Green Growth Terms – Context Sensitive Solutions

WHAT IS IT? Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) was created to support facilitated decision making for infrastructure investments. Fundamentally, Context Sensitive Solutions are those that reflect community values, are designed safely and efficiently, and are sensitive to environmental concerns. According to the ContextSensitiveSolutions.org:

Context sensitive solutions is guided by a process which:

• Establishes an interdisciplinary team early, including a full range of stakeholders, with skills based on the needs of the transportation activity.
• Seeks to understand the landscape, the community, valued resources, and the role of all appropriate modes of transportation in each unique context before developing engineering solutions.
• Communicates early and continuously with all stakeholders in an open, honest, and respectful manner, and tailors public involvement to the context and phase.
• Utilizes a clearly defined decision-making process.
• Tracks and honors commitments through the life cycle of projects.
• Involves a full range of stakeholders (including transportation officials) in all phases of a transportation program.
• Clearly defines the purpose and seeks consensus on the shared stakeholder vision and scope of projects and activities, while incorporating transportation, community, and environmental elements.
• Secures commitments to the process from local leaders.
• Tailors the transportation development process to the circumstances and uses a process that examines multiple alternatives, including all appropriate modes of transportation, and results in consensus.
• Encourages agency and stakeholder participants to jointly monitor how well the agreed-upon process is working, to improve it as needed, and when completed, to identify any lessons learned.
• Encourages mutually supportive and coordinated multimodal transportation and land-use decisions.
• Draws upon a full range of communication and visualization tools to better inform stakeholders, encourage dialogue, and increase credibility of the process.

EXAMPLE:

Examples of CSS Best Practices were collected in NCHRP 480 A Guide to Best Practices for Achieving Context Sensitive Solutions

This site includes guidance on the process, design principles and outreach and education opportunities.