The IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation was created in the late 1990s and adopted by IAP2 in 1999, developed under the leadership of Marty Rozelle, Lewis Michaelson and Doug Sarno. For more than a quarter of a century it has shaped how practitioners and decision makers describe the role communities play in public decisions. It was built as a transparency and accountability tool: a way for decision makers to state, at the outset, how much influence they intended to share.
In July 2026, the Spectrum Evolution project Project Team delivered its recommendations to the IAP2 International Board. They are more far-reaching than the earlier proposals suggested. Every label on the Spectrum would change, Inform would cease to be a level at all, and the word "promise" would be replaced.
IAP2 is explicit that no final decision has been made. This guide sets out what has been recommended, why, and what it would mean in practice. We update it as the review progresses.
Why the Spectrum is being reviewed
Concerns have been raised since at least 2017: the need for a companion resource, the position of Inform, difficulties with the Consult and Empower labels, an overemphasis on projects and decisions, and a framing written largely from the decision maker's point of view rather than the community's.
The Project Team's diagnosis is blunt. The Spectrum is widely misread. Many users treat the levels as a hierarchy in which moving right is better. Many treat informing people as engagement in itself. And because the Spectrum is the best-known of IAP2's frameworks, it is routinely asked to carry concepts that live in the Core Values, the Code of Ethics, the Foundations or the Practice Framework instead.
The 2026 process was guided by Dr Tracey Ehl (Canada), Luis Oré (Perú), Dr Cassie Hemphill (USA) and Tiffany Skomro as Project Manager. The earlier 2023–25 phase was led by Marion Short, Chris Cannon and Anne Pattillo, supported by a Sensemaking Committee.
The process so far
2023–25: regional engagement, a global survey and a final report, published as the Spectrum Evolution 2023-25 Report
December 2025: Our Way Forward — what was learned from Regional decision makers
February 2026: Themes Across Regions — common themes drawn from all previous input
Phase 1, Part 1 (reported April 2026): four workshops with Region-identified practitioners, testing criteria, purpose statements and a blank-slate approach to words and visuals
Phase 1, Part 2 (reported May 2026): two further workshops and a survey with the same group, refining the concepts
Phase 2 (reported July 2026): broad global engagement testing four proposed concepts, with the feedback survey closing 22 June 2026
July 2026: recommendations delivered to the IAP2 International Board
What has been recommended
There are nine recommendations for the Spectrum itself, two for roll-out, and one further suggestion. The changes that matter most to day-to-day practice are these.
1. Five new labels replace the familiar five
Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate and Empower would become Inviting input, Exploring together, Shaping together, Deciding together and Public decides.
Part of the reasoning is legal. Consult carries specific statutory meaning in Canada, where the duty to consult is grounded in Section 35 of the Constitution and developed through Supreme Court decisions, and a similar duty exists in New Zealand. In Britain, consultation has a common law meaning shaped by the Gunning Principles. Empower has constitutional weight in South Africa through Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment. A global framework using those words inherits meanings it never intended.
The specific wording was argued carefully. Inviting input was preferred over Providing input or Receiving input, because it signals an active commitment by the decision maker rather than something the public does unprompted or something merely accepted. Shaping together was preferred over Designing together to avoid confusion with technical design work. Public decides was preferred over Delegating authority, because authority does not always originate with institutions — it may be inherent, shared by law, or held by Rights Holders.
2. Inform stops being a level
This is the change with the sharpest edge. Inform becomes Sharing information and moves out of the row of levels entirely, sitting underneath all five degrees as a foundation. It is labelled as carrying no influence, and described as not being engagement on its own.
The intent was always that Inform represented zero influence, and IAP2 training has long said that Inform on its own is public awareness rather than participation. In practice, organisations have used the Inform column to describe a newsletter or a notice and call the result engagement. Moving it out of the row removes that defence.
