This book's genesis is in concerns surrounding the ethics of how ‘outsider’ academics engage with local communities, for the purposes of ‘grappling with complex, global problems with numerous causes, widespread and often unpredictable effects, and impacts on both social and environmental systems’ (p. xvi).

Divided into two parts, the first part of the book has the feel of a memoir. This feeling is a result of how the authors’ history of professional community engagement (aka ‘civic engagement’) and their sense of the relationship between community engagement and democracy are presented. The second, practice-oriented part also contains a more personal tone than is common for academic publications. Combined, the two parts form a book that clearly outlines the importance of community engagement, offers practical ways to go about academia-based community engagement, and identifies common pitfalls of academic-based community engagement. The personal tone embedded in the writings makes the advice accessible and highlights the passion driving excellence in community engagement.

This book is firmly from the perspective of academia. I conduct community engagement from within the environment agency of a regional government. Many of the factors common to the academic experience of community engagement are not part of the public servant community engagement experience. In the first instance, there is no choice of community engagement topic — rather, I engage the community on the topics government, not the community, think are important. Second, I have little control over the format of any engagement programs. Third, of all the checks and balances required to develop an engagement program in the public service, an ethics check is not one of them. Fourth, bureaucrats tend to hold more of an ‘other/outsider’ status, with little likelihood of that status changing. In spite of these and other differences in the motivation for, and the practice of, community engagement, I still found this book useful for my professional engagement activities.

Given my role as a community engagement officer in the public service, the second section of the book is the most directly relevant. However, the first section was not entirely irrelevant. For example, Olsen's chapter (Chapter 3: ‘Somewhere Between the Ideal and the Real, the Civic Engagement “Expert” Learns and Lets Go’) provides observations relevant to those engaging with community members from local or state governance institutions. While couched in terms of the academic experiences, her points that ‘alternative pedagogies that promote democratic relationships are often antithetical to the structure classroom experience of modernity’ and ‘knowledge flows in a top-down fashion’ in the traditional classroom (p. 28) could be readily applied to how the public sector engages. It is not just academia that has been ‘disrupted’ by changing ideas of the purpose of knowledge and who has the power to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge. The public sector also struggles to adopt engagement practices that satisfy both citizens’ expectations and those of the bureaucracy.

Tremaine's (Chapter 4: ‘Community Enrollment: Colleges and the Fault Lines Between Academic and Civic Engagement’) key contribution, for those engaging the community from within the public sector, is actually hidden away in a footnote. He reminds us that striving for ‘best practices’ in community engagement ‘too often takes focus away from the particulars of place . . . and instead suggests that civic engagement projects can always be successfully uprooted and replicated’ (p. 47). This is an age-old argument — local versus outsider knowledge. While I generally favour incorporating local knowledge, priorities and practices in ‘outsider’ regimes, the public sector tends toward the broad-scale adoption of unmodified outsider regimes. This approach privileges ‘process’ at the expense of ‘place’. However, citizens are generally more interested in place than process. This divide can exacerbate the notion of public servant as outsider.

For government and non-academic community engagement, it is Cumberbatch's chapter (Chapter 6: ‘Effective Engagement: Critical Factors of Success’) that offers the most immediate and direct value. This chapter, drawing on the author's doctoral thesis, ‘generate[s] a matrix of factors that must be present for participation to be effective’ (p. 57) from a literature review, and focus groups and surveys of experienced community engagement practitioners across geographic and academic fields. Cumberbatch defines participation as ‘the process whereby individuals and groups are afforded opportunities through specifically designed activities to be actively involved in any or all of the stages of conceptualisation, design, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of projects, programs or policies’ (p. 60). With this definition in mind, seven factors of participation were identified: ‘the definition of participation, the potential participants, the implementer or facilitator, the funder, the type of project, the social context, and the resources’ (p. 60).

Each factor identified is defined and its role in effective participation discussed. Competing or conflicting views of experienced practitioners are presented as appropriate. A checklist for each factor has been developed, providing practical, clear and well-ordered lists that allow for both a reasonable degree of uniformity across a range of engagement campaigns, but also enough flexibility to accommodate local conditions into specific campaigns. For example, the checklist for ‘definition of participation’ (p. 61) includes: (1) purpose: is participation the process, result or both? (2) technique: what methods will be used? (3) level: of participation for each stage; and (4) source: of participation demand, participants, funders and facilitators.

As a government representative, I particularly appreciated the emphasis on the funder's role. While the literature was clear on the importance of adequate funding, the focus group reported that funding largely failed to address critical engagement issues — for example, the time taken to mobilise participants. This certainly echoes my experience of public funding of community engagement; even if we have adequate funding, we do not seem to schedule the projects appropriately, resulting in, for example, a poorly attended event populated by ‘the usual suspects’ who participate in multiple engagement activities.

The interview between the leader of a community subject to a plethora of requests for community engagement and this book's editor (Chapter 7: ‘We Can't Give Up: A Conversation about Community Engagement’) is a powerfully simple way to highlight the difference between effective engagement and ineffective engagement. The community leader's perspective of the nature of the engagement their community has experienced is clear — those who engage with, and work in the long term for the community tend to be more effective as they are more likely to be working on the issues that matter to the community, rather than the researcher and/or funder. There is a part of me that wishes to suggest that this chapter be compulsory reading for community engagement practitioners.

While clearly pitched at the academic community, this collection is still valuable for non-academic practitioners. I appreciated the range of experiences about, and understandings of, what community engagement is and the openness and honesty of the authors.