We help you develop projects that earn local legitimacy and support

Strategic advice for shared-space projects

We help you understand how your project is perceived and experienced by the people and organisations within its sphere of influence – the space it shares with others. We clarify the resulting risks, opportunities, and practical options, helping you decide how best to respond.

We also help you address complex stakeholder challenges, including situations where trust between project proponents, authorities and host communities has broken down.

Our work helps you build locally legitimate and supported projects.

 

Build the capability within your team

We help project proponents understand the capabilities they need to work successfully in shared space, strengthen those capabilities within their existing teams, and identify and address any gaps.

Helping projects earn local legitimacy and support 

Many project conflicts take shape long before they become visible, often while important project decisions are still being made.

AstonECO developed ELSA – the Earning Local Support Architecture – to help project proponents, host communities, and public authorities work together so that local knowledge, concerns, and aspirations can inform material project decisions.

Discover ELSA here.

Your journey to Supported Projects

An aligned and ready team

Your team clearly understands the root causes of your challenges. They are empowered and equipped to embark upon their road to a successful project.

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Smart Engagement creates focused teams
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Smart Engagement creates trust

...create a joint strategy

You know how to get to the partnerships you need to achieve a project that works for you and your stakeholders.

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...build the required trust and relationships

You bring the right people into the process and create the conditions for open dialogue, shared understanding, and constructive problem-solving. Together, you identify common goals, work through differences, and develop practical ways forward.

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Smart Engagement creates relationships
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Smart Engagement results in the right design

...achieve an optimum project design

You innovate. Together, you design a project welcomed by stakeholders and shareholders.

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...while building and sustaining local legitimacy and support

Your project is underway. The right information is on the right desk at the right time. Concerns, fears, needs, expectations and opportunities are known and addressed in an inclusive, responsive and efficient way.

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Smart Engagement leads to projects supported by all concerned

Team clarity strengthening

We undertake a deep dive to clarify your stakeholder challenges and opportunities. We do this with your team (and some close stakeholders, as required). We map out where people think they are at, where they are at, and where they need to be.  By being fully aware of where we currently are, roads to future goals become clearer.

Risk & Strategy Workshops

Tailor-made workshops identify and join the dots. They hold up a mirror for you and your team to see what your stakeholder challenges and opportunities are and ways to address them. Team cohesion is strengthened and next steps are clarified.

Results include:

  • Clarity on where your project is adding or subtracting local value - what is your project's Net Gain sum?
  • Everyone from your senior management to your implementation teams and key stakeholders are focused on the right things at the right time.
  • Stakeholder-related risks and opportunities are clearer understood and are being managed.
  • Synergies between your project with local long-term development become part of your projects design briefs.

Smart Leadership and focused team

We help your team to grow to resolve all pressing issues identified during the assessment. 

Champions within your team and their key stakeholders are identified and supported to ensure all material issues are addressed in a timely, professional, and confidence building manner. 

Smart Engagement Strategy & Plan

The engagement and co-design required to ensure all stakeholders fully understand and support the need for your project is readied.

Smart Project co-design processes and skills

Your team becomes fully capable to co-design Smart Projects wanted by you and by your projects’ neighbours.

Co-design a Smart Project

At all times, we help you ensure that there is enough trust, capacity, and willingness to enable internal and external stakeholders to work together to design a project that makes sense for all of them. One good for business and good for the community. A Smart Project.

This may include the creation of:

  • a highly functional multi-stakeholder forum to oversee the decisions that are needed to arrive at a Smart Project,
  • participatory/joint baseline studies and impact assessments,
  • designs and management plans that deliver for both the investors, developer and the host community,
  • acceptable risk and opportunity monitoring regimes that ensure the delivery of the agreed standards, goals, and impact-benefit agreements,
  • win-win solutions through principled negotiation,
  • community and authority permissions (permits) and social license to operate, and
  • an agreed project implementation plan.

Implement a Smart Project

We will work with you to:

  • nurture relationships throughout project implementation that are important for all stakeholders' reputations (this includes you),
  • proactively share feedback to manage risks and expectations, and monitor impact-benefit agreements,
  • ensure that all the involved are willing to keep engaging and open to understanding each other,
  • report on progress and challenges (link to GRI or other reporting framework if useful),
  • audit and protect the shared social license to operate.