage:

  • Very important stage for community engagement and rarely recognised
  • Public relations and liaison role and information dissemination very important
  • “damage control” and “putting out fires” roles feature in this stage
  • “living on a building site”: issues for existing residents and new residents
  • An accountability group can work well here.

This could be an opportunity to hold an interactive staffed event called a SpeakOut.

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Completion

In this stage:

  • Evaluation
  • Celebration
  • Welcoming ceremonies
  • Huge marketing and market research potential in this stage.

Post-occupancy evaluation

Ongoing assessment of the community engagement processes will help you design more appropriate and effective processes for future developments.

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