Welcome to the online Guidebook!
Who is the Guidebook for?
The Guidebook is designed to serve the needs of all those seeking to develop effective strategies for deliberate, community-led engagement in managing natural resources issues – regardless of whether they are relatively new to, or are more experienced with, developing these types of initiatives.
Audiences the Guidebook was explicitly developed for include technical service providers, Extension professionals, local and state governments and agencies, civic and non-profit organizations, farmer organizations, watershed associations, and others seeking to better engage their stakeholders. It is our hope that the Guidebook provides practitioners and researchers alike with new insights and a set of strategies, concepts, tools, considerations, and assessment strategies for advancing the evidence-based implementation of effective engagement in natural resource management.
While the experiences, concepts, and strategies provided here are primarily within the context of water and agriculture issues, the insights and perspectives we have developed are relevant to a wide range of engagement projects and issues. Whether your engagement initiative is designed around local leadership groups, as ours was, or is developed in any number of other ways, the strategies, principles, findings, and considerations discussed here will be relevant to helping you ensure your efforts are as effective as possible. We strongly encourage you to make this Guidebook your own – and to use and adapt the tenets of stakeholder engagement we outlined here in the ways most appropriate to your specific project or organization.
How To Use This Guidebook
The Guidebook has been developed to provide an overview of the important engagement implementation strategies and concepts, as well as an investigation of the social science concepts and findings emerging from the Water for Agriculture project’s four-year engagement implementation and research endeavors. It is designed so that you can either move consecutively through it, or focus on those sections, chapters, and tools you find most useful. Links to additional resources, tools, and worksheets are included in the Resources folder on the top bar and provided within each chapter.
The full table of contents is available on every page: on the left of the screen on a computer and at the top on a tablet or phone. Click on the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons to expand and collapse the menu and click the topics to explore the content.
We hope this guidebook is useful as you use and adapt these materials for your own engagement initiatives! If you have questions or comments please feel free to reach out.
Acknowledgements & Citations
This website was developed by Penn State University and the USDA-supported Water for Agriculture project in collaboration with Southwest Decisions Resources. For more details, see the Acknowledgements & Thanks page.
To cite this Guidebook, see the citation page.