Community engagement – what are we communicating?

Written by Suzanne Walker, Consultant Engineering – Mirragin

Community engagement can mean so many things – a letter drop, a survey, an open discussion. The premise ranges from informing the community about what is happening, to co-design. Community engagement in Australian transport projects is a legislated requirement, and there is a recent (ish) push from the community for involvement.

Now it is worth noting that community engagement is its own research area – best way to engage with people, when to engage with people, issues with current engagement practices. The importance of engaging with the community is undoubtable, and it needs to be an ongoing process throughout the project life from the very beginning.

Science communication is also its own field. It is important that we are communicating in a way that is being understood, because science and engineering aren’t always the easiest concepts, especially when you add in project constraints that impact what can realistically be done.

I am sure you have seen community backlash to an engineering project. Often this is due to not liking the proposed project, or not feeling heard.

Contrary to industry belief that they just don’t understand the benefits enough, a change is being forced on their environment and their power has been taken away. Proposed benefits don’t fix that feeling of loss of control.

I am sure we have all experienced disagreements where we felt unheard, and at least most have had emotions that we wanted to express without someone immediately providing a solution.

Community engagement doesn’t work as a tick box exercise to let the project continue – it is a conversation with the people the project is for, to understand. Are we actually listening? Are we actively listening? And are we listening to understand?

It cannot be expected for communities to grasp underlying engineering reasons informing decisions, and it cannot be expected for their alternative solutions to necessarily be appropriate – if it were, I would question how unqualified or inexperienced people could do an equivalent job.

Despite this, as a society we often communicate issues by proposing a solution we see as fixing that issue. This is true in industry – think to some project meetings, but it is also true of the broader community. We need to use these solutions, however impractical, to understand what the underlying issue is. Maybe we can’t change anything in the design, but we can show we empathise and explain the reasoning.

In a future article I will explore knowledge that the community holds that scientific data and studies don’t. But the value of community engagement shouldn’t be determined by what they can provide, but rather the realisation that we are doing this work for them.

Local knowledge, are we capturing it?

The way you drive around your local area is probably a bit different to how Google would direct you. There are probably some intersections you avoid, areas you know clog up at certain times, and maybe key areas that people use to ‘hoon’.

Your lived experience gives you insight into how the local area works. This is more obvious when you see someone new to the area get confused. For example, I forget that I can’t assume people know how to use the unusual multiple roundabout intersection in Mooroolbark, Victoria (near where I grew up). Similarly, roads that are technically one lane but are treated as two.

We have innate knowledge that is so valuable to understanding how the transport network works, and yet it can’t easily be captured by our typical industry approaches.

I mention this gap in industry approaches, to flag that our scientific bias for a nice report with data, can’t be relied upon to show the whole picture. Moreso, it shouldn’t be used to fact check the local knowledge. Despite this, it is typically given precedence for decision making.

Community engagement has many purposes, but once a project has been scoped, very rarely do we take advantage of collecting local knowledge. It can be argued that if the project has been assessed to be needed, other issues in the community are not relevant. But there are often efficiencies in combining similar projects, or benefits in streamlining designs across locations needing similar changes. Sometimes it can be just a little change to scope within the project boundary that would solve an existing issue. Alternatively, a key point about community movements that the project will make difficult.

I want to note here the really cool online mapping used in community engagement. Local councils particularly, use it to ask the community to identify areas of concern or areas for improvement. However this is a short term engagement, and the typical way to raise issues is to personally message or call the council – upside of this is that it turns out personal complaints are a motivating factor for councils to fix things.

Unfortunately it isn’t as simple as being open to learn about the local knowledge. Community engagement is plagued with:

1. Participation bias?– on average over 70% of participants for a project’s engagement are middle aged, highly educated, white men – clearly a diverse cross section.
2. Participation fatigue?– people get sick of answering surveys and being spammed with information, and so engage even less.
3. Access?– language barriers, modes of engagement, time of engagement, empowerment of a demographic and more, all restrict members of the engagement process even if they had views they would like to share.

It isn’t an easy fix – how many things ever are? But we need to be aware of what we are missing, and try to bridge this knowledge gap.

Written by Suzanne Walker, Consultant Engineering – Mirragin

Suzanne is an experienced engineer with a passion for problem solving, leadership, research informing best practice, and making a positive impact. She has a wide range of multidisciplinary experience, across traffic, rail, major road infrastructure projects, OEM manufacturing, STEM research, and project management. Suzanne started with Mirragin in January 2022 and is now working with drones, autonomous systems, and AI. Suzanne is also undertaking a PhD exploring how community knowledge can be implemented better in engineering projects to improve design outcomes.