Tensions in the ‘tent’: Civic engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand universities

Abstract

Discussions around civic engagement are now commonplace in Aotearoa New Zealand universities, albeit to varying degrees of intensity. The results of these discussions are realised in strategic plans, curricular development and the commitments of individual academics to engage with the world outside the university. This article explores the tensions of increasing civic engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand universities amidst the neo-liberal landscape in which universities find themselves. Three key tensions are explored: first, who benefits – communities, students, universities or a combination? Second, how can we ensure accountability to the social and community groups which are engaged? And, third, what are the impacts on engagement of a market-driven context that encourages fast-paced, output-oriented academic processes? These tensions are explored through local examples drawn from the authors’ own experiences, alongside a review of initiatives around Aotearoa New Zealand in general and the authors’ university in particular. Grounded in broader debates around civic engagement and the contemporary political context of universities, an analysis of these experiences highlights the ongoing need to clarify what civic engagement means and aims to achieve in different contexts, as well as some of the structures and processes that require consideration for civic engagement to be meaningful for all those involved, and positively sustained over time.

Introduction

Aotearoa New Zealand has not escaped the increasingly globalised discourse on civic engagement in university education. The government’s Tertiary Education Strategy 2014–2019 requires Aotearoa New Zealand universities to become ‘more outward-facing and engaged’ with ‘strong links to industry, community, schools, and the global economy’ (Ministry of Education, 2014: 6), and all eight of its universities have signalled their desire to engage with community, government and industry through the vehicle of civic engagement. All are currently at different stages in designing, planning and implementing their modes of engagement. ¹ Varied approaches reflect the many different ways in which universities can engage students and communities in civic learning, and the political struggles that those approaches represent, as universities ‘struggle with the clash of their corporate identities and their civic duties’ (Clifford and Montgomery, 2017: 1139 ). Civic engagement discourses have emerged in the ‘uncomfortable neoliberal space’ universities find themselves in and the drive to secure external funding, demonstrate measurable impact, and build university brands to attract domestic and international students (Heath, 2000: 44). Yet civic engagement can also be a site of radical contestation and transformative social action (Arvanitakis and Hornsby, 2016; Caspersz and Olaru, 2014; Pawson, 2016). In this article, we explore the tensions that emerge from trying to develop meaningful forms of civic engagement in universities in Aotearoa New Zealand at a time when universities are working to broaden and deepen their approach to engagement.

The tensions we focus on include ensuring that engagement activities benefit both students and communities or external partners. Currently, much of the literature focuses on pedagogical benefits to students rather than social or political benefits to communities (e.g. Deeley, 2010; Mbah, 2016), yet both are important if civic engagement is to contribute to positive change and not reinforce inequalities. In addition, it is important that any collaborations are accountable and relevant to the social groups involved, rather than merely reflecting institutional funding priorities. Sound relationships are needed to ensure such accountability, but relationships take time to nurture and are not free of tensions themselves, which is challenging, given the current short-term, fast-paced, output-oriented nature of much academic and teaching practice. These three tensions – the distribution of benefits, the need for accountability and the challenge of long-term relationships – will be explored in this article in relation to emergent projects in universities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Civic engagement pedagogies and social change

The term ‘engagement’ encapsulates a range of learning theories. Edgerton (1997) identifies four pedagogical strands – problem-based learning, collaborative learning, service learning and undergraduate research – while Swaner (2007) notes that engagement also includes experiential learning, motivation and learning environments. Adding ‘civic’ to the term ‘engagement’ narrows the focus to university students engaging with communities and organisations off-campus, but a shared scholarly definition of civic engagement remains uncertain (Einfeld and Collins, 2008; Swaner, 2007). While some view civic engagement as strongly focused on the political dimensions of citizenship, such as active participation in political institutions (Reinke, 2003), others emphasise service to the community (Swaner, 2007). Civic engagement initiatives typically promise to transform individuals and communities.

