The Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) will help identify the greatest challenges and knowledge gaps around community engagement and infrastructure delivery as a partner in the University of Melbourne’s Next Generation Engagement Project.
CEO of the Public Relations Institute of Australia, Anne Howard, said the PRIA is delighted to be a partner in this important research.
“The PRIA and the Public Relations profession has always been focused on increasing levels of engagement and understanding between an organisation and its many stakeholders. The challenge of reducing friction between communities and organisations of all kinds is uppermost in our minds.
“Our members are at the forefront of community engagement delivery in Australia and their insights will be essential to the success of this project.
“We wholeheartedly encourage our members to take part in all aspects of this groundbreaking consultation and to share the benefit of their considerable experience,” Ms Howard said.
Social license expert, Dr Sara Bice, is leading the project on behalf of the Melbourne School of Government.
“Almost $20 billion in largely taxpayer-funded projects have been delayed, cancelled or completed and then mothballed over the past decade in Australia. This research aims to identify the key engagement challenges and gaps in delivering new infrastructure and to then address them through applied research with industry.”
“Partners such as the PRIA will play a vital role in helping us to understand the problem. The experiences of their members at the coal face of major projects will allow us to create a clear picture of the core social challenges facing Australia’s infrastructure delivery,” Dr Bice said.
Project Director, Kirsty O’Connell joins Dr Bice in delivering the project.
“Investors, governments and infrastructure professionals acknowledge that social risk and community opposition are making projects slower and more expensive but as practitioners we don’t yet have the hard data to allow us to calculate these costs,” Ms O’Connell said.
“A solid evidence base will underpin the business case for better practices and ultimately deliver better outcomes for communities and proponents. The Next Generation Engagement Project is the first step in developing that sound evidence base.”
Over the coming six months the University of Melbourne and its partners will conduct the largest national consultation on engagement to date. This will include:
- a national survey on engagement and social license challenges for Australia’s infrastructure sector
- workshops in each capital city with leading Australian practitioners and international infrastructure experts
- a gap analysis that details the most critical knowledge gaps for the community engagement profession
- testing the gap analysis with infrastructure professionals across Australia.
Dr Bice said, “Through this work we aim to identify the biggest roadblocks around engagement, social risk management and social license for infrastructure delivery together with an analysis of emerging trends and challenges.”
“Our aim is to get this information onto the desk of key decision makers in Australia’s infrastructure sector to really inform the discussion. Our intention is that this work will seed longer-term research partnerships that will help industry to make meaningful progress on these issues.”
For the latest news on the Next Generation Research Project visit