From the Board November with Jo Wilkins
Kia ora Engagement Whanau,
I’m reasonably fresh back from the IAP2 Australasian Conference on the Gold Coast and while I won’t bang on about the wonderful location, the “sunshine state” certainly delivered! Here are some of the highlights, please get in touch if you want to talk more about any of the items mentioned here:
Things started with Aucklander Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Associate Professor at University of Auckland running a workshop on Connecting Public Participation and Politicians. Giving the politician’s view on engagement:
- Ministers accept their limited power and knowledge
- Ministers seek their own public input
- Ministers see the value in public engagement.
They need to be involved early, and find diverse conversations from a variety of sources and perspectives useful. There was some interesting discussion about access to ministers and how they aren’t all the same.
I attended the Masterclass on Citizens’ Juries: Nicola Wass (Straight Talk part of the RPS Group) took us through some of the challenges to implementing recommendations from a citizens’ jury. Nicola covered heaps of good practical stuff about these deliberative processes; they seem more common in parts of Australia and are very good for dealing with tricky problems where trust in decision-makers is low.
For the official start to the conference there was an amazing ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony
Keynotes:
- Liam Smith talking about behaviour change; Cialdini’s principles of persuasion; habits and human nature.
- Engaging with first nations:
- Shelley Reys AO from Arrilla – wonderful story telling about first hand experiences
- Tanya Koeneman from NSW Dept of Planning and Environment – while environment and heritage are both important for Aboriginal communities, so is the economic potential of their Aboriginal owned land
- Corie Taylor on personal relationships: they take time to establish and nurture…finding common ground is just a starting point
- Noel Niddrie – community engagement it’s how they want to be treated, not how you think they want to be treated (or how you want to be treated)
- Tane and Gus from Future Crunch – disruptive technological trends to get us thinking!
- Science is the bedrock of everything around us
- Getting it wrong = that’s exciting = it means we’ve learnt something
- Everyone is online … data is the new oil … geeks are in power … code is currency
- If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance less!
Highlights from the breakouts:
- Participatory Budgeting – having a go and then listening to a panel session with international experts
- E2A Youth – the young person’s view of the IAP2 Spectrum
- Engaging with school children…with long infrastructure projects – some of the young children you might talk to at the start of a project could end up being apprentices on the project as it’s being built…talent pipeline
- Youth voices are open, optimistic, energetic, hopeful and creative. They are not that hard to reach, it just requires a bit more thinking through
- Kylie Cochrane’s advice on practitioner resilience: understand the triggers and manage the balancing act of being empathetic with remaining objective and professional
- Cost of not engaging = Community input and outrage is now the key project risk: $20bn of road infrastructure projects in Australia have been put on hold due to community outrage
- Chris Mene gave a uniquely kiwi view of explaining culture and “how are things done here”, and also reminding us that “Engagement travels at the speed of trust”.
Closing plenary:
David Williams from Planning Institute Australia shared an interesting point of view: “the golden age is about to bloom for your profession.”
Jennifer Lees-Marshment’s final comment was about data – what do we do with all the data we collect! Should there be a central place for the maintenance, curation and archiving of the data that’s collected and what about the Governance of all this data?
Nathan Williams (Economic Development Queensland) had the view of: always going back to “what are decision makers looking for?” and keep being inquisitive.
Awards:
Big congrats to Aimee Brock from (New Zealand Transport Agency) NZTA and her wider team who cleaned the board by taking an award for best Planning Project; Project of the Year and International Project of the Year – there’s a project summary attached and you can read more about the other awards here.
On to the next thing – IAP2 NZ Symposium 2019 in Christchurch. If you think any of this warrants further conversations in NZ, let me know.