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Hydro Resource Evaluation Tool
public acceptability and engagement
How should I go about engaging the public?
Advice on Communication, Participation and Engagement
Communication
There are a whole suite of methods and practices that can be included in an engagement process. Some of them are formal and others informal. From the 4 step process it can be seen that the earliest processes are those of collecting addresses and contacts for different individuals and groups, and inviting them to meet formally in a group or informally with yourself, and discuss how engagement should progress. At the earliest opportunity you should be open and transparent with all of your thinking about the project, including all those facts that are fairly fixed (the size of the project, the exact site etc), as well as those areas that are less certain at the early stages, such as the details of exact impacts or work that needs to be carried out to ascertain them.
One of the surest way to provoke antagonism is to give the impression that you are not being open with people that have an interest in what is proposed. Local environmental groups, campaigners, and schools or colleges may be interested from an early stage in the educational prospects of your project. Email lists are a good way of building up a community of interest in the project as it develops from the first suggestion, and can keep people up to date with developments, or access help from people with useful experience and skills (see Building a Group, below). Even the smallest scale project can benefit from the help, advice and expertise of others, and these people need not only to be contacted, but communicated with on a regular basis if they are to be transformed from into participants. A simple website such as a blog is another recommended method of updating people with progress without over-burdening them with emails.
Meetings and/or exhibitions
There should be a public meeting and/or an exhibition tied in to the early stages of the permissions process, to gauge and increase the level of support. Such events are best held in a location that is familiar to local people and not exclusive to one group or type of users. Village Halls and Community Centres are the paradigm example of venue. Decide in advance what kind of event is most suitable. Is this primarily for the public at large and interested individuals, or is it mainly intended to appeal to interested parties and stakeholders? Tailor your engagement to the level of expertise involved.
To paraphrase a council website: “a public meeting is a meeting to bring people together to share information, exchange ideas, and to develop relationships and contacts. Attendance should be open to any interested member of the public or a particular community. Public meetings allow for a two-way information flow. Their very nature means they are open to all and everyone is entitled to express an opinion. They create a focal point of activity where people can share perspectives and concerns, hear other points of view, identify tensions and agree resolutions for action.”
Many people are most accustomed to a traditional ‘public meeting’ format with a presentation and speakers, followed by a question and answer session, but in order to hold this kind of meeting, it is useful to have someone experienced in chairing such events. Think about who is going to present the information that is available about the project and in what format. Powerpoint or slideshow presentations are the norm these days, and many people will want to see pictures and other visual material rather than listen to a spoken presentation involving facts and figures.
Comprehensible and familiar comparisons (“would fit under a car bonnet”/”as large as a garden shed”/”the width of this room”) should be used whenever possible. It goes without saying that a trial run of the presentation can avoid the inevitable problems with technology! Members of the research team that produced this website were invited to present at numerous public meetings where projects at different stages of development were being unveiled, and it is worth considering contacting people who have had past experience of project development at the same scale as the one you are considering (see the case study material). The timing of such formal engagement exercises is also important. Public meetings should always be held in the evening or at the weekend to enable people with work and childcare commitments the most opportunity to attend.
Be aware too, that public meetings where people are addressed from a stage or ‘on high’ need to be conducted with a good facilitator or chairperson, and to allow genuine opportunities for questions, advice and opinions to come from the floor, to be taken seriously and responded to wherever possible, as this format of engagement exercise has traditionally been associated with attracting opponents, and those with pre-existing views on the topic. They should therefore be listened to and treated with respect to avoid antagonism (see General Principles, above).
With an exhibition, it is possible for information material to be made available (e.g. on boards, through a laptop and projector) for viewing over a longer period of time. A traditional combination for many renewable energy projects is thus an afternoon exhibition followed by an evening meeting. Such exhibitions can be low-tech and relatively inexpensive (if resources such as free-standing pin-boards and large-size printing can be accessed, but may still be beyond the resources or ambitions of, for example, a household-scale project. Presentation materials that are less professional-looking may seem to reduce credibility, but they will be appreciated more than no material at all if the purpose of the engagement is to provide information and detail for examination and comment.
At all times it is good to avoid wasted effort, so make use of any material that has been provided to you (e.g. through contacts established in the earlier steps), especially if any detailed diagrams that will be used for e.g. the ‘validation requirement’ (see section 3) are available. Pictures of potential technologies can be sourced from the internet. Photographs of the site should be provided, and it is recommended that at the very least a simple ‘artist’s impression’ should convey roughly the anticipated size of the finished installation, and the configuration and exact location. Including a human figure in visual materials will help to convey scale. All materials provided for the meeting and/or exhibition should also be made available through a project website or blog, if one is available.
Site visits
Visits to the potential site will anyway be required at an early stage (pre-feasibility), and site visits are a very immediate way of engaging people with the potential project. Invite people along to see the site. One project (Torrs Hydro) took walking tours or visits to the site every weekend during development, arranged a follow-up ‘year-on’ public meeting for those who had attended the initial engagement activities, and have facilitated over 40 visits to the site in the 3 months since the project became operational. Education activities may be a criteria for acquiring funding from certain sources, and can be tied into the engagement processes.
