Community Rewilding Guide
This page is part of the Community Rewilding Guide, a resource for local groups working to restore nature. Back to guide contents page.
In any community activity there are different levels of involvement in decision-making. While trustees and members of the organisation will be most involved, a community organisation needs to also include the wider community - this is known as community participation or engagement.
Involving the community will take different forms at different stages. At an early stage it may simply involve informal conversations to ‘take soundings’ about interest in an idea. Later, fuller consultation may be needed. This might be a formal requirement for funding purposes, or to make sure that you have support, you have addressed concerns, and you are benefitting from creative suggestions and the range of skills in the community.
More active forms of participation can give the wider community more power to get involved in decisions and management activities. There are helpful resources available to guide you through types and methods for engagement.
While many groups are using the term ‘community engagement’ to refer to a wide range of activities and involvement, some prefer terms such as ‘participation’, which can be seen as a more active word. ‘Co-design’ can also be useful to explore. It’s important to find the words and language that work for your situation – but more important is the attitude behind it, and the ways in which everyone has a chance to be included.
The International Association for Public Participation has designed a spectrum to help with selecting the appropriate level of participation for any process. The IAP2 Spectrum of Participation can be adapted to ‘community participation’ by replacing the word ‘public’ with ‘community’ throughout. It ranges from ‘Inform’, through increasing levels of community influence over decisions: ‘Consult’, ‘Involve’ and ‘Collaborate’ and finally ‘Empower’. Find the spectrum here.
We messed up. I’d do it again, knowing how to carry out a successful community engagement – and facilitate it. Where people can have their say and share their ideas, not a meeting where everyone says, “you don’t know what you are doing!” It got a bit heated.
It’s partly that the funding conditions define community support as specifically the very local community. To get Scottish Land Fund support, that community support has to be pretty much unanimous. I hadn’t understood that. It became clear – as the community split – we weren’t going to be able to go down that funding route. We were sent a declaration signed by people saying they didn’t want the community to buy the land. Somebody wanted to buy the land and sabotaged the effort! What got out of hand was that we inadvertently created a space for misinformation.
So our advice is: prepare carefully for a community meeting and get someone to facilitate it from outside the community. That way, what comes out is not just a yes/no but also “yes – and look at all these things we could do”, so people can get enthused and start dreaming. Because it’s hard – you’re going to need that.
It’s one of the most sensitive and difficult things to handle – that community support. I’ve done lots of creative projects with communities, but we suddenly found ourselves completely out of our depth. It’s worth it, even if in the end it doesn’t happen, to ensure the relationship with the community is not jeopardised by the proposal – divided by no’s and yes’s. And if it does happen, you have this momentum!
How do we involve others?
Connect with us:
Get in touch: info@rewild.scot
We are grateful to SCOTLAND: The Big Picture for the images on this website.