Engineers excel at solving technical challenges but may be less confident navigating the emotional landscape of community engagement.
Infrastructure projects across Australia increasingly struggle with budgets, timelines, and community relations. At present, nearly every proposed high-voltage transmission line project in Australia is delayed, many by more than three years.
Project delays and escalating costs often stem not from technical hurdles but from rising social temperatures. Community opposition is as vocal as ever, fuelled by declining trust, heightened anxiety and mounting pressures from daily life. As these tensions spill over into boardrooms, engineering leaders face a stark reality: achieving technical excellence alone is no longer sufficient.
Engineering leaders now find themselves navigating deeply entrenched, opposing narratives. Project proponents often perceive communities as obstacles – ”impediments and risks to mitigate” – while communities view proponents as detached or even exploitative – ”heartless capitalists”. These subconscious, tribal narratives create destructive self-fulfilling prophecies, reinforcing conflict rather than progress.
Breaking this cycle is critical, and engineers can hold the keys to shifting this dynamic. While engineers are widely recognised as pragmatic, solutions-oriented professionals, their social conscience and genuine desire for positive community impact often remain hidden and untapped. By engaging fully as empathetic leaders, engineers can significantly reshape interactions and project outcomes.
Why early engagement stalls
Despite its obvious benefits, early engagement often falters because project teams perceive it as risky, time-consuming, or potentially disruptive to carefully planned schedules. Teams frequently fear that revealing too much information prematurely might heighten opposition or provide fuel for disputes, believing engagement might not genuinely alter entrenched community views. This fear-driven retreat from early engagement, paradoxically, intensifies community suspicion and resistance.
Fear operates on both sides. Communities worry about the impacts of infrastructure projects – such as declining land values, loss of local character, visual pollution, health and heritage concerns – and dread broken promises or neglect. Project teams, on the other hand, fear budget overruns, missed milestones, financial penalties and backlash from executives and boards. These mirrored anxieties reinforce each other, creating a climate of mutual mistrust that delays projects and escalates costs.
Engineering the human connection
Historically, engineers excel at solving technical challenges but may feel less confident navigating the emotional landscapes of community engagement. Community resistance typically signals social, not technical, issues. When engineering leaders address the underlying human factors, they unlock pathways to genuine collaboration and superior project results.
Engineers often feel a sense of internal outrage when their technical expertise and meticulous planning appear unrecognised or undervalued by opposing communities. This frustration, while understandable, can further entrench divisions if it prevents genuine listening and empathetic dialogue.
Projects such as Sydney’s WestConnex and Victoria’s East West Link illustrate the high costs of neglecting authentic community engagement. Conversely, Brisbane’s Cross River Rail showcases the benefits of early transparency and inclusive dialogue, enabling smooth project progression despite inherent complexities. The redevelopment of CleanCo’s Swanbank precinct, transforming the site into a clean energy hub, ensuring long-term jobs and economic opportunities is another example of how early, authentic engagement can achieve positive enduring outcomes.
Importantly, the positive outcomes go beyond implementing a successful project; they also build trust and confidence that future projects can be enhanced through greater collaboration.
Ten essential tips for engineering leaders
To navigate today’s complex social landscapes, engineering leaders must evolve their mindset and approach. Here are ten practical tips to sustain and enhance social licence:
- Quantify the stakes: Calculate and communicate the financial and reputational risks of losing social licence, making it as transparent as any technical risk.
- Treat communities as true partners: Engage communities with the same courtesy, clarity, and respect expected in technical design reviews.
- Leverage local expertise early: Use community insights, networks, and influence as core inputs, not afterthoughts.
- Surface and resolve fears: Openly address community and internal project team concerns proactively to defuse tensions before they escalate.
- Challenge entrenched assumptions: Question and rethink any “this is how we’ve always done it” mindset to foster innovative and inclusive approaches.
