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Community engagement is an essential part of the engineer’s role. ICE has created guidelines to support best practice.
Enabling sustainable and resilient communities is a core purpose of civil engineering.
The ICE Code of Conduct states: ‘All members shall have full regard for the public interest, particularly in relation to matters of health and safety, and in relation to the well-being of future generations’.
Engineers are increasingly called upon to work on ‘wicked problems’ for which there is no clear, single technical solution.
Engaging local communities requires new understanding of the role of engineering in infrastructure delivery.
This includes considering how engineers work with community engagement specialists and established community leaders.
Community engagement can help to:
Effectively engaging with local communities is a responsibility of engineers at different stages of the infrastructure lifecycle, from conception to decommissioning.
It’s also a responsibility across different organisational levels and career stages, from apprentice and graduate to senior leader and policy maker.
Community engagement takes many forms, depending on the site, project and community.
The ICE has defined a set of principles to support best practice:
The ICE Principles for Community Engagement with Engineering were drafted from established literature and finalised after consultation with civil engineers and stakeholders.
The principles are intended to be adaptable to suit a range of contexts, regions, sectors and scales of project. They can support engineers at different stages of their career and levels of influence.
They provide a foundation for further development of best practice case studies and guidance. These can then be shared through engineering education and professional development.
The principles provide core guidance to the purpose, value and nature of good community engagement.
They also set out a challenge to the sector to reflect on how to work with communities as necessary partners in delivering sustainable and resilient infrastructure.
The principles offer insight into how the core knowledge and skillset of civil engineers and other built environment professionals needs to adapt to meet this challenge.
Read the full article describing the development of the principles in the journal Civil Engineering.
Those interested in further contributing to the development of ICE activity on community engagement can join the ICE’s People & Communities (Community Engagement) Knowledge Network.
This knowledge network supports a community of engineers, stakeholder engagement specialists, researchers and infrastructure professionals.
This group is committed to sharing knowledge, overcoming systemic challenges and improving how we can best engage with the public throughout the infrastructure asset lifecycle.
The application form, full list of knowledge networks and further information are available on the ICE website.
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