Getting the green light: community engagement for renewable energies and low-carbon emission technologies in Australia

Around the world, the climate change debate and environmental disasters have placed more emphasis on renewable energies and low-carbon technologies. Gaining support from the affected communities for the development of such projects has become increasingly important. Public relations professionals are frequently called upon to facilitate organisational community engagement activities, but these practitioners often lack knowledge and training about effective engagement practices as this topic receives little attention in public relations research. This research has applied a sequential mixed methods research design to investigate how Australian organisations have engaged with local communities in their quest to gain support for renewable energy and low carbon-emission technology projects. Using in-depth interviews with fourteen experienced community engagement practitioners, this project provides a detailed examination of their practical experiences with community engagement projects. These included their role as practitioners and what they considered to be good indicators for effective engagement, as well as organisational motivations, communication and listening during community engagement. The interviews were complemented with a content analysis to establish how organisational reporting helps gaining a better understanding of the qualitative findings. The knowledge generated from this mixed-methods enquiry has provided new and more refined insights into the practice of community engagement. The new contributions to knowledge include an added local interpreter role for community engagement practitioners, and the scope of negotiables as a new dimension for shared decision-making. A two-tiered Engagement Communication Model was proposed suggesting that - based on organisational intention, communication mode and listening - organisations are aiming for different types of relationships and levels of social licenses with different audiences. This research also identified that personal attributes of engagement practitioners may contribute to engagement effectiveness and suggested they should be integrated into evaluation frameworks.