The Constellation of Ways to Work with People: Community Engagement, Part 1
“Community Engagement” is a phrase used in many ways.
In community development, it’s sometimes used by planners, administrators, companies or developers, and local governments to describe a manner of interaction around a set of decisions or investments.
Locating that particular usage of “community engagement” in the constellation of potential usages helps people consider the wide horizon of options open to them.
Part of my educational and professional background is studying, working, and publishing on this topic precisely because how it is conceived can define the set of possibilities for a group of people. Here’s a thought experiment: if you knew what good policy was, yet you are operating in a democratic society, how would you design institutions to achieve that best policy most often? In Fulbright Scholarship field research in Peru, I was interested in exploring just this question, taking expressed citizen preferences as the best policy. I researched how citizen participation in local decision-making was able to or not able to influence local development decisions.
That is a more expansive view of community engagement, and to take the point further, the breadth of what can be called community engagement could include grasstops and grassroots groups organizing broadly for civil rights as captured the nation’s imagination in the 1950s-70s and led to major life-changing reforms that changed the course of history.
In community development today though, talk of community engagement is often more focused (or narrower). Often many assumptions are built in: first, a context where there is a principal, such as a local government or community development organization, that has authority to build a project or make a development or policy decision. Given that authority, they are going to consult or engage with the community to try to gain support, potentially make adjustments, or settle on a better outcome. Sometimes the principal will convene the community (engage with them) on the very front end to source projects or policy ideas. This is a bit more involved that consultation, but it is still in the framework of a project or development action where a principal is acting as a kind of protagonist.
Yet even in this narrower concept of community engagement, the way these activities are carried out can still facilitate a policy or project, or can very much make a project for policy for challenging. The Biden administration sought to endow even this version of engagement with a more powerful lever to assist communities in exercising their influence to achieve outcomes. Whether it is renewable energy projects, economic development projects, or one of the varieties of pandemic recovery funded community development projects, the need for project supporters to consult and engage with communities rarely has been more emphasized.
There are benefits to this narrower vision of community engagement, especially with these additional levers. Chief among those is the possession of resources to potentially affect the community trajectory when the scope is narrower. More expansive conceptions of community engagement looks to build long term power and requires a huge effort in organization, and capacity to analyze—not only the instant project but economic and development policy out into the future. This analytical ability gives the communities more tools to decide on their preferred outcome and set the agenda from that. As I’ve previously published on, communities often do not possess those resources.
An example from working with communities in Appalachia can illustrate: In facilitating gatherings of local leaders to develop forward-looking policy affecting Appalachian communities at the scale of the challenges, our local leaders saw how difficult it was both to get agreement, and then to write the details of these policies with enough guidance and specificity. It also required many hours of supporting staff time to research items from the nuances of broadband economics, or map out economic distress in a way that matched how local leaders wanted to define it. Fortunately, those resources were in place, and we created a number of thoughtful big-thinking policies. But this was a relatively large multistate organization that had decided to make this investment. Many community groups do not have the same luxury.
That can mean that the narrower approach to focusing on response to an offered project or policy can make more sense, though I do not suggest that taking the narrower approach is easy. To be a community on the receiving end of a community engagement effort, and then to come up with community benefits that would make a policy or project more attractive or worth the sacrifices that a policy or project may entail also requires much time and careful thoughtfulness. But this is more doable, and that’s an advantage of not trying to incorporate the broadest community engagement.
The party engaging in this narrower community action, the developer side or local government also has some real challenges in carrying out effective community engagement. Unfortunately, the typical university curriculum in planning, accounting or finance, law, business, or other training does not often prepare talented development professionals for an effective community outreach and engagement effort. This is because community engagement in its narrower usage is still difficult. First, many technically intelligent people in these fields understandably appreciate being able to surface a technical solution for a problem, but community engagement is fundamentally unpredictable and messy. Often the best-laid plans do not survive except with major changes and this is tough for technically talented people who put effort in their plans and designs. Relatedly, it’s difficult sometimes for businesspeople and administrators to give up some of the control and welcome in critical viewpoints, especially when those viewpoints feel unfair or unconstructive to the sponsors of a project or policy.
To add to this, community engagement strategy is quite different from the strategy for putting together a financial statement or a good neighborhood infrastructure plan. It centers around listening, consensus-building, retail politics and coalition work, good faith message building, and organizational issues that just may not have been practiced as much. Many people find these uncomfortable to practice – in some ways similar to the way they find it uncomfortable to practice public speaking.
If the affected community wishes to engage when developers and local governments are proposing projects, they’ll want to not only develop their strategy politically and in messaging, they’ll also benefit from having a point of view on what they hope to achieve with their engagement. The local government, developer, or administrator understands they have a goal, which could be open to some discussion, but they mostly know what they’re coming for. They’ve potentially carried out financial modeling, market studies, and/or demographic studies. The population of the community might consider: what would we have, if we were to get what we want. As discussed, that’s not an easy question.
Our modern history is littered with examples of projects that were either derailed, or made much less successful by misunderstandings and failure to find common ground with affected communities. For example, I just finished reading the investigative journalistic work Other People’s Money by Charles Bagli on the failure of the largest real estate transaction in the world, pre-Great Recession. Those Harvard-educated developers were handicapped by their mismanagement of their community engagement. The capstone to their shortcomings was a dramatic court case that put the nail in the coffin of their financial model. The court decision, and the tenants who brought the case in the first place, were surely influenced by the negative public opinion stemming from poor decisions resulting in large part from poor community engagement.
Another example is New York City and their attempted engagement with the towns in their watershed, which I wrote about for the University of North Carolina’s Environmental Law Symposium. In the 2000s, the City hoped to comply with safe drinking water regulations by paying upstream towns not to develop, thus providing fresh water from the Catskills mountains. However, the City’s inability to come to an effective agreement with their ‘watershed towns’ resulted in those towns taking the City to court over the watershed plan. The lawsuit headed up to appeals in protracted litigation, an outcome New York City surely wishes they could have avoided.
Even in its more limited form, community engagement is especially important for developers who wish to be successful in today’s environment. To avoid the negative outcomes associated with public engagement debacles, it’s usually a good idea for technically minded groups to be open-minded about incorporating expertise to their team. And this is exactly what happened following the New York City real estate debacle that I wrote about, where the high-powered real estate company decided to make an investment in expertise on these issues. Not only did this help them reduce misunderstanding with the communities, it eventually helped them rehabilitate their image and grow their ability to execute on projects.
In future articles, I will discuss some ways to be successful around community engagement and to reduce misunderstanding – a great goal for all of us. I will also return to the broader conception of community engagement. Keeping ourselves grounded about who and how power is being exercised when these policy decisions are made about local development can help us see the situation with clear eyes and achieve more public-interested outcomes.