September 2026
The decision before the decisions
Good projects bring technical expertise to the table before the big decisions are made. Engagement Institute CEO Marion Short argues the first decision should be to bring communities there too, so their knowledge can help shape what follows.
Across infrastructure, planning and major projects, there is a familiar argument: bring the right expertise into the room earlier.
Engineers know the cost of being asked to solve problems after fundamental design decisions have already been made. Planners understand the limitations of being brought in once a preferred option is effectively settled. Consultants across the built environment consistently advocate for earlier involvement because better advice, applied upstream, leads to better decisions, reduced risk and stronger outcomes.
The same principle applies to community and stakeholder engagement.
Too often engagement begins after the project has already taken shape. A problem has been defined, options narrowed, budgets allocated and timelines established. The community is then asked to respond to decisions over which it has had little meaningful influence.
At that point, engagement can easily become an exercise in explaining or defending a proposal rather than improving it.
The opportunity is to shift engagement upstream – so community and stakeholder knowledge becomes an input to decision-making, alongside engineering, planning, economic, environmental and commercial expertise.
Engagement is part of good project design
Community and stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognised as essential to better decisions, stronger relationships, social licence, social cohesion and public trust.
Those outcomes matter enormously to the consulting sector.
Projects do not operate in isolation from the communities they affect. People hold valuable knowledge about place, history, local conditions, community priorities and unintended consequences. Bringing that knowledge into a project early can identify risks that may otherwise emerge much later – when they are substantially harder and more expensive to address.
Earlier engagement does not mean communities make every decision. Nor does it remove the need for professional expertise, statutory processes or accountable decision-makers.
It means being clear about where community and stakeholder influence is genuinely possible and creating meaningful opportunities for that influence to be considered before choices become unnecessarily constrained.
For consultants, this creates a powerful alignment between technical excellence and engagement excellence.
The question should not simply be: Have we consulted the community?
It should be: How has what we have learned improved the decision?
Moving from engagement activity to engagement quality
As engagement practice matures, the challenge is also changing.
Counting meetings, submissions or survey responses tells us something about activity, but relatively little about quality.
Engagement Institute is therefore bringing its existing and emerging work together into a Quality Framework for community and stakeholder engagement. The Framework connects principles, ethics, policies, practice guidance, professional capability, evaluation, organisational maturity and continuous improvement into one cohesive strategic system.
At its heart is a simple proposition: quality engagement does not happen by chance.
It requires the right organisational culture, governance, capability, resources and professional practice.
That is also why practical tools and professional development matter. Engagement Institute’s practitioner resources include toolkits, Practice Notes, templates, webinars and an Engagement Methods Tool covering more than 80 methods for different contexts, objectives, levels of influence, budgets and timeframes.
Our training is designed around the same principle: building the capability to make engagement part of good decision-making, not simply an activity undertaken at the end of a process. Programs include the Certificate of Engagement and Advanced Certificate of Engagement, alongside specialist learning in areas such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander engagement, engaging in the field, digital facilitation and applying engagement principles to policy design. In-house training can also be tailored to an organisation’s own projects, case studies and challenges.
A major component now in development is the new Engagement Institute Quality Assurance Standard for Community and Stakeholder Engagement.
The Standard is intended to define and assess quality engagement across the project lifecycle from early scoping, design and planning through to delivery, reporting, evaluation and continuous improvement.
Importantly, it is not designed to replace professional judgement. It is intended to strengthen that judgement by providing practitioners, organisations and decision-makers with a clearer shared understanding of what quality engagement looks like.
That matters because engagement cannot be treated as a discrete communications task sitting beside the “real” work of a project. It needs to connect with project governance, design, risk, procurement and decision-making.
At an organisational level, EngageMark provides another part of that picture, helping organisations assess their engagement maturity, identify capability gaps and gain independent recognition for their practice.
A shared opportunity for consultants and engagement practitioners
There is considerable common ground between the consulting profession and the engagement profession.
Both argue that expertise is most valuable when it influences the problem definition, not merely the response. Both recognise that poor decisions made early can create significant downstream consequences. And both understand that successful projects rely not only on technical competence, but on trust, judgement and the quality of the information and decisions made along the way.
The opportunity is therefore not to add another engagement stage to the project plan.
It is to integrate engagement into how projects are conceived and designed from the beginning.
For project owners, that means creating genuine space for community and stakeholder influence early.
For consultants, it means recognising community and stakeholder knowledge as another important source of intelligence informing advice.
For engagement professionals, it means demonstrating not simply that engagement occurred, but how it contributed to better outcomes.
The Engagement Institute’s emerging Quality Assurance Standard is ultimately designed around that ambition: better decisions, stronger relationships and trusted engagement.
If we already accept that bringing engineers, planners and other advisers into projects earlier produces better results, perhaps the next step is obvious.
Bring communities and stakeholders in earlier too.
About the author
Marion Short is the Chief Executive Officer of the Engagement Institute. A transformational leader with almost 20 years’ experience as a CEO in the not-for-profit sector, Marion joined the Engagement Institute (then IAP2 Australasia) in August 2017. Under her leadership, the organisation focused on delivering a suite of valued initiatives to members which has resulted in tremendous growth, membership has more than tripled to almost 15,000 and revenues have likewise increased.