Advancing the scholarship and practice of stakeholder engagement in working landscapes: a co-produced research agenda

Abstract

Participatory approaches to science and decision making, including stakeholder engagement, are increasingly common for managing complex socio-ecological challenges in working landscapes. However, critical questions about stakeholder engagement in this space remain. These include normative, political, and ethical questions concerning who participates, who benefits and loses, what good can be accomplished, and for what, whom, and by who. First, opportunities for addressing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion interests through engagement, while implied in key conceptual frameworks, remain underexplored in scholarly work and collaborative practice alike. A second line of inquiry relates to research–practice gaps. While both the practice of doing engagement work and scholarly research on the efficacy of engagement is on the rise, there is little concerted interplay among ‘on-the-ground’ practitioners and scholarly researchers. This means scientific research often misses or ignores insight grounded in practical and experiential knowledge, while practitioners are disconnected from potentially useful scientific research on stakeholder engagement. A third set of questions concerns gaps in empirical understanding of the efficacy of engagement processes and includes inquiry into how different engagement contexts and process features affect a range of behavioral, cognitive, and decision-making outcomes. Because of these gaps, a cohesive and actionable research agenda for stakeholder engagement research and practice in working landscapes remains elusive. In this review article, we present a co-produced research agenda for stakeholder engagement in working landscapes. The co-production process involved professionally facilitated and iterative dialogue among a diverse and international group of over 160 scholars and practitioners through a yearlong virtual workshop series. The resulting research agenda is organized under six cross-cutting themes: (1) Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; (2) Ethics; (3) Research and Practice; (4) Context; (5) Process; and (6) Outcomes and Measurement. This research agenda identifies critical research needs and opportunities relevant for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike. We argue that addressing these research opportunities is necessary to advance knowledge and practice of stakeholder engagement and to support more just and effective engagement processes in working landscapes.

Codeveloping and implementing an Indigenous mentoring program for Native American faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

“…NA faculty are consistently underfunded compared to their White colleagues in STEM. Recent studies have found systemic racial inequality in funding for all historically excluded groups including NA groups (Chen et al, 2022;Eaton et al, 2022). In 2019 alone, NSF received 20,400 research proposal submissions; only 99 of them came from self-identified NA researchers (.3%; Chen et al, 2022).…”

“…This represents only .004% of the total number (n = 41,631) of funded research projects for this funding source (https://re port.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/306; NIH Data Book-Report 306: Number of NIH Principal Investigators Funded by Grant Mechanism and Race). Other studies have highlighted that funding agencies have different conceptions of what constitutes fundable research, which leads to lack of funding as mentioned above (Eaton et al, 2022;Parker et al, 2018;Smith, 2021). Questions such as: What constitutes legitimate research?…”