How can I support the co-design of NBS with stakeholders?
The question behind the question
Co-design means that the people affected take part in shaping the intervention, not only in commenting on it. The reason to do it is practical: they hold knowledge about the place that the project does not have, and their participation is frequently what allows an intervention to be implemented at all. The reason it is difficult is that it requires the project to give up the sequence in which the design is finished before anyone outside sees it.
How to do it
Begin with the people, not the site. Map the actors, their interests, their influence and the relationships among them, and establish which of them the implementation will depend on. This is the step that determines who has to be in the room, and it is worth doing properly because a co-design process that omits a necessary party produces a design that party will stop later.
Then establish the problem jointly. Where the project has already defined the problem, the first working session is where that definition is tested: the stakeholders' account of what goes wrong, where and for whom is frequently broader than the technical one, and it identifies the effects that matter to the people who will live with the outcome.
Build the model together rather than presenting it. Causal maps and system dynamics models constructed with the participants produce a shared representation of how the system works, and they allow proposed interventions to be tested against that representation in the room. Where a proposal performs well in the technical model and badly in the shared one, that is a finding worth having before the design is fixed.
Design the engagement as a process with several stages rather than a single event, and be explicit at each stage about what has been decided, what is still open, and what will be done with what comes out of the discussion. Co-design fails most often because participants conclude that their contribution changed nothing, which is a failure of the process design rather than of the participants.
Supporting instruments
The stakeholder engagement protocol provides the structured route through the process, from mapping to facilitation to recording the results. The participatory and collaborative modelling methods provide the techniques for building models with stakeholders. The adaptive planning material provides the framework that co-design usually needs, because the decisions that can be left open are precisely the ones that can be designed jointly.
