Urban development projects in Portugal, particularly those involving waterfront regeneration, historic neighbourhood renewal, or new public infrastructure, tend to generate conflict. Some of that conflict is inevitable. But a significant portion of it is produced by consultation processes that are designed to manage opposition rather than understand it. This article draws on work with municipal bodies, urban cooperatives, and development agencies across Portugal.
The difference between consultation and engagement ¶
Consultation, as it is usually practised, is a process of informing stakeholders about a decision that has already been made and recording their responses. Engagement is a process of involving stakeholders in shaping a decision before it is made. The distinction sounds obvious, but in practice the two are frequently confused, sometimes deliberately. Organisations that say they are doing engagement but are actually doing consultation tend to produce the worst outcomes: stakeholders who feel they were misled, formal objections, and press coverage that is difficult to recover from.
Mapping before engaging ¶
The most common mistake in stakeholder engagement is starting the engagement before the mapping is complete. Mapping means identifying every group with a legitimate interest in the project, understanding their specific interests (not just their stated positions), and charting the relationships between them. For the Setúbal waterfront project, we identified fourteen distinct stakeholder groups before we spoke to any of them publicly. That mapping took two weeks and changed the entire shape of the engagement process that followed.
Working with fishing associations and heritage groups ¶
In Portuguese coastal and riverside development projects, fishing associations and heritage protection groups are frequently the most vocal opponents of regeneration plans. They are also frequently the most misunderstood. In our experience, fishing associations are not opposed to change. They are opposed to change that does not account for their operational needs: access to the water, storage for equipment, proximity to markets. When those needs are addressed specifically, the opposition tends to reduce significantly. The same is true of heritage groups, who are usually more interested in process than in outcome.
Designing an engagement process that builds alignment ¶
A useful engagement process starts with questions, not presentations. Before any public meeting, we recommend a series of smaller conversations with key stakeholder groups, designed to understand their interests rather than to present the project. Those conversations inform the design of the public process. The public meetings themselves should be structured to produce specific outputs, not just to allow people to speak. And every commitment made in an engagement process needs to be recorded and followed up, because nothing destroys trust faster than a promise that is not kept.
When engagement fails ¶
Engagement processes fail for several reasons. The most common is that they start too late, after key decisions have already been made. The second most common is that they are run by people whose primary loyalty is to the project rather than to the process. External facilitation is not always necessary, but it is useful when the organisation running the project has a strong interest in a particular outcome. If you are working on a project where the consultation has already run into difficulty, our completed engagements page includes a case study on exactly this situation.
Stakeholder engagement done well is slower and more expensive than stakeholder management done badly. But the cost of a failed consultation, in time, in legal fees, and in community trust, is almost always higher. If you are planning a development project and want to think through the engagement process before it starts, we are happy to talk.