Community Perspective on Consultation on Urban Stormwater Management: Lessons from Brownhill Creek, South Australia
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Date
2016
Authors
Dillon, Peter J
Bellchambers, R
Meyer, W
Ellis, R
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Rights
Copyright © 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Rights Holder
The Authors
Abstract
There are salutary lessons from contrasting community consultation efforts in 2011 and
2015 to develop and gain support for an urban stormwater management plan for the Brownhill Creek
catchment in Adelaide, South Australia. The 2011 process was a failure in the human dimension,
precipitating loss of community confidence, unnecessarily entrained thousands of hours of time of
residents who initiated a community action group for environmental conservation and caused a
three-year delay to decision making. By contrast, the 2015 process was vastly improved, resulted in a
landslide level of support for an obvious option not previously offered, achieved the required level of
flood protection, saved Aus$5 million (14%) on the previously proposed option and protected a highly
valued natural environment from an unnecessary dam. This paper presents a rarely heard perspective
on these community consultation processes from a participating community environmental and
heritage conservation action group (the Brownhill Creek Association) that was deeply engaged in
reforming the Draft Brown Hill Keswick Creek Stormwater Management Plan. This reveals that the
community needs to see that all options are considered and to have access to accurate information
with which to assess them. It is also necessary that the proposed plan is consistent with existing
agreed plans and policies developed through public consultation. Community concerns need to
be heard, acknowledged and acted upon or responded to, and the consultation process needs to
be transparently fair and democratic to win community support. A major contributor to success in
the second consultation was that all community action groups were invited to meetings to discuss
the purpose of the consultation and the methods to be used. Feedback was subsequently received
before the process commenced to show what had changed and why any suggestions concerning the
consultation process were not being adopted. This openness helped to mend the distrust of the first
consultation process and is recommended as an essential early step in any public consultation process.
Description
This article is an open access
article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
public consultation, community engagement, urban water management, flood protection, conflict
Citation
Dillon, P.; Bellchambers, R.; Meyer, W.; Ellis, R. Community Perspective on Consultation on Urban Stormwater Management: Lessons from Brownhill Creek, South Australia. Water 2016, 8, 170.