Community engagement
Organisations: using evidence
Community engagement
approaches often focus on the planning of the process rather than on how the project outcomes will be used to feed into decision-making. This means that many well-intentioned community engagement initiatives fail to have the intended impact on decision-making. Community engagement can in fact provide an evidence base for policy development. When thinking about how this could work in practice, consider the following:
- Is community engagement being carried out at the right time to feed into decision-making cycles?
- Are key decision-makers informed about community engagement initiatives and being kept on board at all stages of process?
- Are community engagement approaches collecting the type of information that is useful to policy-makers?
- If the community has differing views or needs, how are these going to be weighed in the balance?
