Yet for all this momentum, the fundamentals remain stubbornly challenging. Participation rates are declining. Trust in institutions continues to erode. And the digital-first approaches that dominated the past five years are revealing their limitations, leaving one in five Australians on the wrong side of a growing divide.
Community Engagement Trends for 2026
As we look toward 2026, I see six defining trends that will separate the organisations that thrive from those that struggle. Each represents both an opportunity and a warning.
- Regulatory Reform Driving Community Engagement Transformation
- Hybrid Engagement Bridging Online and Offline Participation
- AI-Powered Accessibility
- The Trust Imperative: Close the Loop or Lose the Room
- Reaching the Unreached: Inclusion as Strategy
- Budget Pressures Meet Rising Expectations
1. Regulatory Reform Driving Community Engagement Transformation
Government policy across both countries is standardising and, in many cases, intensifying community engagement requirements, creating both opportunities and compliance pressure for practitioners.
New South Wales
NSW's Planning System Reforms Bill 2025, passed in November, represents the most significant overhaul of planning legislation in a generation. The reforms introduce a single state-wide Community Participation Plan replacing over 100 local council consultation plans, new community participation principles setting standards across all planning functions, and mandatory public transparency on how community views influenced decisions.
Notably, however, the reforms replaced explicit references to "increased opportunity for community participation" with a "proportionate and risk-based approach", a shift that may concern advocates of deeper engagement. The tension between efficiency and depth will play out across the sector in 2026.
Victoria
Victoria's Local Government Act 2020 continues to drive sector transformation, requiring all 79 councils to adopt community engagement policies with mandatory deliberative practices for Community Vision, Council Plan, Financial Plan, and Asset Plan development. With the 2024 local government elections now behind us, councils are entering their second cycle of deliberative engagement, demonstrating genuine sector maturation.
Cities including Melbourne, Greater Geelong, and Wyndham have reviewed or updated their engagement policies in 2025. The Essential Services Commission has also commissioned specific guidance for small rural councils on deliberative engagement, recognising the particular constraints they face.
Queensland
Queensland's Planning (Social Impact and Community Benefit) Act 2025 introduced mandatory community benefit systems for large-scale renewable energy developments. Critically, it elevated wind farms from code assessable to impact assessable, meaning mandatory public notification and formal community engagement processes.
This model is likely to expand to other jurisdictions as the energy transition accelerates. Practitioners working in the renewable energy space should anticipate similar requirements becoming standard.
Federal Government
The Federal Government has released nationally consistent guidelines for community engagement on transmission projects. These guidelines require transmission developers to engage early with communities, deliver outcomes for regional communities and First Nations groups, and provide tangible benefits to host communities. The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has also conducted a Community Engagement Review to strengthen standards across the renewable energy sector.
Post-election federal commitments add further momentum: $60.7 billion in infrastructure funding over four years, $17.1 billion for road and rail over ten years, and $1.5 billion specifically for the Housing Support Program to build planning capability and enabling infrastructure. The scale of required engagement is staggering.
New Zealand
Complete replacement of the Resource Management Act is underway in New Zealand, with two new acts, a Planning Act and Natural Environment Act, targeted for passage by mid-2026. The reforms will introduce nationally standardised planning zones and combined regional plans, with significant implications for how engagement is conducted at regional level.
New Zealand also released its first national AI strategy in July 2025, emphasising a "light-touch and principles-based approach" with unique requirements to consider Te Tiriti o Waitangi in AI deployment, relevant for any AI-powered engagement tools operating in the New Zealand market.
A Maturing Profession
The regulatory shifts are mirrored by professionalisation within the sector itself. IAP2 Australasia officially rebranded to The Engagement Institute in June 2025, a change driven by member feedback, with 84% preferring "community and stakeholder engagement" to describe their work rather than "public participation" (the term common in North America). The rebrand won a 2025 Transform Award ANZ, signalling the sector's growing maturity and distinct regional identity.