Community-based forms of civic engagement are often termed ‘service learning’ (Parker et al., 2009), where ‘students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning and development’ (Jacoby, 1996, cited in Einfeld and Collins, 2008: 95). Reflection and reciprocity are key concepts of this approach (Brown et al., 2016). Service learning takes various forms, from students being placed as short-term volunteers in community organisations, to co-led research processes that aim to address community needs, to overseas trips where students contribute to a community development project.

Saltmarsh (2005: 52) sees this fluid understanding of civic engagement as appealing, noting that ‘there is room inside the civic engagement tent for the inclusion of issues of community development, student leadership, academic leadership, mission reclamation, pedagogical excellence, engaged scholarship, civics education, the renewal of liberal education, and more’. Yet it is important to ask: What challenges does such a fluid and complex understanding of civic engagement mean in practice for universities that want to deepen their students’ experience of civic engagement?

Civic engagement is expected to contribute to positive outcomes – personal, cognitive and social (Caspersz and Olaru, 2014). The research literature argues that civics should be explicitly taught in the classroom, as well as through community experiences. McTighe Musil (2003) is critical of universities leaving the learning of civics to students through clubs and volunteering activities. In addition, opportunities for structured critical reflection that bridge students’ experiences with a pathway for future action are important (Carrington and Selva, 2010; Heath, 2000). Thus, civic engagement can only come about with conscious development of engagement capacity. This, says Saltmarsh (2005: 52–53), is the kind of civic learning that ‘illuminates the socially responsive aspects’ of ‘learning and developing the knowledge, skills, and values of democratic citizenship’.

In terms of social change, the literature suggests the importance of critical analysis in distinguishing between the rhetoric that often accompanies civic engagement and its actual social outcomes. A study of short-term international service-learning trips, for example, showed that students gained considerable awareness and reflexivity around poverty and injustice but made little attempt to channel that into awareness-raising on their return home beyond sharing their stories with family and friends (Cermak et al., 2011). The students in this study experienced a sense of dissonance on their return and no opportunities to build on their experiences.

Collectively, these findings suggest that the structures that surround and support civic engagement are important to effect change on a social (rather than only an individual) scale. They also highlight a schism between civic engagement that promotes a sense of charity and ‘helping’ in students and that which engages more radically (and uncomfortably for some students and academics) in activism for transformative social change. This is a common theme in the literature (see Cermak et al., 2011; Einfeld and Collins, 2008; Marullo and Edwards, 2000), particularly for authors who sense a loss of the radical potential in civic engagement and argue for its recuperation. Marullo and Edwards (2000) clearly delineate between a scholarship of engagement that is political and aims to transform the status quo in the name of social justice, and a model of charity that is moral and associated with service, volunteering and outreach. Understanding the relationship between pedagogy and social change, and the difference between activist approaches to engagement and charity models, is a foundational issue that universities must address.

Key tensions in practising civic engagement as pedagogy

Much has been written on the impact of neo-liberalism in academic institutions in terms of how it manifests both ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ (Peck, 2003). As Ball (2012: 18) puts it, ‘out there’ refers to the ‘very real economic and political dynamic to the reform of Higher Education’, which involves the commercialisation of education services, including academic practice. This includes the persistence of auditing and ranking systems to ‘produce academia as a space of economic efficiency’ (Berg et al., 2016: 178 ). On the other hand, Ball (2012: 18) understands neo-liberalism ‘in here’ as the ways in which ‘neoliberalism gets into our minds and our souls, into the ways in which we think about what we do, and into our social relations with others’. Other scholars have noted that it creates an environment of constant competition and comparison that leads to high levels of anxiety, a focus on the short term, and a fast-paced approach to teaching and research activities (Berg et al., 2016).

Although most literature on neo-liberalism and universities is critical, progressive spaces can also be carved out (Cupples and Pawson, 2012; Lilley et al., 2015). In this context, creating citizen scholars through civic engagement poses an important opportunity to remember and expand the emancipatory potential of education and research (Arvanitakis and Hornsby, 2016), and to rethink relationships between academia and society (Chatterton et al., 2010).

