Dialogue and Engagement Specialists
The Sciencewise-ERC has a team of ‘Dialogue and Engagement Specialists’ (DES) who provide expertise on Science and Technology dialogue, represent the Sciencewise-ERC programme, monitor funded projects and are on hand to offer support for capacity building in national Government. The team consists of:
Diane Warburton
Diane is a writer/researcher and consultant on public and community participation and one of the UK's most experienced evaluators of public and stakeholder engagement processes. She has evaluated most of the major national Government public engagement programmes in recent years (including on health, nuclear power, hybrid embryo research and energy research), as well as stakeholder programmes (on waste, nuclear decommissioning and tidal power). She has written extensively on participation for a wide range of public, professional and academic audiences and is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Brighton and is a co-founder of Involve.
Andrew Acland
Andrew Acland has worked as a mediator and facilitator of dialogue in contexts ranging from the political, social and environmental to the legal, corporate and organisational for over twenty years.
He has specialised in designing and facilitating dialogue in complex, multi-party, multi-issue contexts, such as the transport of nuclear waste, decommissioning of offshore installations; industrial development in environmentally sensitive areas; corporate social responsibility and many others.
Now in private practice as a specialist in ‘deep dialogue’ - exploring situations where people are divided by profound differences of beliefs and values - Andrew was also a founding Director of Dialogue by Design Ltd, one of the United Kingdom’s leading providers of stakeholder engagement processes, and of Involve, a not-for-profit organisation specialising in understanding public engagement in all its forms.
Alison Crowther
Alison is the longest serving member of Sciencewise-ERC, having been involved since its inception in 2004. Since then she has been responsible for developing the dialogue expertise of the programme and for assisting policy makers identify and commission public dialogue projects. An experienced dialogue facilitator, Alison has been involved in many high profile and controversial areas of policy starting with Shell's Brent Spar stakeholder dialogue back in 1996, GM technologies, nuclear power, waste infrastructure and the advent of offshore wind. Since joining Sciencewise-ERC her work has encompassed public rather than just stakeholder dialogue and has covered responses to climate change, and many new scientific technologies such as nanotechnology and stem cell research.
Alison currently works mainly in a training, coaching and mentoring role and on a number of projects increasing personal and community wellbeing and resilience in communities at risk.
Suzannah Lansdell
Since the early 1990s Suzannah has been advising on, designing, managing and facilitating high-level stakeholder engagement projects, and more recently has been a freelance facilitator and stakeholder engagement advisor. She has been involved in projects covering the spectrum from those with a high degree of contention or conflict through to visioning and strategy development work with business, government and NGOs. Issues covered have included genetic modification; nuclear decommissioning; sustainable mobility; oil field decommissioning; electro-magnetic fields; recycled aggregates; water directive implementation; and landscape strategy.
Daniel Start
Daniel works in the design and facilitation of dialogue and deliberation processes. Trained in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, he has broad experience across the science sectors and over fifteen years international consultancy experience in public policy delivery, organisational strategy and stakeholder engagement. He regularly works as advisor, coach and mentor to evolving government and NGO programmes, bringing independence, participation and inquiry to projects. He has published widely and is the author of two books.
Penny Walker
Penny has been facilitating public and stakeholder engagement around contentious and complex topics for over ten years. She specialises in aspects of sustainable development, where people need to have better conversations whilst developing good policy, technical and social responses to environmental challenges. Topics have included nuclear decommissioning, communicating sustainable development, climate change and the role of social science in flood risk management. She also provides one-to-one expert support and coaching on these new approaches and has written extensively about engaging people and the interface between organisational change and sustainability.
Lynn Wetenhall
Lynn is a consultant in the field of stakeholder engagement. She has fourteen years of senior consultancy experience on a range of engagement work – consultation, partnership working, strategic collaboration, and public participation. She also has a background in sustainable development. Lynn has a particular interest in multi-agency and multi-sector collaboration and also in local Government.