Community participation

Engineers must play nontechnical educational and leadership roles in understanding and supporting engineering that is sustainable throughout the lifecycle of an infrastructure project. These involve interaction with stakeholders who help engineers in all stages of a project. In the early design phases, they help engineers define needs, identify concerns, and understand the social and political forces in the community that shape their participation and preferences. During the later design and build stages, they help engineers prioritize criteria, rank options, explain choices to those not directly involved, and build potentially broad support. Working with communities means working with individuals, groups, and institutions. Although individuals may also be part of groups or even leaders of institutions, they participate as individuals and should be treated as such. Every community and each project presents a unique situation and requires different tools and techniques for community participation.