Information provision
This should be maintained through the email lists or blog or website as suggested above, and if resources permit, other channels such as leafleting, more permanent displays (noticeboard in public buildings and libraries, even schools) or media stories should be considered. This is particularly important when associated with the formal stages of engagement such as the meeting/exhibition, the planning permission consultation period(s), when important milestones are achieved (such as the production of a feasibility study, the securing of funding etc) and in conjunction with any fund-raising activities (such as share offers related to a community-scale project, see later). A constant process of information provision will raise project awareness and convey transparency to the public, interest groups and other organisations alike.
Organisations offering advice/services relating to engagement for renewable projects
A large number of private consultancies (and much fewer not-for-profit organisations) offer advice or services relating to the kinds of engagement activities that you may want to develop in taking your project forward. Below are the details of a small selection, and more can be found using web searches. Inclusion here does not constitute endorsement:
Private
http://www.greenissues.com/ “We specialise in helping developers and businesses manage the complexities of local authority politics, stakeholder management and liaison - especially given the onus on pre-application community consultation by government legislation. We have a unique approach to managing difficult projects in that we are driven by results and objectives and not actions for their own sake; we use a proven methodology, communications is a science like most other disciplines and we work on a project basis agreeing costs in advance so there are no surprises.
Ultimately, we act to deliver political and community support for planning applications.” This organisation’s website contains a lot of useful advice on engagement activities and their benefits, but the consultancy themselves focus o house-building applications.
http://www.engageplanning.co.uk/index.html “We work with both the development team and the local authority to communicate planning issues to the wider community providing a two-way flow of information. Our programmes of work are constructed to provide the best value for our clients and ensure a high quality level of consultation is maintained throughout the project.” Services offered include Public exhibitions, Community evenings, Workshops, Steering groups,Press liaison, Project websites, Information leaflets and Newsletters.
This organisation appears to be focussed on housing developments.
http://www.mistral-pr.com/casestudies/pdfs/Environment/Eco2_biomass_plant.pdf
This web document outlines the strategy taken by Mistral PR company to a renewable community consultation.
http://www.r-e-p.com/REP%20materials/website/r-e-p.com-240408/Developers.htm “REP provide leading community engagement services using interactive websites, door to door mailings, exhibitions, etc. REP use online public consultations to gather information on public concerns that can then be addressed. These consultations also provide statistical information about public opinion, which is helpful in explaining the true nature of public opinion to planning authorities. REP have been commended by the Welsh Assembly for their community engagement practices.”
This organisation focuses on visual materials for engagement purposes, and on wind energy.
http://www.consense.co.uk/what-we-do-online.asp?ID=7 “Our online consultation systems, Open Debate and Open House, make community and stakeholder engagement more accessible, interactive and auditable; inevitably helping record valuable support for new developments. These systems help windfarm and property developers to consult with more people than the more traditional consultation methods do, reaching people who wouldn't normally take part in consultation - often supporters. Presenting all the information normally produced for the planning application and inviting local people to register online, means that consultation becomes a simple and interactive process, and that all data is fully auditable. Open Debate is designed for windfarm planning and Open House for property planning”.
This organisation’s advice on online consultancy best practice is useful and concise: http://www.consense.co.uk/downloads/Online-Consultation-flow-chart.pdf http://www.consense.co.uk/downloads/Online-Consultation-Best-Practice.pdf
Not-for-profit
http://www.h2ope.org.uk/ “there is an untapped potential for hydroelectricity that exists almost in every river in this country which is being overlooked by the government and potential investors…River weirs were constructed by their thousands and generated mechanical power for the industrial revolution. We now propose to re-use those river weirs for their original intention, namely the generation of power... By doing so we will be tapping into a vastly underused resource that can mobilise local community involvement whilst delivering a blended return on investment…Water Power Enterprises (h2oPE) is proud to be a social enterprise.
Our Board has both a business and community focus. We believe we have a working business model that can deliver renewable energy, that can engage local communities and that can provide investors with an ethical, long term opportunity that does nothing less than help save the planet…We intend to develop ‘low head’ hydro sites using the Archimedean screw which will be installed adjacent to suitable river weirs. The water will run from above the weir, down the screw and turning it, returning to the river just below the weir. The turning motion of the Archimedean screw generates electricity which can then be sold through the national grid…
We believe that social enterprise and renewable energy go hand in hand and that local communities can become the beneficiaries of the revenues so raised for decades to come. h2oPE propose to remove the two biggest barriers to the involvement of the local community in renewable energy by providing both the finance and capacity to develop and install small scale hydroelectric schemes.”
This organisation provide advice and support for people wanting to develop community-scale schemes, including and can also provide a fixed-rate ‘turnkey’ service to gaining financial backing and permissions for a project, whilst engagement remains primarily the responsibility of the developer. They only deal with hydropower, but are tied to one specific technology, the Archimedean Screw.
http://seedsforchange.org.uk/vcs/res This page directs you to the online resources of Seeds For Change, a not-for-profit consultancy that specialises in helping with meetings, grassroots groups organisation and campaigning. There is an activism focus rather than project development, but the lessons on how to effectively run groups may be useful.
