Managing divided loyalties in the emerging profession of community engagement

Abstract

Community engagement practitioners design, deliver, report and evaluate processes which invite the community to influence decision-making. It is a unique role, with practitioners serving two masters: the organisations that employ or contract them and the communities whose views they are engaged to elicit. In balancing these interests, practitioners experience a number of tensions in their work, and employ a variety of methods to address them. This paper draws on a series of 20 semi-structured interviews with senior practitioners, in an attempt to answer these questions and finds that a multiplicity of tensions exist which relate to the need to serve both the community and the engagement sponsor, their position in either the public sector or as a private consultants to the public sector and the constraints and behaviours of public institutions. They way in which they manage these is relatively ad-hoc, although is often informed by principals and position.