Fostering citizen scholars (staff and students) involves dealing with at least three key tensions. First, when advocating civic engagement as an instrument of transformative social change, it is important to consider how benefits accrue to both students (pedagogical, professional and personal) and/or the external partners (often communities). Ideally, transformation is co-constituted and there are benefits for both (Brown et al., 2016); however, the literature suggests that far more is known about pedagogical benefits than benefits to communities. O’Steen and Perry (2012) cite extensive literature on the benefits to students of service learning, including improving academic achievement (Chan, 2016) and personal growth, but Deeley (2010: 44) argues that there is a ‘lack of convincing evidence regarding impact’ more broadly (see also Mbah, 2016). Other scholars caution that it is possible for damage to be done to communities through engagement processes (Einfeld and Collins, 2008). Short-term engagements, for example, have sometimes been shown to have minimal positive impacts on communities, reinforce local hierarchies, suffer from elite capture and be co-opted by interest groups (Cermak et al., 2011). Such findings suggest that we should think critically about who, within any ‘community’, we are choosing to engage with and why, and be alert to local striations of power (Lally, 2001).

Second, and in relation to such concerns, any interventions and collaborations need to be accountable and relevant to the groups involved. Recognising the power that academics and students have in supporting, silencing or harming movements for social change, it is vital to guarantee spaces for privileging the voices and priorities of marginalised social groups. Collaboration, then, should involve the negotiation, rather than the imposition, of acting as citizen scholars (Chatterton, 2010).

Third, issues around temporality need to be considered carefully in order to create transformative spaces and reclaim the political potential of universities. The current short-term, fast-paced nature of much academic practice poses a real challenge to establishing long-term commitments with community groups and to developing spaces for deeper transformation and learning. The need to act towards a long-term horizon is crucial to foster forms of research, teaching and civic engagement that enable an ethic of care, collaboration and collective action (Mountz et al., 2015), as well as to decolonise Eurocentric, elitist notions of time (Shahjahan, 2015). This is an important factor in disrupting inequalities and creating different ways of being, doing and knowing in higher education that foster solidarity, connection, empathy and commitment (Mott et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015).

Civic engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand

In Aotearoa New Zealand, these three tensions around civic engagement are situated within broader considerations of the purpose of universities, who and what public engagement is for, and whether the ‘good’ of universities accrues only to private individuals or to wider publics. Between 1959 and the late 1980s, universities were viewed as central to the development of social and economic life, yet were also somewhat distant from the ‘people, problems and places they studied’ (Larner and Le Heron, 2005: 849). During the neo-liberalising reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, Berg and Roche (1997) argue that increased market influence within the tertiary sector shifted universities away from working for the public good towards market-oriented businesses in which knowledge is individualised. This was also a period that fostered partnering with external organisations, which facilitated greater openness and responsiveness to the needs of communities, as well as businesses (Larner and Le Heron, 2005).

More recently, outward-focused third-stream activities (to distinguish engagements from the traditional first and second streams of research and teaching) seek to enhance knowledge transfer and relationships, but they also place a more explicit focus on opportunities to convert university knowledge into revenue (Shore and McLauchlan, 2012). Certain kinds of knowledge are more highly valued than others, however, and Shore and McLauchlan (2012) raise concerns about the threat posed to knowledge as a shared societal good by commercialisation and debt-laden students seeking to maximise their education investment (Shore, 2010).

Different approaches have now combined to create complex university–public intersections in Aotearoa New Zealand. Shore (2010: 1) argues that the ‘entrepreneurial and corporate university has not so much replaced the traditional functions and meaning of the university as added a new layer of complexity to the university’s already diverse and multifaceted roles in society’. Similarly, Larner (2015: 204) argues against binary understandings of ‘public good/global capital’, and for paying careful analytical attention to the complex context-dependent links and networks that are forged between universities and communities. However, this layering often involves tensions between competing interests (Kyle et al., 2011; Shore, 2010). Kyle et al. (2011) state that certain conditions are needed to ensure the radical potential of engagement – specifically, the protection of critical pedagogy, support for radicalism on campus, access to education and, we would add, stronger efforts to assess the impact of engagement activities on community partners.

