A Comparative Analysis of Engagement Methodologies in Community Resilience Initiatives

Abstract

Millions of dollars, not to mention invaluable community trust and energy, are wasted every year on ineffective community redevelopment programs and projects that fail to live up to their goals due to lack of community buy-in. Community organizations have begun to acknowledge the shortcomings of conventional engagement methodologies, but a lack of solid data on the benefits or long-term efficacy of differing engagement methods has left a critical gap at the question of how and why to invest in one engagement method over another. Given the considerable expense and importance of effective engagement to community resilience, my research sought to analyze the variables that influence successful local-level engagement and outcomes for community resilience initiatives and provide practical, relevant, and implementable engagement guidance for those on the front lines of community resilience. Striving to fill the gap between the ‘why’ of engagement to the ‘how,’ I explored the question of which engagement methodologies are demonstrably most and least effective by testing the hypotheses that: 1) the perceived overall levels of the variables of “shared values” and “trust” in a community would correspond positively with the efficacy of project-specific community engagement efforts; 2) the more investment organizations made in ongoing, transparent communication, and the more varied and overlapping those forms of communication were, the greater the sense of “trust” and “shared values” community stakeholders would have; and 3), engagement strategies based on the shared values of a given community, such as financial security, personal health, or social connectivity, would prove most effective. In order to test these hypotheses, the Envision sustainable infrastructure assessment tool was used as a framework to undertake a comparative analysis of the data presented in reports by cities participating in the United Nations Office for Sustainable Development (UNOSD) Voluntary Local Review (VLR) process. Representativeness was established by including reports submitted to the UN in 2021 from distinct geographic locations, histories, and social structures, and the analysis considered the general maturity of the initiative and/or the experience of project leadership with similar initiatives. My analysis achieved the goal of categorizing engagement methodologies in the resilience sphere, determining that the most effective engagement methodologies for community resilience initiatives do appear to be based on the shared values of a community and providing a list of best practices to consider when designing and implementing resilience initiatives. It became evident that organizations should plan to build exploratory actions and activities into the earliest stages of resilience initiatives to discover and successfully establish authentic and transparent lines of communication between participants and organizers, identify shared values and sources of or threats to trust, and thus increase community receptiveness and eventual program success. Further, it highlighted the value of the Envision framework for use in the evaluation and refinement of all manner of programs and projects and provided follow-on research opportunities in the development of an interactive, algorithmic tool for data-tracking, knowledge-sharing, and capacity-building between communities.