What This Means for Us
The direction is clear: engagement requirements are being standardised, elevated, and in many cases mandated where they were previously discretionary. Organisations that treat engagement as a compliance exercise will struggle; those that build genuine capability will find themselves well-positioned as these reforms take effect.
2. Hybrid Engagement Bridging Online and Offline Participation
For too long, our sector has been fixated on the digital engagement hub. The market is saturated with platforms that excel at online surveys, interactive maps, and idea boards. But anyone working on the ground knows that some of the most valuable feedback happens at a pop-up stall, a town hall meeting, or a conversation on the street.
The problem? These rich, in-person insights too often end up as second-class citizens, manually transcribed days later, lost in spreadsheets, and separated from the digital data that gets analysed and reported.
The data supports this as well. Research from Datacom reveals that while 57% of Australians would engage more if they could do so digitally, only 35% feel genuinely heard by their local council. Meanwhile, 20% of Australians remain digitally excluded, including low-income earners, people aged 65+, those with disability, and regional residents. City of Casey found one in five households in Doveton without internet access.
Pure digital engagement isn't just insufficient, it's potentially exclusionary.
The winning organisations in 2026 will be those that embrace what I call "Hybrid Reality", where the line between an in-person conversation and a digital data point completely dissolves. This means technology that allows a form filled out at a market stall, a phone call, an email, or an online survey to flow into the same analytical stream. It means designing engagement programs that integrate digital reach with face-to-face depth, rather than treating them as separate.
Leading councils are already demonstrating this approach. Glen Eira City Council achieved 1,755 survey responses alongside 1,773 conversations at pop-ups, engaging 420 people from underrepresented groups. City of Parramatta adopted annual face-to-face ward workshops alongside digital platforms after community feedback requesting "greater engagement at Council events and more face-to-face outreach." Cairns City Council achieved 9,500 engagements from a population of 160,000 by asking topical questions councils don't normally ask, meeting people where they are, not where technology prefers them to be.
At Communiti Labs, we've built our reputation on the Review and Follow Up phases of engagement through Communiti Analysis. But we recognise that the Plan and Engage phases, as outlined by the Engagement Institute, are where this unified, multi-channel innovation is most urgently needed.
The future isn't about more digital portals. It's about technology that finally brings the physical world into the fold.
3. AI-Powered Accessibility
Artificial intelligence has already transformed how we process engagement data. Online community engagement platforms are starting to offer AI-powered sentiment analysis, theme detection, and automated reporting. What once took weeks of manual coding can now be accomplished in hours.
But 2026 will see AI step beyond the back office and into the front lines of engagement itself.
The most significant shift will be AI-powered accessibility. Consider an elderly resident who struggles with online surveys, or a shift worker who can't attend evening consultations. AI voice agents capable of conducting empathetic phone interviews at scale could capture voices that have long been silent, instantly transcribing and coding their feedback alongside digital submissions.
This isn't about replacing human connection. It's about extending our reach to communities that traditional methods have failed.
AI also opens possibilities for more dynamic, adaptive engagement. Smart surveys that adjust in real-time to participant responses, skipping irrelevant questions or probing deeper on important issues. Interactive scenario simulations that let communities explore the potential impacts of a decision before it's made. Real-time translation and captioning that enable non-English speakers and hearing-impaired residents to participate meaningfully.
Yet we must approach this technology with clear eyes. KPMG and University of Melbourne research reveals 78% of Australians are concerned about negative outcomes from AI, and only 30% believe AI benefits outweigh risks, the lowest of any country surveyed. When it comes to customer service, 81% of Australian consumers would rather wait for a human than engage with an AI chatbot immediately.
Emerging Policy Frameworks for AI
Government frameworks are emerging to guide responsible use. The Australian Government's Policy for the Responsible Use of AI in Government (September 2024) and AI Plan for the Australian Public Service 2025 establish core requirements including human oversight, transparency statements, and stakeholder consultation before AI deployment.
