We write the community and stakeholder engagement plan your development approval requires

What a community and stakeholder engagement plan is

A community and stakeholder engagement plan is the document a renewable energy project submits to show who it will engage, how and when it will engage them, and how it will record and respond to what it hears. It is the artefact an assessor reads to decide whether the project has genuinely consulted the community, or only notified it. For most wind, solar, battery, and transmission projects, a credible plan is part of getting the development approved, not an optional extra alongside it.

The plan does two jobs at once. It commits the project to a defined engagement program so the team knows what to do and when. And it gives the assessor the evidence trail that demonstrates the program was carried out and that community input changed the project. We write both into a single document so the plan you lodge is the plan you can deliver against.

When you need one

Most state planning and environmental assessment processes expect a renewable energy project to demonstrate genuine community and stakeholder engagement before and during assessment. The exact form the plan takes depends on the scale of the project and the pathway it follows. We prepare plans for projects moving through:

• New South Wales State Significant Development under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, where the Planning Secretary issues the Environmental Assessment Requirements (SEARs) and applicants must engage the community under the Undertaking Engagement Guidelines for State Significant Projects (high-voltage transmission is assessed as State Significant Infrastructure)
• Victorian planning permits for wind and solar facilities of 1 MW or more under the Planning and Environment Act 1987, the accelerated Development Facilitation Program, and, for higher-impact projects, an Environment Effects Statement under the Environment Effects Act 1978
• Queensland assessment under the Planning Act 2016 (State code 23 for wind, State code 26 for solar), where wind and large-scale solar are now impact assessable and must complete a Social Impact Assessment with up-front community engagement and a negotiated Community Benefit Agreement before approval
• South Australia's assessment under the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016 against the Planning and Design Code, with development-application public notification set by the Act and its General Regulations (the statutory Community Engagement Charter governs how the planning rules themselves are made, rather than the assessment of an individual project)
• Commonwealth processes where a project is referred under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, which provides for public comment on referred projects and on projects assessed through an environmental impact statement
• Competitive tenders for revenue support such as the Commonwealth Capacity Investment Scheme, whose merit criteria include the quality of a project's community engagement, social outcomes, and First Nations participation and benefit-sharing

We name the frameworks that apply to your project rather than work from a generic checklist. If you are not sure which pathway your project sits in, that is one of the first things we work out with you on a scoping call.

What SCA's plan includes

Every plan is built for the specific project, but the structure is consistent. A plan we prepare covers:

• Stakeholder mapping. Identification of the people and groups affected by the project, from neighbouring landholders and the host community through to local government, state agencies, First Nations groups, environmental interests, and elected representatives, with an assessment of the influence and interest each holds.
• An engagement program calibrated to the IAP2 spectrum. A program that sets the right level of participation for each group across the International Association for Public Participation spectrum, from informing through consulting, involving, and collaborating, so that engagement matches what each group can reasonably expect to influence.
• A First Nations engagement approach. A method for engaging Traditional Owners and native title parties early and on their terms, consistent with the consultation and agreement-making obligations under the Native Title Act 1993 and relevant heritage legislation.
• A benefit-sharing framework. Where the project offers tangible value to the host community, a framework that sets out how benefits such as community funds, neighbour agreements, local procurement, or co-investment will be designed and delivered.
• Consultation records to assessment standard. A method for capturing what the project heard and what it did in response, in the form assessors look for, so the consultation record is complete and defensible by the time the project is assessed.
• Measurement and reporting. A way to track whether engagement is working and to show, with evidence, how community input changed the project, which is the test assessors increasingly apply.

How we work

We work to a fixed fee, scoped to the scale of the project and the approval pathway it follows. A single-site solar or battery project with a contained stakeholder map is a smaller piece of work than a long transmission corridor crossing many landholdings and council areas, and the fee reflects that. We agree the scope and the fee before we start, so the cost is known against your lodgement budget from the outset.

Most clients come to us for the plan itself. Some need delivery support as well, where the team wants additional capacity to run the engagement program the plan sets out. And some come to us mid-assessment, after an assessor has asked for more on consultation, for a review and uplift of a plan that is no longer holding. We scope to whichever of these you need.

Project types we plan for

Who does the work

The plans are prepared by Chris Hanna, Director of Social Capital Advisory. Chris spent nine years inside South Australian state government and seven years leading corporate affairs for one of the state's critical energy infrastructure organisations, where landholder, corridor, and community engagement for transmission was core to the job. That work taught us how assessors weigh consultation evidence and what genuine engagement looks like when a project is under real community pressure.

We learned this in the most renewables-saturated grid in the country. South Australia ran ahead of the rest of the National Electricity Market on wind, solar, storage, and the transmission to connect it, which means the engagement problems that are now arriving in every Renewable Energy Zone arrived here first. The landholder, corridor, and community questions are the same in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland as they are in South Australia, which is why we now prepare engagement plans for projects nationally.

Frequently asked questions