- Define shared objectives from the outset: Co-create clearly defined goals early, ensuring alignment across stakeholders from landowners to lenders.
- Design for genuine value: Apply engineering skills not just for technical specifications, but for outcomes delivering lasting benefits to communities and businesses.
- Engineer out the “impossible”: Proactively identify and mitigate risks. Challenge instinctive assumptions that projects communities love can’t be delivered or are inherently more costly.
- Use meaningful social metrics: Prioritise metrics that genuinely measure social value and impact rather than superficial activity-based indicators.
- Be the transparency benchmark: Set new standards for openness by sharing data, trade-offs and progress consistently, reinforcing trust as a critical asset.
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Shaping better conversations
Engineers often design technically sound projects that face active resistance – not due to faulty calculations but because they overlook the human equation. When communities are asked merely to provide feedback on highly detailed, impressively designed plans, they interpret this as a sign that their views don’t genuinely matter. This invariably results in costly battles, lengthy delays, and persistent community opposition.
Engineering leaders do not need to have all answers upfront. It is perfectly acceptable – even valuable – to acknowledge gaps in knowledge as opportunities for shared learning. Community anger or scepticism is not an attack on engineering credentials but a chance to demonstrate genuine care and build lasting rapport. Remember the principle of reciprocity: communities value engineers’ expertise more when engineers genuinely value community perspectives.
Critically, ensure your project team includes skilled engagement professionals from the outset. Such experts prefer proactive collaboration to crisis-driven firefighting, and their early involvement greatly reduces downstream risks.
Read more: How engineers can design civil infrastructure people will invest in
Partnering with engagement experts
For engineers unfamiliar with engaging communities early, it is valuable to involve community engagement and co-design professionals, who offer a distinct type of expertise. Unlike communications personnel who specialise in managing outrage, engagement experts know how to build relationships proactively, identifying community values, aspirations and fears. They also collaborate effectively with engineers.
Partnering with skilled engagement professionals from the outset doesn’t eliminate all conflicts, but it significantly reduces them by ensuring communities have meaningful input before designs are finalised. These specialists help engineers navigate the complexities of public opinion, reveal site-specific challenges that surveys often miss, and establish stakeholder relationships crucial for project success.
The alternative – presenting a finished design to communities who had no voice in shaping it – almost guarantees opposition, costly redesigns and projects that struggle to secure essential community support. Smart engineers recognise that investing a few months in upfront engagement saves years of resistance later.
In our experience, engineers who understand and appreciate authentic early engagement and co-designed solutions become the most effective project managers. They integrate engagement deeply into their methodologies, rather than viewing “consultation” merely as a procedural step once plans are largely completed.
Toward a new social contract
Ultimately, engineering leaders must internalise that managing social licence is not an additional task or someone else’s job but integral to project delivery itself. Technical solutions alone cannot resolve inherently social problems. Engineers must design with communities, not just for them, aligning technical expertise with clearly defined and shared goals. In this sense, social licence is reframed into generating social value.
Engineers have the capability and opportunity to set new standards in project delivery. By dialling down conflict and dialling up progress, they ensure not just technical success but enduring community benefits.
About the authors
Max Hardy is a Fellow of IAP2 Australasia and Principal of Max Hardy Consulting, specializing in deliberative democracy, community engagement and collaborative governance. Co-author of multiple publications including The Power of Co: Leaders Guide to Collaborative Governance, the e-book The Underbelly of Engagement and contributing author to the Handbook of Public Participation in Impact Assessment, he brings more than 30 years of community engagement expertise to designing and facilitating complex community and stakeholder processes.
Dr Nick Fleming FIEAust CPEng served as National President of Engineers Australia and now sits on the boards of water and power utilities. Co-author of Insight Trading: Collaborating to Transform the Infrastructure That Shapes Society, he offers 30 years of systems thinking, design practice, engagement and strategic advisory experience to help organisations deliver high-value solutions by design.
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