A New Heart for an Old Soul – Local Government Engagement

Doyle G¹*

1. Wollongong City Council, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

The perceptions of Local Government consultative practices rarely reflect words like, participative, empowering, transparent, clear, community centred, or culturally appropriate.

Local Government Authorities play a major role in every community via planning, development and service delivery. As local government continues to come to grips with the transformation of the citizen to the customer it is surprising they continue to not truly value sound community engagement processes. Authorities enlist the assistance of consultants to actually undertake engagement on their behalf with the community. Who is engaging with who?

The public sector is increasingly responding to triple bottom line requirements and the need to be sustainability focussed.
This paper proposes that ‘real’ community engagement is the most effective method Local Government can utilise to support the development of sustainable communities.

Firstly, local profiling of communities based on, Place (locality), People (Demographics) and Issues (social, economic & environment) is the most effective means to ‘knowing’ who you need to engage with.
Similarly, the practices applied to consult and engage with communities or individuals must reflect place, people and issue profiles.

Wollongong City Council recently undertook a project to inform and improve its engagement processes. The context of the project was in the form of a Social Data Research Project. The project was purely focussed on identifying issues across every suburb of the city. The project purposely did not offer to directly deliver solutions to issues identified in communities. So in this case, participants were offered the opportunity to merely log their issues with no ‘real’ commitment to delivering results. It was thought that this lack of any incentive other than ‘telling Council’ could allow us to measure the effectiveness of our engagement processes.

The project offered a number of challenges including connecting with one of Australia’s most culturally diverse local government areas, demographic including children (3–12) that have never really been consulted with and a Council with a ‘poor’ reputation for engaging with local communities.

The results in terms of level of participation, feedback on consultative methods, and the data itself, exceeded our initial goals. The project has become the catalyst for change across the organisation, an improved perception of Council and has provided a tangible opportunity to be able to continue talk with communities about a range of issues – The real goal!

Click here to view the full paper