PFAS Community Co-design Framework and Guidelines

Senior figures within the Australian Government working across multiple agencies with the National PFAS Taskforce wanted to understand the potential use for co-design approaches to come up with mitigation pathways and options with communities affected by PFAS contamination. PFAS contamination has resulted in a very complex area for decision-makers with much misinformation, real pollution, some genuine unknowns and very strong emotions across agencies and communities.

What we did

• Working with senior representatives from across Government (including the Australian Department of Defence, National PFAS Taskforce, Department of Infrastructure) we partnered with Max Hardy to use co-design approaches to create a National PFAS Community Co-design Framework and Guideline.

• Executive-level awareness raising of the reasons why co-design would work in such a technically, socially, and politically complex system.

• We used the process of co-design that we were retained to create to produce an output for the clients aligned to their specific needs and focus.

The Result

Following this project the Australian Intergovernmental Agreement on a National Framework for Responding to PFAS Contamination was updated to include co-design as an agreed national approach for use in the National PFAS Information sharing, Communication and Engagement Guidelines (Appendix C).

While the specific outputs for this engagement are for the use of the client, the Framework and Guidelines produced ultimately evolved into the successful Authentic Co-design approach.