Which methods and tools can I use to engage with stakeholders?
Overview
Engagement is a process with a design, not an event at the end of a project. The methods and tools collected here cover the whole of that process: identifying who to involve and why, choosing the level of involvement that the decision requires, running the activities, and using what comes out of them.
The methods and tools
The stakeholder engagement protocol is the reference instrument. It provides a structured route from mapping the actors and their interests, through the design of the engagement process, to the facilitation of the activities themselves and the recording of their results. It was developed jointly by the partners responsible for the social and institutional work, and it is written so that it can be applied by an organisation that is not a research institute.
For the individual activities the material covers facilitated workshops, interviews, focus groups, and the participatory modelling methods described elsewhere in this section, together with guidance on when each is appropriate. It covers the practical conditions that determine whether a workshop produces usable material: who is in the room, what they have been asked to prepare, what will be done with the output, and what will be reported back.
The guidance on enhancing social acceptance addresses the step after engagement, which is the one that determines whether an intervention survives contact with the public. It identifies which attributes of a Nature Based Solution drive acceptance, how those attributes can be presented honestly, and how objections that are technically unfounded can be distinguished from objections that identify something the proposal has got wrong.
How it fits with the rest
The engagement process supplies the knowledge that the participatory and collaborative modelling methods formalize, and it supplies the acceptability assessment that determines whether a proposal can be implemented at all. It is applied throughout the demonstration areas, where the same protocol was used in settings with very different traditions of public involvement, which is what makes its guidance transferable.
