Participatory Approaches in Public Engagement

Co-Creation:

The aim of co-creation is to create shared ownership of a project between institutions and communities. The idea is to co-operate and learn from others and build a strong connection between groups which enables them to raise awareness and sensitivity towards important issues.

During our co-creation training, we train individuals to become facilitators who bring people together, while ensuring the control remains in the hands of the co-creators. Using a co-creation approach you meet your audiences’ needs, build stronger relationships and widen your audience.

The co-creation includes various steps, including two main stages; the ideation phase in which the group creatively generates, develops, and communicates new ideas, and the iteration phase in which the group revisits and improves ideas.

This approach empowers participants to create their own ideas from beginning to end, stimulates ownership of their ideas, and builds relationships between groups that last beyond the scope of the project.

Behaviour Centered Design (BCD) approach for behaviour change in conservation:

The Behaviour-Centered Design approach consists of 8 steps and has been developed by RARE, the center for behavior and environment, in order to build breakthrough solutions to environmental challenges. It is based on a combination of behavioral science and design thinking.

These are the steps of the BCD approach:

1. Frame: Identify the actors and behaviors that have a meaningful impact on your environmental goals.
2. Empathize: Collect data about the target audience and behavior using their perspective to understand their motivation, barriers, and context.
3. Map: Draw links between data observations and behavioral insights using your behavioral lens to get more effective solutions.
4. Ideate: Brainstorm, combine and prioritize ideas. By expanding the realm of possible ideas, you will think more creatively.
5. Prototype: Develop a small-scale version with the essential features of your solution. This way you don’t have to invest a lot in resources, and it makes your idea tangible.
6. Test: Test the prototype by validating your hypotheses about what motivates behavior and get feedback so you can improve the solution.
7. Launch: Plan and launch your solution to see if it works in the real world.
8. Assess: Measure the impact and monitor change in order to see if the behavior change is happening and to what degree it happens.

This approach is highly effective because all environmental problems and solutions involve behaviour change. The BCD approach helps identify target behaviours and develop strategies to change them. By using small, incremental steps, it creates a strategy that will have a larger and more lasting impact. The most important aspect of this approach is that it provides an opportunity to understand the barriers preventing people from adopting the desired behaviour and to find solutions to overcome these obstacles.

This is based on the Behavior Centered Design from Rare.org.