To date, Aotearoa New Zealand university initiatives that encourage student engagement with the wider community are, for the most part, small scale and reliant on individual champions to keep them running. A significant exception to this is Massey University’s recently revised Bachelor of Arts programme, in which the core curriculum encourages students to ‘engage with the wider world’ (Massey University, n.d. a). The programme includes three compulsory papers: in the first year, ‘Tūrangawaewae: Identity and Belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand’; in the second year, ‘Tū Rangaranga: Global Encounters’; and, in the third year, ‘Tū Tira Mai: Practising Engagement’, which includes content focused on contributing to community and professional contexts, ethics and the meaning of citizenship (Massey University, n.d.a).

Another initiative of note is the University of Canterbury’s (n.d. b) Community Engagement Hub. The Hub was set up following the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 to build on the enormous contribution of the 9000+ members of the Student Volunteer Army in assisting with post-quake recovery. Staff and students sought to formalise these efforts (Pawson, 2016), and these third-stream activities are now aligned with the University of Canterbury’s new graduate profile, which requires every student to engage with the community as part of their studies. The Hub facilitates opportunities for community engagement through teaching, research, and a service that connects staff and students with communities.

More generally, universities across Aotearoa New Zealand signal their desire to engage with the community, government and industry in strategic plans. This is particularly evident in Pasifika and Māori-focused plans, which often desire to connect with the community, iwi, hapū and whānau (e.g. see the Pasifika@Massey Strategy 2020 (Massey University, 2013)). ² University strategic documents also often link engagement to the internationalisation of the curriculum, asserting that internationalisation fosters a global competitiveness and improves the quality of the curricula (Mabin et al., n.d.). ³

The less structurally embedded and formalised engagement activities more typical in Aotearoa New Zealand universities seem to centre on three types of activity. The first involves outreach opportunities such as the Learning and Change Networks programme, a partnership between the University of Auckland’s education faculty and kura, ⁴ schools, communities and the Ministry of Education to involve whānau and children in the learning process (Annan, 2014).

A second type focuses on lifelong learning opportunities, whereby universities offer short-course training in a particular area of expertise to professional and/or community groups. Examples include the University of Otago’s (n.d.) continuing education programmes, which allow the public to attend lectures and workshops, and courses on emergency management offered by the Joint Centre for Disaster Research, an initiative between Massey University and GNS Science (Massey University, n.d. b).

The third common area of civic engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand universities is connecting undergraduate research, thesis and vocational programmes with local and central government, industry and community groups in order that students might focus dissertations and other projects on ‘real-life’ topics of value to these groups. For example, a course at Victoria University of Wellington on environmental behaviour change works with the local council each year to identify relevant research projects. The results from the projects are given back to the council for use in policy development.

In the following section, we offer brief vignettes from our own institution that elicit the tensions and uncertainties of civic engagement development and, more broadly, the questions around what ‘good’ is produced and for whom.

Taking stock of civic engagement: initiatives at Victoria University of Wellington

This article came about when a group of academics from diverse backgrounds in geography, development studies and education at Victoria joined together to think, talk and write about new ways to approach higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand. We wanted to rethink the spaces where learning was happening and explore the non-traditional places that inspired our students.

As it happened, around this time our university began an exercise in identifying our distinctive academic emphasis and settled on a scaled-up programme of civic engagement. In 2016, Victoria undertook a stocktake of existing civic engagement and experiential learning activities, as it was positioning itself as one of the ‘great global-civic universities’, delivering research, teaching and engagement in the service of communities (Victoria University of Wellington, 2014). Victoria has stated that its goal is to produce students who are engaged in civic and social activities (Larner, 2016). However, in order to do that, the university needs not only to locate students in places where they can experience civic engagement, but also to support them to develop ‘civic learning’ skills and address the tensions we raise here.

The ensuing stocktake of existing university activities that embedded experiential and active learning caught in its net many creative teaching endeavours. We wondered if this new university-wide civics programme could create the environment for creativity, diversity and inclusion that we sought. We also wondered if and how the tensions working ‘in-against-and-beyond’ the institution (Pusey and Sealey-Huggins, 2013) were being handled.