New Zealand's first national AI strategy (July 2025) takes a "light-touch and principles-based approach" with unique requirements to consider Te Tiriti o Waitangi. For engagement practitioners, this means any AI tools used in New Zealand must account for Māori data sovereignty and cultural considerations.
The Skills Gap Challenge
Technology alone isn't enough. Research shows only 35% of Australian employees agree their organisation provides the AI enablement and training they need to succeed. The gap between what AI tools can do and what practitioners are equipped to use effectively is widening.
This skills gap matters because AI in community engagement isn't a set-and-forget solution. It requires practitioners who understand both the technology's capabilities and its limitations, who can interpret AI-generated insights critically, identify potential biases, and know when human judgment must override algorithmic recommendations.
The message is clear: AI must augment human engagement, not automate it away. Organisations will need clear ethical guardrails, disclosing when AI is involved, ensuring data privacy, and always maintaining human oversight of AI outputs. But they'll also need to invest in their people. The organisations that pair AI adoption with genuine capability building will outperform those that simply deploy new tools and hope for the best.
At Communiti Labs, we've been at the forefront of AI-powered analysis. As we look to complete our end-to-end offering, we're approaching these emerging capabilities with careful attention to both their promise and their risks, and to the human expertise required to use them well.
4. The Trust Imperative: Close the Loop or Lose the Room
"Consultation fatigue" is frequently cited as a barrier to participation. But evidence increasingly suggests it's a symptom, not a cause. As the Engagement Institute's 2025 guidance states directly:
People still care, they're just choosy about where they spend scarce time and attention. The test communities apply is: 'Is this process clear, accessible, and likely to influence anything?'
Industry analysis identifies five likely causes often mislabelled as fatigue: consultation boredom from using the same methods repeatedly; engaging on topics that don't matter to communities; only hearing the loudest voices; failing to thank or show impact; and treating every project with uniform maximum-intensity engagement.
But there's also a volume problem. Data from major platforms shows some communities receive up to 20 surveys per year from a single organisation. When every project triggers a consultation, and consultations rarely demonstrate impact, it's rational for residents to disengage.
The underlying issue is trust, and the data is sobering. The Scanlon-Monash Index of Social Cohesion shows steady decline since 2007, reflecting a broader erosion of institutional trust that engagement practitioners must now contend with.
Broader civic participation trends reinforce this picture: participation in social groups has dropped from 62.5% to 50%, associations per 100,000 adults have declined from 80-100 in the late 1970s to less than 20 by 2019, and only 38% of Year 10 students now meet required civic knowledge standards. We're not just competing for attention, we're operating in an environment where civic engagement itself is in decline.
Specific sectors report genuine saturation. Renewable Energy Zones are causing communities to feel "surrounded" by overlapping project consultations. Indigenous communities report fatigue from hurried government consultations with no feedback about outcomes.
Rebuilding trust requires demonstrating impact, and that means closing the feedback loop.
Too many engagement processes fail at this final hurdle. Communities give input, then never hear what came of it. The message, however unintentional, is that their time wasn't valued.
Best practice now demands active follow-up: publishing "What We Heard" reports, adapting plans in response to feedback, communicating changes back to participants, and visibly taking action on quick wins that demonstrate responsiveness. Some organisations are going further, using public dashboards to track the status of community suggestions, live streaming deliberations, and sharing raw feedback data so stakeholders can see what others are saying.
The Engagement Institute's launch of EngageMark in October 2025, Australia and New Zealand's first certification and maturity assessment tool for the engagement sector, signals that accountability is becoming formalised. The certification offers Gold, Silver, and Bronze levels across nine assessment areas, valid for three years, providing independent benchmarking against best practice. The Institute is actively advocating for EngageMark to be incorporated into government policy, submitting to the Productivity Commission that "proponents be independently assessed and certified for engagement maturity" for net zero transformation projects.
For practitioners, the strategic implication is clear: investment in the Follow Up phase is no longer optional. The organisations that can demonstrate a clear chain from community input to decision outcome will build the trust that sustains long-term engagement. Those that can't will face increasingly empty rooms.
