Botany Bay and Catchment Alliance

 Community engagement is not a magic wand that can be waved to make all parties happy. If community engagements are not conducted in good faith and do not fully engage the community, they can be perceived as cynical and manipulative exercises. They may also be seen as tokenism responding to dominant voices and ignoring the broader community, as a means of co-opting groups or defusing opposition, as falsely raising public expectations, or as substitutes for good government and sound policy making.

This is why community engagements must be conducted in a clear, transparent manner that provides the public and all participants with a realistic understanding of the policy and decision making process and the range of possible outcomes. Part of this approach is clarifying the limits of the community’s influence in the process. This is particularly necessary when the decision making power ultimately rests with government. Without a clear definition of the realities of a particular situation, it is inevitable that a sense of distrust will be generated about the engagement process.

The above is contained in a document produced by the NSW Department of Planning.  As you can see, The Department of Planning is not/has not been bereft of good planning ideas.  You can read about them in:

Community Engagement in the NSW Planning System: Handbook and Website Full link  published in 2003

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 1317 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.