Stakeholder engagement

Effective stakeholder engagement is now a pre-requisite for virtually all public sector activity. It takes place in a context of growing public cynicism about consultation for consultation’s sake. We have highly-developed expertise in designing approaches to stakeholder engagement that work effectively to achieve the client’s objectives and are recognised as legitimate by stakeholders.

Working with us brings you:

• An in-depth understanding of emerging practice in stakeholder consultation, nationally and internationally.
• The ability to understand the client’s requirements, including the extent to which the culture of the client’s own organisation can enhance or detract from the effectiveness of different approaches.

Feature project

We recently undertook a review of options for stakeholder input for a client in the health sector, recognising that there is now a much stronger expectation that policy and service development will be informed by input from the public – as consumers of services, as people affected by the delivery of services to others and as people or organisations with knowledge and understanding of the issues.

The project raised complex issues over legitimacy of process and conflict of interest. In developing options for the client to consider, we were able to draw extensively on current best practice in Europe, North America and Australasia.

This work identified some very innovative approaches to public involvement, not yet part of New Zealand practice, that have very good potential for overcoming “consultation fatigue” and getting results that will be much more acceptable to the affected public.