5. Reaching the Unreached: Inclusion as Strategy
Diversity and inclusion in engagement are no longer optional, they're front and centre of emerging practice and, increasingly, regulatory requirements. Our regions are home to vibrant, diverse communities, yet traditional engagement has often struggled to hear from all segments of society.
Addressing this requires meeting communities on their terms. That means interpreters and translated documents, bilingual staff, face-to-face communication in community settings rather than council chambers, and increasingly, compensation for participants' time. Deliberative mini-publics in South Australia and Victoria now pay participants to ensure diverse representation, recognising that asking people to volunteer their time creates a barrier that disproportionately excludes lower-income and time-poor individuals.
The Boorloo Bridge project, winner of the 2025 Engagement Excellence Award for Project of the Year, demonstrates what this looks like in practice. The METRONET Noongar Place Names Initiative established Noongar-led cultural governance with a standing Reference Group engaged from pre-feasibility through construction. This wasn't consultation as an afterthought; it was partnership from the beginning.
The infrastructure demands of 2026 make inclusive engagement more urgent than ever. With $163 billion in renewable energy investment planned and ten regions across NSW, Tasmania, and Queensland forecast to see public investment rise by at least 200%, regional communities, many of which feel they've been consulted to exhaustion, will be the front line. The Federal Government's new transmission guidelines requiring developers to deliver outcomes for regional communities and First Nations groups signal that inclusive engagement is becoming a compliance requirement, not just a nice-to-have
6. Budget Pressures Meet Rising Expectations
These expanding regulatory requirements and community expectations collide with a stark reality that I am sure we are all feeling: resources are constrained.
ReadyTech's Customer Centricity Report 2024 found 47% of local governments cite lack of financial and human resources as their biggest challenge, with 31% citing ICT system limitations and 26% citing lack of staff skills. Victorian councils face "intense pressure to meet community expectations while staying financially sustainable" within rate capping, with infrastructure backlogs estimated in the tens of billions.
Rural councils face particular constraints, balancing "critical infrastructure like roads and bridges with social challenges like healthcare and housing" across vast geographic areas with smaller revenue bases.
Infrastructure Australia projects a 300,000-worker shortfall to deliver the $242 billion pipeline, and the implications for engagement are significant. The regions where skilled workers are scarcest will face the greatest consultation demand.
This creates a strategic tension that technology must help resolve. The platforms that succeed will be those that genuinely reduce practitioner burden, particularly in analysis and reporting, rather than simply adding features. Efficiency gains must be real and demonstrable. When budgets are tight, every dollar spent on engagement technology needs to translate into time saved and quality improved.
The Road Ahead
The engagement sector has spent the past decade mastering the digital survey. That era is ending, not because digital doesn't matter, but because it was never enough on its own.
The future belongs to those who can close the loop: from the first moment of Planning, through the messy, multi-channel reality of Engagement, to the deep Review of data, and the crucial Follow Up that demonstrates impact. It belongs to those who embrace AI as a tool for inclusion and efficiency, not a replacement for human connection. And it belongs to those who recognise that trust, once lost, is painfully slow to rebuild.
At Communiti Labs, we've built our foundation on AI-powered analysis that helps organisations understand what their communities are telling them. Now we're focused on completing that end-to-end vision, because the sector doesn't need more point solutions. It needs technology that brings the entire engagement lifecycle together.
The stakes are high. In a year of major infrastructure decisions, planning reforms, and continued pressure on democratic institutions, how we engage with communities matters more than ever.
I can't wait to show you what's next.
From Insights to Action
Reading about trends is one thing. Acting on them is another.
We've distilled the practical implications of this article into the 2026 Engagement Practitioner Toolkit; a set of ready-to-use resources covering regulatory compliance, hybrid engagement planning, and AI readiness.
Whether you're auditing your current practices or planning your next project, these tools will help you hit the ground running.