PIE Index: Quantifying Stakeholder Engagement on Urban Water System Projects and Initiatives

Abstract

Recent water crises showed that excluding community stakeholders in urban water system decision-making throughout can have an adverse effect on the entire community and decrease system resilience. Although engineering managers value input from stakeholders (any group or individual that can impact or is influenced by an organization’s decisions), community engagement historically has been limited. This study examined the impact of including community stakeholders in decision-making by developing the participatory implementable engineering (PIE) index to quantify stakeholder engagement for engineering managers. In addition, the PIE model was applied to a number of case study cities for validation. The case studies validated the early engagement of community stakeholders in project decision-making as contributing to increased system resilience and decreasing the likelihood of system disruptions and/or jeopardized water quality. A scaffolding is proposed to quantify stakeholder engagement and show that targeted stakeholder engagement can be used for improved engineering decision-making.