Evaluating traditional and web-based community engagement mechanisms for green stormwater infrastructure development: Perspectives from administrators, practitioners, and researchers
This research aims to convey a comprehensive overview of the existing community engagement mechanisms applied for green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) development. This study uses the mixed-methods methodology to fulfill the objective and answer research questions. The mixed-methods integrates quantitative analysis based on survey and qualitative research in the form of the survey’s open-ended questions and key informant interviews. The quantitative data is analyzed through descriptive statistics, and primary/secondary descriptive coding is used for the qualitative survey and interview data. Findings reveal that no single approach would suit every GSI project. It will be required to combine a variety of complementary approaches to be most successful. The selection of an appropriate engagement mechanism is determined by considering the logistic, perceptual, and political factors which hamper the engagement in the first place. Designing an engagement process can be informed through collaboration with local stakeholders who clearly understand the nature of the issue, desired objectives, available resources, and community capacity and context. Such engagement process must be informed by the contextual characteristics of the community, build capacity for long-term collaboration, and facilitate knowledge transfer and science communication to overcome the perceptual barriers. The Covid-19 pandemic and its associated circumstances also indicated many public and private organizations are in the early stages of adoption and experimentation with web-based tools and have yet to realize their full potential. Therefore, with a rising number of web-based engagement platforms gaining popularity among decision-makers, there is a need to further investigate these tools to identify their full capacity.
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