Background
A national infrastructure agency faced a contested decision about the preferred route for a major transport corridor. Previous consultation rounds had produced thousands of form-letter submissions and adversarial public hearings dominated by organised interest groups. Decision-makers felt the consultation was generating noise rather than signal.
The Values-Based Approach
In partnership with the agency, we redesigned the engagement process around values identification rather than position advocacy.
The key insight: most stakeholders' positions (support or oppose specific route options) were proxies for underlying values (community cohesion, economic development, environmental protection, fairness to affected residents). By engaging with values directly, the process aimed to surface areas of genuine shared ground and understand the actual normative tradeoffs at stake.
Phase 1: Values Mapping Workshops
Twenty-four workshops were held across affected communities. Participants completed the Values Explorer inventory, engaged in scenario-based deliberation, and produced a community values statement reflecting their collective priorities.
Phase 2: Values-Informed Submissions
Stakeholders were invited to make submissions structured around the values framework developed in Phase 1. Guidance materials helped submitters articulate how their preferred positions related to their values and what tradeoffs they were prepared to accept.
Phase 3: Agency Synthesis
The agency used the values framework to organise and analyse submissions, allowing them to identify genuine points of consensus, the distribution of values tradeoffs, and the conditions under which different stakeholder groups might accept outcomes they had not initially preferred.
Outcomes
The values-based process produced submissions that were substantially more nuanced than those from previous rounds. Agency analysts reported that the values framing made it possible to identify packages of decisions that honoured multiple stakeholder priorities simultaneously — an option that had been invisible in position-based analysis.
The final decision was contested by fewer parties and generated less legal challenge than previous comparable decisions.
Transferable Lessons
- Lead with values, not positions: When stakeholders articulate their values before their positions, deliberation becomes more flexible and creative.
- Values mapping needs investment: The workshops were resource-intensive but generated data that simplified later analytical stages.
- Agency uptake is critical: The approach only works if the agency is genuinely committed to using values data in decision-making, not just for legitimation.