A Promise, Not a Preference

Choosing your level of engagement — and honouring it

Choosing a level of engagement before you’re clear on your objectives, constraints, and decision-making authority isn’t aspirational. It’s a commitment you’re making to your community before you know whether you can keep it.

A familiar conversation.

A project team is briefed on a new neighbourhood plan. The engagement manager asks what level of engagement they’re running. Someone suggests Collaborate — it’s a significant project, the community has strong views, and it feels like the right signal to send.

Nobody asks whether the organisation has the mandate to co-design outcomes. Nobody asks which decisions are actually open to community influence. The level is chosen because it feels respectful, not because it reflects what the organisation can deliver.

Six months later, community members who participated in co-design workshops are frustrated that their preferred options weren’t on the shortlist. They weren’t told the shortlist had already been set. Nobody intended to mislead them. The level was chosen before anyone checked what the process could actually honour.

The IAP2 spectrum — Consult, Involve, Collaborate — is one of the most widely referenced frameworks in community engagement practice. It is also one of the most frequently misapplied. Not because practitioners don’t understand what each level means, but because the level is often chosen before the conditions that should determine it have been established.

The level of engagement is not a preference, a signal of intent, or a reflection of how much you value community input. It is a commitment — a specific promise to a specific community about the degree of influence they will have over a specific decision. Making that commitment before you know what you can deliver is how good intentions produce bad outcomes.

The right level of engagement is the one you can honestly honour — not the one that signals the most respect.

What each level actually means

Consult means you will seek community feedback on analyses, options, or decisions, and you will genuinely consider that feedback. The promise is: we will listen, we will acknowledge what we heard, and we will tell you how it influenced our decision. Consult is not a lower form of engagement. It is the right level for many project types — particularly where decisions are technically or legislatively constrained, or where the decision space is genuinely narrow.

Involve means you will work directly with stakeholders throughout the process to ensure their concerns and aspirations are understood and considered. The promise goes further: we will make sure your perspective is reflected in our options and alternatives. This requires ongoing, substantive dialogue — not a single session.

Collaborate means you will partner with stakeholders in developing alternatives and identifying preferred solutions. The promise is the most significant: we will look to you for advice and innovation, and we will incorporate your recommendations to the maximum extent possible. This level requires genuine organisational flexibility and decision-making authority that includes, or is meaningfully influenced by, community input.

The sequence dependency

The level of engagement cannot be chosen responsibly before Step 3 (defining objectives) and Step 2 (establishing constraints). Without knowing what you need from the community and what is genuinely open to their influence, you are choosing a promise without knowing whether you can keep it.

The overclaiming problem

Overclaiming — choosing Involve or Collaborate when the process can only honestly deliver Consult — is the more common and more damaging of the two failure modes. It happens for understandable reasons: it signals respect, it feels more inclusive, and it is rarely challenged at the outset.

The damage surfaces later. When community members who participated in co-design processes find their recommendations not reflected in outcomes, they feel misled — not because the organisation acted in bad faith, but because the implicit promise of the engagement level was not kept. The gap between what the level implied and what the process delivered is experienced as a breach of trust, regardless of intent.

Overclaiming is also self-defeating from an organisational standpoint. It creates expectations that require more resource to manage than honest Consult would have required, while producing the same decision-making outcome.

Overclaiming pattern: The team selects Collaborate because the project is significant and the community has strong views. Co-design workshops are run. The community develops preferred options. The final decision reflects the organisation’s original preferred option, constrained by budget and prior commitments that were never disclosed. Community members feel the co-design process was theatre. They are right.

The underclaiming problem

Underclaiming — defaulting to Consult when Involve or Collaborate would be more honest — is less discussed but equally problematic. It often happens when organisations have had difficult experiences with community engagement and have retreated to the minimum commitment to manage expectations and reduce risk.

The cost is different from overclaiming but significant. Underclaiming signals to communities that their input is limited in scope and influence before the process begins. Highly engaged stakeholders — the ones with the most relevant knowledge and the strongest motivation to contribute — often disengage from processes they perceive as tokenistic. The organisation ends up with a narrow participant base and shallower input than the project required.

Consult done well and honestly is more valuable than Collaborate done poorly or dishonestly.

How to choose the level honestly

Three questions, answered in order, will get you to the right level.

First: What decisions are genuinely open to community influence? If the decision space is narrow — constrained by legislation, budget, or prior commitment — be honest about that before choosing a level that implies otherwise.

Second: What do we actually need from the community? Clarifying your engagement objectives (Step 3 in the sequence) will tell you whether you need feedback, collaborative input, or partnership in solution design. The level should match what you genuinely need, not what sounds most progressive.

Third: What can we organisationally deliver? The right level requires the right infrastructure — decision-making flexibility, time, skilled facilitation, and a genuine willingness to act on input. If those conditions are not in place, choose the level you can actually honour, and make a plan to build toward higher levels on future projects.

Once the level is chosen, communicate it explicitly

Tell communities at the outset: here is the level of engagement we are running, here is what that means for the influence your input will have, and here is how we will tell you what happened with your contribution. Stating this clearly at the beginning is the single most effective way to prevent trust damage later.

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Part of the CE Canvas series: Order of Operations

This post is part of a series on the sequence that drives effective community engagement. Read the full framework in our pillar post: Order of Operations — Why community engagement fails before the first session runs.

Part of Order of Operations for Community Engagement.

Next: Stakeholder Mapping: Who Needs to Be in the Room?