Community Engagement — Shaping the future
A community-focused approach supports the effective generation and transfer of new knowledge and management aids to groups and individuals.
Communities are one of the important building blocks of society. They may be organised around shared values, a common geographic location or a cause, and these days are increasingly connected through the Internet. In broad terms they generate cohesion, identity and purpose through interaction around common needs and preferences. While some contend that communities are not as strong as in the past, for example in rural districts where focal points such as the school or hall have closed, they nevertheless remain powerful agents for the adoption of new ideas and influencing change. Besides simply being ‘the right thing to do’, engagement with communities is fundamentally important to Landcare Research on at least four levels.
First, we like to involve as many of the public as possible in projects such as the annual online Garden Bird Survey, or BioBlitz events to identify local biodiversity. Here communities provide their resources and ideas to enable the successful completion of projects while at the same time enjoying a powerful opportunity to learn about and connect with science and the natural world.
Second, we engage in conversations with communities to learn about their concerns and needs. We often gather data about these matters through surveys of various types – in my earlier career as an academic researcher, I especially enjoyed the face-to-face interaction with farmers and rural communities for this purpose. Information on community requirements and aspirations helps shape research direction and priorities, and informs better public policy. We take this a step further when we work with communities to collectively develop solutions to address those needs, sharing both scientific and practical knowledge in order to tailor solutions to the community’s specific circumstances. This community-focused approach supports the effective generation and transfer of new knowledge and management aids to groups and individuals.
Information from communities also indicates what their ‘bottom lines’ and preconditions are for development projects to proceed (e.g. a hydro-dam project), in circumstances where they believe their collective group could be disadvantaged or put at risk in some way. This ‘social licence to operate’, with the aid of social media tools, is increasingly powerful and influential – you need only observe the tensions between recreational fishers and irrigation development in Canterbury to see this. Working with communities early on can help prevent such tensions developing.
Third, we are interested in the purchasing behaviour of communities. Consumer choice helps to shape product specification, supply chain management, methods of production and, increasingly importantly, brand reputation. The global megatrend for sustainability, in addition to resource constraints and environmental limits, is being influenced by consumers seeking verifiable evidence that products and services are produced in an environmentally responsible manner. This was powerfully illustrated locally by the recent ‘campaigns’ mounted against Cadbury for using palm oil rather than cocoa butter in its chocolate and pork producers for using particular methods of animal housing. We may not always agree with the tactics used but mostly the underlying concerns they are expressing cannot simply be ignored.
Fourth, communities are of interest because of their ability to exercise political choice and influence the agenda for policy-setting. We can all probably relate an example of voters at both local and central ballots collectively organising around an environmental issue (e.g. the Manapouri dam in the 1960s). Our concern as a research organisation is to ensure objective, independent information is available to the public to help them make informed decisions. The recent paper by the PM’s Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, on ‘Integrity in Science: Implications from and for the Climate Change Debate’ illustrates the types of issues and challenges the science community faces in effectively presenting information on contentious matters such as climate change. With a lot of our research involving complex, multi-faceted issues for which there are usually no straightforward solutions, we experience a lot of this challenge. A current example is the research we are doing to improve the efficacy and accuracy of use of 1080 for pest control.
In this edition of Discovery we present some of the dimensions of our research involving interactions with communities. The emphasis in the CRI Taskforce for CRIs to achieve more effective end-user engagement, and earlier and greater uptake of new knowledge and technologies, means we are vigorously taking up the challenge of how we can achieve this by working better with communities.