Practice Development

The belief that ‘the public should have a say in decisions about actions that could affect their lives’ (IAP2 Core Values) drives the practice development agenda. IAP2 and other organisations including Involve, NCDD, C2D2, and AmericaSpeaks are contributing to rapid developments in the field.

IAP2A has a number of projects to help advance the practice of public participation.

State of the Practice

Through a long-term process of participation, reflection and learning, IAP2A will invite practitioners, decision makers, officials and ‘people who are engaged’ to help:
• assess the state of public participation in Australia
• set the public participation agenda
• define leading practice

In March 2010, IAP2A piloted a new participatory evaluation methodology at a summit in Victoria and produced a State of the Practice Report Card for Victoria. A short video from this event can be viewed on our YouTube Channel.

IAP2A held regional summits in late 2010 in centres across Australasia to produce regional State of the Practice report cards. These will be the basis of an Australasian report card, which is available to members in the Members Resouces section of this website. Members need to be logged on in order to access this information.

Leadership Breakfasts

In March 2010, almost 200 leaders from across the public, private and voluntary sectors attended a breakfast to hear EPA Chair Cheryl Batagol and City of Melbourne CEO Dr Kathy Alexander talk to “Creating an Engaging Organisation: What is the role of leadership in embedding community engagement?”. IAP2A plans to organise similar events across Australasia.

Core Values Awards

The Core Values Awards recognise leading practice and innovation in public participation. IAP2A has been running the Awards since 2005.

Case Studies

Case studies are an important way of documenting and sharing practice. IAP2A will shortly publish a major collection of case studies based on the last 5 years of its Core Values Awards. The collection will be added to after every set of Awards.

Kettering Report

In 2005 the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) and The Charles F. Kettering Foundation began work on a joint research project exploring public-government decision making in seven country/regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada, Latin America, UK/Western Europe and the United States.

As a result, this monumental effort has provided those on the research team and both sponsoring organizations with a unique, cross-cultural perspective of the social, political and institutional dimensions of public participation, at the country and at the regional level. We now are pleased to share these findings with you.

Please take a moment to view the documents below and see how Australasia compares against the Public Participation Practice of the world.

• Acknowledgments (114Kb)
• Africa (288Kb)
• Asia (237Kb)
• Australasia (667Kb)
• Brazil (593Kb)
• Cambodia (480Kb)
• Canada (873Kb)
• China (537Kb)
• Executive Summary (272Kb)
• Further Research (1.02Mb)
• Ivory Coast (528Kb)
• Mexico (460Kb)
• Research Project Final (4.47Mb)
• Scotland (651Kb)
• South Africa (540Kb)
• Sweden (555Kb)
• United Kingdom and Western Europe (251Kb)
• United States (841Kb)