Reflections on the architecture of community engagement

In February 2026, the Caribbean Policy Research Institute published Who Gets Heard? Citizen Engagement and Youth Participation in Urban Governance. The ecosystem-level study maps more than twenty public participation channels operating across Jamaica and evaluates them against the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation and a newly developed user-needs framework. Its central finding is that Jamaica’s participation landscape is extensive but fragmented: consultation without impact, dialogue without feedback, engagement without empowerment.

Against that backdrop, a small number of mechanisms are identified as performing materially above the ecosystem average. Project STAR is one of them. The report classifies STAR’s Community Transformation Boards at Level 5 which is Empower, the highest tier on the IAP2 Spectrum and the only channel assessed to reach it. STAR is also cited as an illustrative example of good practice in both the Understand and Participate components of the user-needs framework.

The recognition reflects design choices made at the outset of the project rather than outcomes that emerged by chance. STAR’s community planning process, developed with The Leap Co., follows the CAPS approach - Consultation, Analysis, Planning and Sign-Off - a four-phase workflow that moves each community from primary data collection through collaborative interpretation and into a three-year Community Transformation Action Plan. The Sign-Off phase is the feature that distinguishes CAPS from most consultation frameworks in use elsewhere in Jamaica. A plan cannot proceed to implementation until the community itself has formally endorsed it. This is the design decision that places STAR at Level 5 on the IAP2 Spectrum, and it is precisely the mechanism the report identifies as largely absent across the rest of the ecosystem.

Sitting alongside CAPS is the Community Transformation Board, the governance structure through which each plan is then delivered, monitored and reviewed. Also developed by Leap, the board is chaired by a community lead and convenes residents, community-based organisations, church and school representatives, the Social Development Commission and private sector actors. It operates on a closed cycle of information, analysis, strategy, action and review. Because the board is the standing body that owns the plan, the record of how citizen input shapes decisions exists by default, directly addressing the ecosystem failure the report describes as the most consistent source of citizen disengagement.

Who Gets Heard? is not a report about Project STAR. It is a report about an ecosystem in which citizens frequently feel unheard despite an abundance of formal channels. That STAR emerges as its headline good-practice example offers a useful point for wider reflection: rigorous engagement design, developed and applied deliberately, is not incidental to meaningful participation. It is the precondition for it.