Community and Stakeholder Engagement

On this website you can:

  • Find resources to guide you in constructively and effectively engaging stakeholders
  • courses
  • publications
  • links to websites
  • Explore syllabi to structure a class to teach students the basics of community/stakeholder engagement, or find a class to take.
  • Input information about your community/stakeholder engagement project into the best practices archive. 

This website is funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #1856059) as part of the EngageINFEWS Research Coordination Network. Our objective is to identify and disseminate best practices in community/stakeholder engagement.

Best Practices Archive

A searchable and expandable digital resource to consolidate and share the collective knowledge and experiences of the EngageINFEWS community, including best practices, protocols, and methodologies for effective stakeholder engagement in the realm of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (FEWS) science. 

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Benefits of stakeholder engagement

Benefits of engaging stakeholders have been found to be: improved quality of local management plans of ecological systems (Brody, 2003); environmental effectiveness of solutions (Fritsch and Newig, 2012); greater uptake of conservation measures and fewer conflicts between stakeholders (Sultana and Abeyasekera, 2007); improved quality of decisions by adding new information, ideas, and analysis (Beierle, 2002) improved transparency, civic activity, and satisfaction with issues (Coleman et al., 2019), and improved outcomes (Midendorff et al., 2020).  These studies also emphasized that careful consideration must be given to how stakeholders are engaged. Sterling et al. (2017) found that early and significant engagement of key stakeholders was critical. Reed et al. (2018) concluded that engaging stakeholders in a co-production process (which requires both early and integrated engagement of stakeholders) resulted in better outcomes, but cautioned that stakeholder engagement should be approached as a process integrated into all other aspects of the project, not a “toolbox” approach.