Transformational Collaboration: Communities Engaging

Earles W¹*, Lynn R¹* and Jakel J²*

1. James Cook University, Cairns, Queensland, Australia
2. Department of Communities, Cairns, Queensland, Australia

The reality of community engagement represents nebulous collaborative action around multiple (and diverse) issues and for multiple (and sometimes conflicting) goals. Theorising around community engagement through collaboration has a strong focus on instrumental collaboration around a single issue or single goal. In contrast transformational collaboration involves a strong emphasis on organising, leadership, ownership and power within multiple communities of engagement across the household, market, state and civil society sectors.

A university/industry research team in Far North Queensland used action learning to explore transformational collaboration through engagement with two distinct communities: the Mareeba Dimbulah Irrigation Area Community Response Group and the Cairns Human Services project team. Both communities were responding to their identified needs to enable successful collaboration.

The theoretical findings from the two sites are synthesised to contribute to the discourse on community engagement and participative practices for inclusive and sustainable development. These findings include principles and logics for collaboration. ‘Principles’ are the guiding sense or essential quality of the function of the collaboration and ‘logics’ refer to the basic design elements for the form (or lack of form) of a collaboration.

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