This November, we came together as a small group of professionals experienced in stakeholder engagement in European research and innovation projects focused on sustainability. The aim was to explore how meaningful local engagement looks like, how it translates into impact, and how to measure this impact. Insights were shared from across different areas, from energy, to forestry, to wetlands, to NBS in cities. Our ideas on local engagement offered a shared starting point for digging deeper into the questions posed, inviting a targeted follow-up discussion among us on what meaningful local engagement is and how to capture its impact.
Key points on what's needed for meaningful local engagement
It was broadly agreed that it is crucial to engage stakeholders from the very start of an initiative and to be honest about the extent of possibilities for their influence. The difficulty to sustain engagement from a project's vision/ planning phase to the implementation phase was noted. It was also observed that meaningful engagement can be a challenge at the vision phase too, given often-preset project goals. What's more, there often isn't a shared vision on what to achieve and how. Hence it is crucial to be aware of tensions among stakeholders and to initiate dialogue to reconcile and address these. We discussed that for engagement to be meaningful for stakeholders a joint narrative must be developed in a language that resonates with the local communities. It is also important to consider local cultures and ways. To enable non-expert stakeholders to participate, it's vital to accommodate that they typically need to take time off from their regular jobs or offer their free time for engagement. To create motivation for long-term participation, it is important to quickly show local stakeholders and communities tangible results (also needed at the EC level for continued funding).
Key points on reaching and measuring impact
It was emphasised that to create potentially lasting solutions it is imperative to find a match between the political/administrative priorities at a given moment and the interest and priorities of the communities we engage. For lasting impact to be possible, we also need to ensure that the co-created knowledge continues to be built on after a project ends and that its legacy is actively managed and communicated. It was noted that it is often up those who organise the stakeholder engagement to translate the outcomes of this process into impact. We discussed that to develop impactful results together with local stakeholders we need to approach cities and regions as genuine partners rather than just pilots. Media engagement is equally important for enabling impact as it allows a project and its engaged stakeholders to shape (and take control of) the narrative. It was reflected that to effectively measure impact of local engagement it is necessary to establish the process for doing so early on in a project. The value of combining quantitative and qualitative methods was emphasised, as was the importance of capturing 'small' shifts in behaviour and thinking in addition to assessing structural change.
Useful resources/inspiration shared
Ideation workshops with pupils to visualise their vision of the space; SUPERB (pun intended!)
Storytelling/engagement for change guide & insights on analysis of online/social media data in stakeholder identification, understanding and engagement;
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