Citizen-Government Dialoguing – How Maroochy Shire Council Started on the Inside

James A¹*, Randall A¹

1. Maroochy Shire Council, Nambour, Queensland, Australia

This presentation explores how an organisation realised that to improve its community engagement practices; it must firstly build its own capacity. With this in mind, Maroochy Shire Council on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast developed a public participation program to improve the way it worked with the community. This in turn is leading to improved decision making through effective citizen-government dialoguing.

Maroochy Shire Council based their Public Participation Program on the International Association of Public Participation’s (IAP2) best practice framework. As winner of the 2004 IAP2 ‘Organisation of the Year’ Core Values Award, Maroochy is considered an International leader in the field.

The presentation will walk through what Maroochy put in place to develop the knowledge and application skills of their staff in public participation practices. Barriers to capacity building have been identified throughout the implementation of the project and various processes, tools and techniques have been adopted and integrated into the organisation to overcome these barriers.

The result was that the program assisted to change the organisation’s approaches and behaviours in regards to public participation. Evaluation of projects also indicates that the community believe they have been listened to, their feedback considered and that Council is making better decisions because they are more informed about issues. This is capacity building at its best where both the organisation and the community are working effectively together to obtain better outcomes for the community.

The Maroochy Public Participation Program (MPPP) is now considered a critical strategy in moving the organisation forward with the Councillors, CEO and General Managers supporting the program at the highest level.

Click here to view the full paper