Chapter 1: Guidebook Introduction

Stakeholder Engagement Introduction and Definitions

Stakeholder Engagement Introduction

Citizens, organizations, governments, and leaders in communities across the United States, and indeed many parts of the world, are struggling to make the right choices to engage their communities in ways that help them most effectively address the natural resources challenges they face. Building and implementing effective stakeholder engagement strategies in natural resources requires both careful planning and a solid grounding in the evidence-based tools, techniques, and resources available. Providing front-line practitioners and organizations with these resources and tools is the focus and purpose of this Guidebook.

Paying careful attention to and building the skills you need to effectively engage stakeholders in natural resource management concerns and issues can help you ensure your efforts are as successful and efficient as possible. Before diving in, however, it’s worth taking a few moments to define a few terms and concepts. (You can find a glossary of these and other terms here).

Stakeholder Engagement Definition

While there are a wide variety of definitions, in its simplest terms stakeholder engagement seeks to effectively engage stakeholders and communities in the processes, relationships, discourse, and decision-making that affects their lives. At its best, it does so in ways that achieve long-term capacity building, learning, and sustainable outcomes.

At its most general, we think of engagement as an integrated, proactive, reciprocal, capacity-building, deliberation-based and relationship-building approach to participation and decision-making – and are all characteristics integral to the Engagement Process Model we developed and implemented across our five partner communities (See Chapters 2 and 6 for additional details).

Definitions: Community-led engagement

Community-led engagement, a key element of our approach to engagement, places a premium on the embedded authority and responsibility of our local leadership groups to determine the activities, directions, issues, and priorities they consider most important. As the ‘sponsor’ of these efforts, our primary role is to act as coordinators, collaborators, resource brokers, information providers, and facilitators. This means we will have to take our lead from the groups with whom we are working. We are to act primarily as advocates for process rather than outcome. We discuss this in great detail in Chapter 3.

Definitions: Deliberation-based engagement

Deliberation-based engagement refers to the expressed intention of ensuring deliberation and dialogue are organizing features of our engagement processes. Deliberative discussion occurs when the public comes together to talk and think through options – and is integral to our Process Model approach to engagement. A deliberation-based approach allows for the collaborative, in-depth, systematic, inclusive, learning and exploration of the issues communities are facing – and their potential solutions.

While the strategies we employ to achieve these ends will vary, we consider these principles foundational to our project efforts. In practice, this means our intention is to build new and/or enhance existing relationships and foster/enhance dialogue among and within individuals and groups with diverse experiences and perspectives related the common issue-frame of water and agriculture.

In order to distinguish the various levels and intentions of stakeholder engagement we found the widely recognized International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) framework, adapted here, to be especially useful.

Adapted from: https://catalyst.harvard.edu/community-engagement/ce/

The IAP2 Framework

The IAP2 framework identifies the differing types and degrees of communication ranging from one-way flows to inform stakeholders or receive feedback from stakeholders to the more complex processes of building collaborative relationships and partnerships among stakeholders to address the issues they are confronting. While objectives may vary across engagement initiatives – and sometimes even within the same project depending on the roles and expected involvement of various stakeholder’s groups – the goal is to incorporate as many aspects of involvement (working as far toward the right of this framework) as is feasible given the design and intentions of your project.

The Water for Agriculture project fits squarely in the ‘Collaborate’ space – building teams of stakeholders in our five locations to identify the top water and agriculture issues concerns and building action plans and partnerships to address those challenges now, and in the long-term.

Definitions: Stakeholders

Broadly defined, stakeholders can be considered all those who either can affect, or will be affected by a discussion, decision, or initiative. As with most community engagement efforts, stakeholders will vary depending on the community context in which they occur. They will also vary depending on the goals of your engagement effort and the issue(s) you seek to address. The stakeholder groups convened around a change in land management practices, for example may be very different from those engaged in revising a regulation or implementation policy affecting surface or groundwater. We discuss our approach to the importance of diversity of perspectives and representation, and what the literature has to say about this throughout the Guidebook.

Tools & worksheets

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