I spend quite a lot of my time working with clients to engage stakeholders around topics related to sustainable development.
This might be working with coastal communities to figure out how to respond to rising sea levels. It might be chewing over new approaches to public transport. Or it could be examining how the market for supplying domestic energy can be adjusted to reward companies for selling less energy or lower carbon energy.
I also run a lot of training courses for people who want to learn more about stakeholder engagement and to develop their facilitation skills.
DAD / ED is one of the most useful models I know for helping learners and clients understand the difference between traditional communications – Decide, Announce, Defend (Abandon) – and an approach which engages stakeholders: Engage, Deliberate, Decide.
This article I wrote for the environmentalist, published in February 2009, explains a bit more.
[...] There are some really interesting examples from the UK of the Environment Agency spending quite a lot of time and resources thoughtfully engaging in conversations with communities and other stakeholders when considering flood defences and coastal erosion risk. For example, Shaldon and Medmerry [transparency alert - I worked on the Medmerry project] where engagement with stakeholders was carefully planned so that people could influence the decisions which the project team was making as the plans developed. Both schemes are ongoing. See for example this report from the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission which includes Shaldon as an example, and this short case study from the Environment Agency on Shaldon. A search using ‘environment agency’, shaldon, stakeholder and ‘liaison group’ will bring up other interesting views on the engagement approach and its success.There’s a bit more about the EA’s ground-breaking work in this area in this article on DAD/EDD. [...]
April 14th, 2011 at 10:22 am