Multi-stakeholder engagement for sustainable bridge delivery

There is constant pressure for the civil engineering industry to keep improving its cost efficiency. In the meantime, the industry has to operate within an increasingly stringent policy and regulatory environment, more recently driven by the growing commitment to sustainable development. To overcome these challenges often requires more effective collaboration between professionals from different disciplines and wider stakeholder engagement in general. This paper focuses on the bridge engineering sector in the UK and identifies the main areas for improvement in the project delivery process, especially where effective collaboration can play a significant role. The increasing need for effective engagement of the affected community is highlighted and its implications for practising engineers are discussed. Key factors to enable effective collaboration in practice are then considered, with particular attention given to effective community engagement, after which the benefits of effective collaboration and community engagement are demonstrated by way of examples. Attempts are made to highlight some unique challenges brought about for engineers in practice by the implementation of sustainability principles. Key skills are identified to enable engineers to contribute to more sustainable bridge delivery. In order for their actions to be most effective, the development of applications-oriented, bridge-project-specific, best practice guides is proposed.