The stocktake, although representative rather than exhaustive, demonstrated the wide range of activities that are seen to fulfil the criteria of making a difference to communities and cultivating students who can contribute to society (Victoria University of Wellington, 2016). For instance, the Bachelor of Arts internship programme gives students the chance to earn credits through 100 hours of voluntary work for one of 70 private or commercial employers, combined with opportunities for in-class reflection. The Climate Change Clinic, in contrast, is a voluntary student-run club. The Clinic built a website that explained the Paris climate negotiations, made submissions to the government on Aotearoa New Zealand’s contribution to climate change and worked on a legal claim against the government.

We also reflected, as academic staff, on existing programmes and projects that we are personally engaged with in order to think through the complexities of the tensions we identify in this article. Three of us supervise Master’s students in development studies, a field focused on transformative praxis and social justice typically involving students in extended fieldwork with communities and working to inform policy. ⁵ These Master’s students come from diverse professional, academic and cultural backgrounds, and some are international students supported by the Aotearoa New Zealand Aid Programme. Thesis students gain research experience, cross-cultural competencies and skills in data analysis, as well as their Master’s qualification. Together, these often lead to employment opportunities – for example, in the non-governmental organisation sector, in consultancies or for governments. Less is known about what kinds of personal transformation students may experience, although this warrants further research.

The benefits to the communities that are the focus of Master’s research are rarely evaluated, although as supervisors we invest considerable time in discussing ethical and mutually beneficial processes of engagement. However, some broad remarks can be made. In many cases, Master’s students have already worked professionally (and/or as volunteers) in their research field (e.g. in refugee resettlement, sexual and reproductive health, or education). These students typically select a thesis topic that responds directly to a knowledge gap observed in their professional capacity. In such cases, the research often supports the goals of an external organisation and/or community, and the research findings usually find a ready audience. Benefits accrue to both the student and an external organisation and/or community. This can also happen, although less frequently, with students who identify an organisation or community group to work with and manage to build rapport and collaborative processes within the one-year timescale of the Master’s thesis.

In such cases, however, it is harder to gauge the value of the research for the community. If overseas, it is often too expensive for students to return to the site of their research on completion, and they become busy applying for jobs. Some students do consciously adopt more activist methodologies (like participatory action research) that imply engagement and reciprocity throughout the research process, but, again, the impact of this is rarely evaluated beyond anecdotal observations.

However, for the most part, when the research (and engagement) process is embedded within an existing set of relationships and responds directly to a known knowledge gap, the benefits to an external partner are likely to be more direct and visible. In these cases, the research contributes to an already existing ‘social change’ project that is not led by the university or time-bound by the framework of the thesis itself. However, even in such circumstances, it is important to understand that these are learning processes and the quality of engagement will be variable. Students often reflect on things they wished they had done differently, which is an inevitable part of learning to be an independent researcher. In assessing the benefits that are hoped to accrue from civic engagement, this ‘learning environment’ must be taken into account. Currently, Master’s research in development studies is not framed as ‘civic engagement’ within an overarching university mandate. One of the questions that emerges, therefore, is how that framing might alter existing ‘engaged’ teaching and learning, and the experiences of students, communities and staff.

A further and related tension centres on the need for accountability to the groups with which universities engage. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the landscape is unique in terms of the nature of the groups that the university might engage with. In addition to commercially focused and community groups such as non-governmental organisations, charities and social service providers, Māori tribal groups (iwi) hold particular esteem as partners to government and related institutions, including universities, under the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi. Iwi groups often have both commercial and social objectives, aiming to utilise funding received from government through grievance settlements in income-generating enterprises. Given that these settlements are never fully compensatory of the historical losses experienced, this ongoing income is important in sustaining and building the economic, social and environmental health of the tribe.

