Farmer support is make or break for Australia’s clean energy transition
Before joining Currie, I was a journalist and my skills transferred most easily to our communications work. But over the years I’ve worked with this team, I’ve loved helping out with and learning more about stakeholder and community engagement. With our clients and partners, we’ve worked on engagement projects ranging developing sustainability frameworks for beef and dairy, and running community reference group for waste facilities.
Last year, I decided to make my excitement for engagement official by completing the International Association for Public Participation Australasia (IAP2A) Certificate of Engagement.
IAP2 is an international leader in public participation, offering tools and training, as well as certification, to lift the bar. We’re required to use IAP2 tools for government engagement work, and we choose to use them for our other work because they’re robust and effective.
Here are the top 5 things I learned – or was reminded of – through the IAP2A training:
1. The power of a process
Unfortunately, some engagement is tokenistic, given little thought or a box-ticking exercise. But to avoid those pitfalls and to make the best of the opportunity, engagement processes need to be well planned. IAP2 has a very detailed process (i.e. its Practice Framework) to design, plan, implement and review engagement.
We use this process when we’re planning engagement. And one of the key things we help clients with is bringing the rest of their organisation on board, especially project teams and decision makers. This means they too understand and value engagement as a means of managing risks and improving outcomes.
2. Do your research
It’s vital to understand the context of any engagement process. Often when we start talking with a potential client about engagement, we ask lots of questions about the history of the project/proposition. Our research about farmers and the renewable energy rollout demonstrated how critical knowing and understanding farmers and their communities is to this important shift.
In our engagement work, we research and analyse the people involved in a project, including the decision makers, stakeholders and community. One of the lines that stood out from the training is: are groups “hard to reach” and get involved in engagement or are they “hardly reached”. It’s up to us, as engagement practitioners, to understand why these groups haven’t been reached previously and plan what we can do to avoid making the same mistake.
We seek to understand the organisation that’s doing the engagement, including its approach to engagement, importance it places on the project, its resources, structures and reputation. Other things we consider, what’s the history of the project? And are there any global, national and regional trends that might have an impact?
3. Be clear on why you’re engaging
This is the purpose of the engagement. It focuses on why we involve stakeholders and community to contribute to the project.
We find it useful to work through with our clients what are the negotiables and non-negotiables of an engagement process. Another great takeaway from the IAP2 training – if you are doing an engagement program that has no negotiables, then it is communications.
IAP2’s Public Participation Spectrum is a fantastic resource to help select the level of participation for public or other groups in an engagement process and provides a basis from which you can tailor this “promise” to the different groups of stakeholders.
4. Don’t be afraid to mix up methods
Yes, an online survey can be cost-effective and quick (especially if the questions are designed well) but will it achieve your engagement purpose? There are so many creative, fun, effective activities to involve people and capture their input. The IAP2A Methods Matrix includes more than 60 methods suited to engagement programs of different scale, context and purpose. We refer back to the matrix often – it’s a great tool to test our thinking and brainstorm new ideas. It’s available online to IAP2A members as the Engagement Methods Tool. The crowdsourcing platform Participedia has a huge library of engagement methods that can inspire too.
5. Remove obstacles to engagement
Effective engagement recognises that the sum is greater than its parts – together we can have a greater impact on our environment and community. I really value bringing people together to find common ground and develop solutions to complex challenges. To do this, we need make it fair and easy for people to get involved and contribute their knowledge and experiences. Engagement needs to be inclusive and accessible. We appreciate that it’s our role to remove barriers and facilitate people’s involvement.
