Measuring the efficiency of community engagement An ecological analogy

Evaluation of community engagement has historically avoided or ignored the question of the efficiency of the processes used. This paper suggests a way of measuring efficiency that is robust, quantifiable, straightforward to calculate and intelligible. Curiosity about a striking feature of two case studies led to the realisation that there are significant parallels between community engagement and theoretical ecology. Some of these parallels are briefly explored before the ecology analogy is used to construct a numerical measure of the efficiency of community engagement. Possible applications of the new measure are then discussed. An illustration of the method by which the new efficiency measure is computed is given in an appendix.