As with other community groups, engaging with Māori requires the building and maintenance of positive relationships. However, engagements with iwi groups are particularly sensitive, given the fraught histories shared between researchers – effectively, government agents – and Māori. This tumult has arisen from unethical research practice involving the appropriation of Māori knowledge without regard for sensitivities around who should hold and own this knowledge, the over-researching of Māori communities and the lack of reciprocity in research practice, leaving Māori feeling that research ‘on’ them has done little to improve outcomes (Smith, 1999).

Thus, any research-based engagements with Māori communities require an understanding of these issues on the part of the researcher, the building of rapport and mutual respect before projects even get off the ground, and ongoing accountability to the ‘researched’ community. This ongoing accountability oftentimes manifests in a research process predicated on the co-creation of knowledge, promoting the community’s priorities as integral to the research process, irrespective of whether these are the researcher’s priorities.

An example of an attempt at co-creation is a project that some of the writers of this article are currently involved with, called ‘Imagining Decolonised Cities’. The project aims to create, with an iwi group and the wider public, new knowledge around what a decolonised city (broadly defined as a city that is underpinned by local iwi identity and is equitable for all communities) might look and feel like. The project includes activities such as a workshop with youth from the local community, upskilling them with design and analytical skills in order that they can submit an entry to a public urban design competition which was also organised as part of the project.

The project team is interdisciplinary, incorporating Māori studies, environmental studies and architecture academics alongside university students. Much of the work is not ‘research proper’ but has been included in the project to ensure that strong and long-lasting relationships are built with the local iwi and local community. The funding of the iwi and community to be involved in the project is crucial in order to give due respect to the time, knowledge and skill sets they bring to the project, and students need to have the appropriate skills to engage well with communities and iwi. Decisions made around the nature of the research have sought to prioritise the community’s desires – we hope successfully, but as the project continues, it is clear that there are small but potentially significant tensions here between our (university academics and students) and the community’s priorities if we are to meet funding deadlines and push out the journal articles required to quantify the research outcomes.

These wider considerations do not sit well with the university accountability mechanisms within which most of the research team are sited. These systems privilege quick knowledge, made tangible through journal articles. This raises questions around how university structures support – or do not support – research engagement that prioritises accountability to communities, rather than to the university itself. For instance, one of the authors confronted significant administrative hurdles when she tried to use money from a Victoria research grant to include collaborators in research activities – for example, co-leading a workshop in another town and co-presenting at an academic conference. The current hurdles to meaningful community engagement include funding structures which are reliant on fast-turnaround application processes, limitations on eligible spending categories, and quantitative measures of research success in report-backs to funders and within wider promotion and recognition systems.

Finally, tensions around temporality are yet to be addressed at Victoria, although the pressure is not entirely from internal forces. Aotearoa New Zealand’s national Performance-Based Research Fund operates on a six-yearly cycle, ⁶ and critics have been vocal in accusing the scheme of discouraging long-term, robust research relationships and forcing ‘a focus on end-products rather than on the quality of the process itself’ (Roa et al., 2009: 234). Despite this stressor, the Victoria stocktake did identify a number of long-term civic engagement activities that privileged place-based education and created transformative spaces. One such example is the ‘Te Kawa a Māui Atlas’ project, a digital-map-based database of student work (Victoria University of Wellington, n.d.). Initially designed to give undergraduate students a taste of ‘real’ research (Kuh, 2008), the project soon blossomed into a virtual repository for a myriad of civic engagement activities and research, many of which gave voice to Indigenous knowledge and people (Mercier et al., 2013). As such, it has become a vehicle for both challenging monocultural perceptions of Aotearoa New Zealand and making accessible different ways of being, doing and knowing mātauranga Māori in higher education. ⁷

These brief examples from our institution demonstrate the potential of civic engagement initiatives for social change at the interface of students, staff and communities. Yet they also reflect the core tensions identified earlier in this article in addressing who benefits accrue to, who interventions are accountable to, and the need for a significant investment of time to realise the transformative and political potential of civic engagements.

