Evaluating Community Engagement: Experiences from Queensland, Australia

Johnson AL¹

1. Opus International Consultants, Dunedin, New Zealand

While anecdotally the call for greater “community engagement” (CE) appears to be increasingly taken up by many governments, the evidence base to support CE practice in the public sector does not appear to be keeping pace. From the author’s experience, this is due, in part, to the paucity of quality evaluations of CE being undertaken within the public sector. This is perhaps a reflection of the general lack of evaluation skills within government, or the overemphasis on performance reporting, with its focus on output measures or disjointed outcome measures, rather than performance improvement. Evaluation, along with well-designed and focused social research, is crucial to expanding our understanding of effective mechanisms for CE within a variety of social, political, and decision contexts, as well as the potential role of CE in supporting governments’ and communities’ aspirations.

This paper explores some of the challenges and opportunities for governments in evaluating community engagement (CE) at the program-level through to the whole-of-government level based on the experiences of the author with developing and implementing a strategy for CE evaluation capacity development within the Queensland Government. In do so it will explore some of the more vexing questions facing CE evaluation including: should CE be treated as an outcome, “an end” for example to have “engaged communities”, or a means to an end’? and if so, what ends?; how do we evaluate the contribution of CE to the outcomes of programs?; and how can evaluation be used to improve CE performance?

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