A Framework and Toolkit to Work towards Whole of Community Engagement

Aslin HJ¹*, Brown VA²*

1. Bureau of Rural Sciences, Canberra, ACT, Australia
2. School of Resource and Environmental Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Australian natural resource management agencies are increasingly recognising the centrality of people and placing more emphasis on engaging stakeholders and communities. We examined this trend in the context of the Murray-Darling Basin and the recognised need to engage communities and foster community ownership of water reform decisions. Examining community engagement literature and making comparisons with current practices familiar to Murray-Darling Basin stakeholders and their agencies, suggested that many stakeholders explicitly recognise only a small range of approaches and often think about community engagement in a very fragmented way. Also, it is evident that specialist community engagement practitioners tend to use language and concepts foreign to government, community members, and experts from other disciplines.

We have applied the ‘toolkit’ metaphor to develop what we hope is a user-friendly guide to engagement tools and techniques that incorporates principles, criteria and ratings, and provides references to further information. The toolkit tries to bridge some of the gaps between specialist knowledge and everyday practice in community engagement. Each tool is related to the project or program decision-making cycle, which provides a systemic framework and shows how different tools and techniques may have logical relationships to particular decision-making stages. We also discuss examples of applying this approach to work towards more inclusive community engagement in natural resource management decision processes.

Click here to view the full paper