Power to the people: amplifying public input on long-term environmental strategies and projects

To truly leave positive legacies, environmental strategies and projects should be shaped by technical experts and the public alike. However, engaging people on schemes that don’t deliver a tangible physical asset or that set out a lasting vision can be challenging. We must capture their imagination, argues environmental consultant Michael Aquilina.

With public and private sector bodies acting to limit the impacts of climate change, public participation is increasingly being sought on long term sustainability projects. But how do you empower someone to comment on a national flood resilience strategy, for example? Likewise, how do you make the information contained within an ecological report readily available to a person with limited prior knowledge of the subject? These demands are compelling environmental consultants to take an increasingly creative approach to stakeholder engagement.

As technical advisors on strategic programmes, it is our role to assess challenges and opportunities based on the best available technical data and stakeholder inputs to then scope and design potential approaches and solutions. Stakeholder engagement – the process of informing, engaging and consulting the public to inform decision-making – on long-term sustainability strategies or projects that take years to come to fruition has a different set of challenges to consulting on a bridge, railway or new building. For example, consultations on city-wide environmental strategies have to make abstract concepts (such as net zero or resilience) real and relevant to local citizens. In other instances, it’s about the wider dissemination of complex information and ideas that might otherwise be confined to niche technical fields, such as natural capital, into accessible formats that allow the public to meaningfully engage with the project.

In addition, the climate and biodiversity crises have complex drivers and outcomes, and the projects created to address them can encompass complex spatial scales. These projects must be effective at both strategic and local implementation levels, so engagement with affected communities is critically important. However, human behaviour is such that people tend to be more interested in schemes that directly affect them. It is common for projects that address the impacts of a changing climate to face the challenge of communicating the wider benefits both in and beyond the local area.

In this article, we look at three challenges when engaging with the public on long term sustainability projects – building ownership and trust, communicating long-term visions, and considering digital literacy – using examples from our work in Europe and the Middle East.

Building ownership and trust

If local communities are not properly consulted on schemes of strategic importance, then public trust can be easily eroded. Engagement campaigns must build effective communication pathways to both present wider benefits and provide a space for public opinion to influence decision-making.

A well-thought-out communication campaign will build trust and strengthen relationships between all parties. In the city of Amman, Jordan, the Greater Amman Municipality has been consulting with the public on key sustainability issues to help develop priority actions for its Green City Action Plan (GCAP). As well as conducting a digital campaign in both Arabic and English, our project team worked closely with local sub-consultants, Leaders of Tomorrow, to access a network of community leaders to engage those harder-to-reach sections of the community, in this project commissioned by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

Building ownership and trust also involves making technical information accessible and relatable. We set up an online workshop with community members and local government officials to discuss the key sustainability issues that had been raised throughout the engagement programme. The workshop utilised innovative role-playing exercises which helped us to explore each party’s perspective, contextualise complex issues, challenge assumptions. The workshop also provided a direct line of communication between the community and the Greater Amman Municipality and helped create a sense of ownership to this critical city-wide strategy. Repeating these exercises beyond the consultation phase can further strengthen relationships and trust.

Communicating long-term visions

It can be difficult to engage members of the public on strategic projects that focus on long-term visions without a tangible outcome. In the case of a rewilding project for instance, a forested area can take decades to establish, so it can be hard for people to envisage what it will eventually look like – or appreciate its future value.

Natural capital is a field of environmental economics which relies heavily on environmental data and valuation literature and the results are often presented in long reports and spreadsheets. At the Natural Capital Laboratory (NCL) – a rewilding project in the Scottish Highlands – we are translating all this information in a creative, easy to access and visual manner with our digital platform. The platform harnesses 3D maps to make the site easier to explore by giving viewers a novel perspective on both the area and the related data so that they can appreciate the mosaic of habitats on one screen. The goal is to help users understand the benefits nature provides, how nature changes over time and why certain land use decisions are made. Once armed with this information, we hope that people will feel more empowered to engage with the project as it evolves.

Even with the use of these industry-leading digital tools, the audience comprises largely of those local to the project or with an interest in rewilding. So, we have also used virtual reality to create a tangible, visual and acoustic experience to demonstrate how rewilding might change the landscape in the future. The use of virtual reality is helping us to further promote this essential work to a new audience: for example, the NCL virtual reality experience was a featured project in the UK Green Building Council’s virtual pavilion during COP26.

The same challenges apply to city-wide strategies. In Amman, we wanted people to share their vision for a green city, so we used emotive personal subjects to engage citizens in thinking about how they wanted the local government to address environmental issues. We set up a social media campaign to encourage residents to share their own green actions as well as community project success stories. These prompts sparked debate and critical thinking across online platforms helping the public to not only engage in these complex issues but at the same time indirectly share their concerns and priorities for the city.

Considering digital literacy and the digital divide

The global pandemic has accelerated the trend towards virtual platforms and digital engagement tools, which have had a transformational effect when used on traditional infrastructure projects. At AECOM, we have been expanding and evolving these tools to meet the particular challenges of engaging the public on complex sustainability projects and using them to unpick technical information into a more engaging format through PlanEngage by Digital AECOM, a platform that uses interactive mapping and video.

However, moving engagement online risks isolating certain demographics of a population, who may not have access to the internet or may not be digitally literate. In Amman for example, where most of the activities were online due to the pandemic, the vast majority of engagement fell between two age categories, 18-34 and 35-54.

The project team considered ways in which they could reach a wider audience, in particular those that the digital campaign did not reach. The team chose a local artist to create a mural depicting the campaign’s vision for a green Amman in a central area of the city in the hope that it would spark debate and conversation. The design incorporated many of the key concerns and aspirations expressed by city residents throughout earlier stages of the campaign. This hybrid approach helped increase the reach of the campaign beyond the digital audience and provided a novel way of engaging sections of the public who did not typically think about or discuss environmental issues.

Empowering communities in the decision-making process

Without meaningful public engagement, there is a danger that sustainability strategies and projects will act as an echo chamber for technical experts, neglecting the communities that these projects serve and reducing potential for change.

Arguably the first step in persuading a person to participate in the decision-making process on long term sustainability projects is to capture their imagination. There are many ways to do this, but success often depends on taking a creative approach.  To maximise the success of these approaches, consultants must think carefully about the reason for engaging, who they are engaging and what information they need to share to foster meaningful dialogue with the public.  These elements will help shape a well-thought-out campaign that creates effective communication pathways using innovative real-world methods and digital tools so that local people are front and centre in the decision-making process.