Community engagement in engineering education

Public infrastructure development projects such as dams, weirs and bridge construction – all require community engagement at least in planning and construction stages of the projects. All such projects need to do a mandatory or a voluntary environmental impact assessment (EIA) before resuming the construction activities. Engineers play a vital role in delivering these projects and they need to engage the community during the project planning, design and construction period, even sometimes during the project operation period. Hence they need to learn the principles and processes of community engagement through to a proper training and/or education course at post graduate or undergraduate engineering education. The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of key principles and processes of community engagement and to identify the importance of community engagement contents into the engineering curriculum.