The importance of being taught: improving public engagement in resource management through learning by doing

Abstract

While public engagement is a legal (and moral) requirement in many countries, good engagement is hard to do. Bad public engagement is too often the norm, often ending in court cases or protests. While government and industry proponents often do not see public engagement as important, in turn practitioners often assume it can be done “on the fly” to comply with the law. We argue that the appropriate role of community engagement, building relationships and ownership of initiatives within communities, is neglected and its promise of improved community-Industry/government relations overlooked. Recently, there has been a resurgence in the creation of engagement tools enabling effective discussion and progress on shared agendas. Unfortunately, as many do not understand or practice engagement ethically, these tools and the deepening understanding of public engagement is underutilized. Our answer to this challenge is to teach university courses that explicitly focus on how to do good public engagement, the importance of many different approaches and the requirement to implement custom supports. Many of our examples are drawn from the authors’ own engagement practice and experiences. We try to teach students, through our own example, a willingness to be a different sort of practitioner: making a difference in the world. We stress that public engagement is key to increased civic engagement and democracy. In this article, we use personal and professional reflection to examine the need for good practice, our own understanding of it and how we teach good engagement practices at a Canadian university, including developing an innovative practice.