The foundation also carries an obligation that repays attention: decision makers are responsible for providing clear, accurate, timely and accessible information before, during and after a process, and for communicating how input was used. That is Core Values 6 and 7 written into the structure of the model rather than sitting alongside it.
3. Levels become degrees
"Degrees of influence" replaces "levels", to describe variation along a continuum rather than rungs on a ladder. The Project Team is candid that vocabulary alone will not stop misuse, but the term does more accurately describe what the Spectrum is: a menu of choices in which no degree is better than another, matched to context.
4. Promise becomes commitment
The Spectrum would be reframed around two complementary ideas: the influence the public can expect, and the commitment the decision maker makes. Both appear for every degree.
The change from promise to commitment is deliberate. A promise is future-oriented, conditional, and easier to walk away from when circumstances shift. A commitment implies ongoing responsibility and follow-through, and is understood as more binding even when it is not formally documented. Practitioners had also questioned whether "promise" assumes a level of relationship and trust that may not exist.
5. A User Guide, and the Goal row moves into it
A companion User Guide would carry definitions, application tips, links to the other IAP2 frameworks, and space for Regional adaptation. The Goal row leaves the Spectrum and is defined there instead, on the reasoning that it duplicated the Goal-driven Foundation and mixed process-oriented statements with outcome-oriented ones.
6. Two visuals, and an open question about the arrow
Two approved visual options would be offered — one abstract, using dots and connectors, and one using icons — because Phase 2 produced no clear preference and different audiences read visuals differently. The horizontal layout stays; a circular model was explored and set aside.
The arrow is the one thing left genuinely open. The Project Team's proposal omits it, on the grounds that a left-to-right arrow drives the hierarchy misreading. But no recommendation was made, because the question was not directly tested. Three options go to the Board: no arrow, a subtle double-ended indicator between "less influence" and "more influence", or a revised one-way arrow.
7. A three-year implementation period
If adopted, the Project Team recommends a three-year implementation and review period, aligned with the curriculum review cycle, with structured feedback gathered and refinements made at the end. The argument against extending the current engagement instead is that the tensions are now well understood, and further rounds would entrench positions rather than produce new insight.
A twelfth recommendation sits outside the Spectrum itself: that IAP2 consider a separate initiative to build an influence framework written from the perspective of communities rather than decision makers. That idea has surfaced repeatedly for a decade and was judged out of scope here.
What this means for practitioners
The direction reinforces something we write about often: the Spectrum is a set of promises, not preferences — or, in the recommended language, commitments. Each degree states the role a community will genuinely play. Nearly every recommendation pushes toward making that statement harder to fudge.
The practical exposure is vocabulary. Spectrum levels are written into engagement policies, procurement templates, project plans, council reports and, in some jurisdictions, legislation. If the labels change, that language ages overnight, and the mapping is not one-to-one — Inform in particular has no successor among the five degrees. It is worth finding those references now rather than after a decision.
The Sharing information obligation is the other thing to sit with. Communicating how input was used is moving from a Core Value into the structure of the framework, at the same time as Australian environmental law is drafting a comparable requirement. We have written separately about why that is a records problem before it is a practice problem.
For choosing an engagement level your constraints can actually support, see A Promise, Not a Preference. For the fundamentals, start with What Is Community Engagement?.
What happens next
The recommendations are with the IAP2 International Board. IAP2's own process timeline places Board consideration across July and August 2026, and the association states plainly that no final decision has been made.
The engagement phases have closed, but IAP2 is maintaining a Questions and Clarifications page with an open form for questions and comments while the Board deliberates. If these changes would create problems in your jurisdiction or your organisation, that is the channel, and the window is short.
We will update this guide when the Board reports.
Primary sources: IAP2 International's Spectrum Evolution page and its Spectrum Evolution 2026 Recommendations, the IAP2 Australasia Spectrum Evolution page, and The Participation Company's account of the Spectrum's origins. The IAP2 Spectrum is protected by copyright; the visuals are described here rather than reproduced.