Stakeholder engagement is now an integral part of the policy development process and informs ministerial policy advice as well as serving to optimise policy implementation and service delivery. However, emerging complex and interconnected policy challenges such as poverty or climate change require more than dated formulaic approaches or prescriptive solutions.

These complex new challenges require ‘adaptive’ approaches where fresh policy ideas, perspectives and solutions emerge and evolve in shared ‘ownership’ with stakeholders. In this course, Paul Porteous, a thought provoking leadership theorist and practitioner, will explore the fine art of stakeholder engagement in managing conflict and finding solutions to intractable policy issues.

Too often, stakeholder engagement is reduced to passive consultative processes in the rush to find solutions, without any real or deeper appreciation of the underlying challenges being faced. Groups pursue competing agendas and the usual suspects engage in stale debates attempting to coerce, intimidate, influence or otherwise convince their way to a solution.

In this context, stakeholder engagement becomes a joint learning and experimentation process – building partnerships, analysing the undercurrents, teasing out the contradictions, assessing the opportunities and threats, crafting critical interventions and preparing for the inevitable resistance and attacks.