Conclusion

The wide range of civic engagement pedagogies within higher education will continue to evolve, likely resulting in a range of positive personal and educational outcomes. Without sufficient critical interrogation, however, they may also continue to generate student dissonance and community disengagement, especially if university spaces and structures fail to support ongoing meaningful processes and learning structures. It is important that the potential to actually harm communities be borne in mind. These risks highlight the need for critical analysis of civic engagement initiatives and vigilance in differentiating the rhetoric about civic engagement from its actual outcomes.

As outlined in this article, all eight universities in Aotearoa New Zealand are engaged in multiple complex activities that can be characterised as civic engagement, despite differences in scale, formality and staffing. This has given rise to a number of possibly unresolvable tensions that have become evident in practising civic engagement as pedagogy, particularly in the current neo-liberal context of our universities. This article has highlighted three tensions in particular, related to transformative social change, accountability and temporality, and has given examples from academic institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our analysis of these initiatives indicates that while student outcomes are well documented, the benefits to the communities are rarely evaluated and the quality of engagement is variable. This finding points to the need for university-supported research on the impacts of engagement and learning with communities – for example, research into the community experiences and impacts that emerge from the work of Master’s students in development studies. What are communities’ expectations and are they met? In addition, our summary of a project to co-create knowledge with local Indigenous people highlights the challenges around meeting both community and university priorities. This example demonstrated the complexity of being accountable to different organisations and people in ways that were often incompatible. It also pointed to the concerns that need to be carefully and slowly worked through when engaging with Indigenous communities that have fraught histories with researchers. Also, our description of a long-term atlas project that privileges place-based education demonstrates the potential for civic engagement projects to embody social change, but also identifies the need to develop relationships over time.

While it is difficult to draw absolute conclusions from the examples identified in the Victoria civic engagement stocktake, the wide range of activities raises questions about how Victoria does and will define civic engagement. In particular, the examples speak to one of the core tensions in relation to the university – how the benefits of engagement accrue to individuals and communities. It also presents challenges and opportunities for the development of citizen scholars. Defining civic engagement should be an area for further development by universities. In particular, it is important that definitions incorporate a range of pedagogical approaches, including pedagogies orientated around radical change for social justice. This definition also needs to be carefully embedded in teaching related to civic engagement to scaffold students’ learning and capacity to engage. Massey University, through its Bachelor of Arts programme, and the University of Canterbury, through its Community Engagement Hub, have demonstrated ways of doing this.

Further, if universities in Aotearoa New Zealand seek to provide a transformative learning experience but in practice emphasise performance barriers that marginalise community engagement (Brown et al., 2016), what changes in institutional culture and praxis are needed to enable this? Specifically, administrative hurdles to accessing grant money to enable genuine collaboration, an obsession with quantifiable measures of progress – for example, the Performance-Based Research Fund and the production of international peer-reviewed journal articles at the expense of other modes of communication – the invisible extra work for staff who engage with communities that is not given weight in promotion criteria, and the reliance on motivated individuals all act as institutional barriers. As Pawson (2016) argues, successful civic engagement requires significant institutional change and support. Yet he also ponders whether this support is in aid of producing yet another marketing tool or outputting graduates who fulfil the expectations of employers and the state, rather than individuals prepared to imagine different, more just worlds.

Addressing this particular tension is fraught and speaks to the changing drivers of universities that we have discussed above. However, it seems clear that a culture of collectivism amongst university staff, students and communities is essential in order to build in shared accountability and also to resist any tendencies towards extractive versions of civic engagement. In practice, this collectivism might mean only supporting civic engagement initiatives that work within existing community–university/researcher relationships where expectations are clearly defined and benefits shared (Pulido, 2008).

What seems clear is that in progressing civic engagement initiatives, there is significant work to be done in defining its purpose and creating structures and praxis that do not reproduce ‘exploitative, hierarchical and precarious’ relationships which benefit capitalism, corporate power and elites (Chatterton et al., 2010: 262), and in shifting beyond the sloganeering of the global-civic university. Ultimately, while there may be plenty of room inside the civic engagement ‘tent’ (Saltmarsh, 2005: 52) for all manner of activities, the key is to prioritise and provide enough institutional support for those that are pedagogically sound, inclusive and appropriate to their wider social and cultural context.