Chapter 5: Process Attributes
Diverse Participation
Diverse Participation
Systematic and broad inclusion of a representative mix of a community’s social, knowledge, skills, livelihood, and other attributes enables robust and effective decisions (Reed et al. 2018). With enhanced diversity in knowledge, perspectives, skills, and experiences, discussions and decisions can expand the view of issues and possible solutions and avoid the informational blind spots that often occur in less diverse initiatives ensuring the most effective use of resources and time.Â
Tapped effectively, this diversity of perspectives and skills can be an integral part of your efforts to co-produce knowledge and leverage the range of knowledge and skills in your community. In the W4Ag project’s case, we invited diverse groups of stakeholders to participate in our local leadership teams. As we describe in further detail in Chapter 6, however, the diversity of voices was not limited to these 10 to 16-member leadership groups. In addition to two random sample surveys for residents and agricultural producers, local leadership groups were encouraged to develop ‘engagement plans’ to identify community stakeholders, organizations, and agencies and develop strategies for how to reach them and for what purposes.
Team Composition in the Water 4 Ag Project
While somewhat variable across our five sites, all our leadership groups were established to reflect, as much as possible, the breadth of experience and perspectives in each site – including farmers, farmer organizations, local governments, technical providers, researchers, educators, environmental organizations, as well as state and/or federal agencies.  A more detailed description of the composition of our leadership groups is provided in Chapter 2.
Tools & worksheets
Process Attributes Worksheet
Helps you identify and plan for the process attributes most appropriate for your engagement initiative.
Additional resources
Stakeholder Engagement Process Attributes
This slide deck addresses the following questions related to stakeholder engagement process attributes: (1) What are they? (2) Where do they come from? and (3) Why are they important?
The World Café: Overview slides by WorkshopBank
“The World Café is a 20 year old workshop activity for engaging your participants in conversations that matter. It draws on 7 design principles to create a simple, effective and flexible format for hosting large group discussions for between 12 to 200 participants.”
A Quick Reference Guide for Hosting World Café
A manual and reference guide produced by the World Café Community Foundation for hosting World Café Conversations.
The Role and Importance of Boundary Spanners – Fact Sheet
Describes the role played by “boundary spanners” – individuals who manage complexity and interdependencies and seek to establish new alliances, collaboratively develop innovative solutions, and encourage the transfer and translation of information – in engagement processes.