How we help you build supported projects

Strategic advisory for complex shared-space projects

We support organisations developing projects in shared space, where technical solutions must work not only on paper but also in the places where they are built.

We help projects that face complex stakeholder challenges, including situations where trust between developers, authorities and host communities has broken down.

Our work focuses on helping organisations in their journey to supported projects (Smart Projects).

Helping projects earn local support from the start

Many project conflicts form long before they become visible, often during the early stages of project design.

With a focus on Renewable Energy developments, AstonECO developed ELSA – the Earning Local Support Academy – to help build local support early on, before opposition hardens.

Explore ELSA here.

Your journey to Smart Projects

Build focused teams

Your team understands clearly the root problems to your challenges. They are empowered and fully skilled to embark upon their road to a successful project.

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Smart Engagement creates focused teams
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Smart Engagement creates trust

Create a joint strategy

You will know how to get to the partnerships you need to achieve a project wanted by you and all your stakeholders.

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Build required trust and relationships

Your project team will be extended to include your project’s key stakeholders. They are empowered to set common goals and find solutions to get there.

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Smart Engagement creates relationships
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Smart Engagement results in the right design

Achieve an optimum project design

You innovate. Your empowered team designs the best possible project and all the stakeholders win.

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Implement a project everyone supports

Your project is underway. You need the right information on the right desk, at the right time and in the right format. Concerns, fears, needs, expectations and opportunities are acknowledged and addressed in an inclusive, responsive and efficient way.

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Smart Engagement leads to projects supported by all concerned

Team clarity strengthening

We undertake a deep dive to clarify your stakeholder challenges and opportunities. We do this with your team (and some close stakeholders, as required). We map out where people think they are at, where they are at, and where they need to be.  By being fully aware of where we currently are, roads to future goals become clearer.

Risk & Strategy Workshops

Tailor-made workshops identify and join the dots. They hold up a mirror for you and your team to see what your stakeholder challenges and opportunities are and ways to address them. Team cohesion is strengthened and next steps are clarified.

Results include:

  • Clarity on where your project is adding or subtracting local value - what is your project's Net Gain sum?
  • Everyone from your senior management to your implementation teams and key stakeholders are focused on the right things at the right time.
  • Stakeholder-related risks and opportunities are clearer understood and are being managed.
  • Synergies between your project with local long-term development become part of your projects design briefs.

Smart Leadership and focused team

We help your team to grow to resolve all pressing issues identified during the assessment. 

Champions within your team and their key stakeholders are identified and supported to ensure all material issues are addressed in a timely, professional, and confidence building manner. 

Smart Engagement Strategy & Plan

The engagement and co-design required to ensure all stakeholders fully understand and support the need for your project is readied.

Smart Project co-design processes and skills

Your team becomes fully capable to co-design Smart Projects wanted by you and by your projects’ neighbours.

Co-design a Smart Project

At all times, we help you ensure that there is enough trust, capacity, and willingness to enable internal and external stakeholders to work together to design a project that makes sense for all of them. One good for business and good for the community. A Smart Project.

This may include the creation of:

  • a highly functional multi-stakeholder forum to oversee the decisions that are needed to arrive at a Smart Project,
  • participatory/joint baseline studies and impact assessments,
  • designs and management plans that deliver for both the investors, developer and the host community,
  • acceptable risk and opportunity monitoring regimes that ensure the delivery of the agreed standards, goals, and impact-benefit agreements,
  • win-win solutions through principled negotiation,
  • community and authority permissions (permits) and social license to operate, and
  • an agreed project implementation plan.

Implement a Smart Project

We will work with you to:

  • nurture relationships throughout project implementation that are important for all stakeholders' reputations (this includes you),
  • proactively share feedback to manage risks and expectations, and monitor impact-benefit agreements,
  • ensure that all the involved are willing to keep engaging and open to understanding each other,
  • report on progress and challenges (link to GRI or other reporting framework if useful),
  • audit and protect the shared social license to operate.