Reaffirming the role of Engagement: Key Insights from the Engagement Institute’s 2025 Annual Conference

As our industries continue to advance and our communities continue to grow, we are increasingly seeing early, consistent and transparent engagement being key to project success.

It’s been just over a month since the Engagement Institute’s (formerly, IAP2) 2025 Annual Conference. The conference brings together practitioners, researchers, and industry leaders to share experiences on the rapidly evolving socio-economic, political, and environmental landscape and learn how we can continue to engage, influence, and inspire positive outcomes for our communities and projects.

Having had time to reflect on the conference and apply these practical insights, it has reaffirmed the need to elevate the role of stakeholder engagement to ensure positive outcomes for our clients’ projects and their communities.

Moving from Compliance to Co-design

Delivering genuine social value was a key topic raised across several sessions throughout the conference. Of particular focus this year was how do we realise social benefit in the emerging renewable energy industry.

As renewable energy projects accelerate, communities are demanding more meaningful engagement and co-designed benefit frameworks. It’s no longer good enough to sponsor the local sport team’s jersey.

The concept of a co-designed benefit framework means that engagement professionals work hand-in-glove with local councils and communities to understand their key challenges and needs, determine where benefits can be most meaningful and long-lasting, and, when possible, work alongside other proponents in the region to ensure social value is maximised in the right areas. As one panelist put it, “benefits need to fit the local story, not the corporate template”.

Across Australia, many states and territories are responding to growing community expectations for meaningful engagement by releasing policies, legislation, and guidance frameworks to support the development of community benefit agreements and similar arrangements between developers and local authorities. While these frameworks remain largely untested, they present both challenges and opportunities for host communities and proponents to move beyond short-term employment outcomes and deliver lasting, positive legacies.

Building the Profession’s Voice

Across several sessions, including keynote speaker Becky Hirst’s “10 Threats to Community Engagement,” the call to action was clear: engagement professionals need a seat at the decision-making table.

Too often, engagement is buried in bureaucracy, disconnected from leadership, or treated as an afterthought. To shift this, practitioners must engage internally and upwards, respectfully challenging decisions, finding internal champions, and demonstrating how meaningful engagement reduces risk and builds social license.

Our lived experience is that cost remains a primary driver of Board decision-making. Increasingly, however, we are having conversations with clients about the risks associated with different engagement pathways, namely under-engagement, and the downstream costs this can trigger if not addressed early and executed well.

Don’t be Afraid to Engage

A recurring message throughout the conference was the role of fear in holding back good engagement. Project managers fear they will lose control, decision-makers fear conflict, and organisations fear reputational risk. Yet, as several speakers noted, this defensive approach often fuels opposition rather than mitigates it.

Our task as engagement professionals is to help the project team feel confident in openness and transparency, showing that transparency and early conversations create trust, not tension and that early engagement is a key contributor to overall project success.

Further to this, when there is fear coupled with an assumption that community perceptions and concerns are already known, engagement becomes a “tick box” exercise and is undertaken to meet the bare minimum of regulatory compliance. As a profession, we need to redefine project success to include social value and community relationships alongside technical outcomes, reinforcing that community engagement is a “must have,” not a “nice to have”, and only undertaken when required by a statutory instrument.

We have worked in partnership with clients successfully in this space and have seen them thrive and enjoy the community activities they have completed in building support for their development project. The conference reinforced that our industry stands at a pivotal moment. As Australia transitions to new industries and navigates growing community expectations, engagement must move beyond process and into partnership.

For Epic Environmental, this means continuing to embed authentic engagement into every aspect of our work, helping clients not only meet regulatory requirements, but earn social licence through trust, respect and collaboration.

Our communities are changing, and therefore, the way we engage must respond and change too.

To learn more about how Epic’s engagement professionals can help your organisation with meaningful engagement, please see our related articles below or contact us.