Advancing Scholarship and Practice of Stakeholder Engagement in Working Landscapes

This report presents products from the virtual and professionally facilitated Advancing Engagement Workshop Series. Workshops were held between Fall 2020 and Summer 2021 and included participation from over 160 individuals including early career and established scholars and practitioners from multiple countries, institutions, and organizations. The goals of these workshops were to:

• Foster and build a new diverse network of researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in stakeholder engagement

• Support the development of new scholarship that addresses pressing knowledge gaps in stakeholder engagement practice research, and

• Co-produce a future research agenda for stakeholder engagement in working landscapes.

The future research agenda consists of 34 research opportunities co-produced through a collaborative process. These 34 research opportunities are grouped into six themes. The order presented does not reflect ranking of themes and overlap may exist.

1. Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Research opportunities focus on creating equitable relationships between different types of stakeholders and researchers.

2. Ethics Ethics in stakeholder engagement considers whose ways of knowing and being are included, enacted, and respected, and seeks to limit risks and harms in traditional research practice.

3. Research & Practice An overview of important research topics on bridging the gap between research and practice.

4. Context Research opportunities center on power differentials among institutions and diverse communities and ways to reduce distance and divides through shared frames and measures of deep engagement.

5. Process Research opportunities center on developing a synthesized understanding of the relationships between modes and modalities of engagement and their outcomes in a way that can inform the practice and science of engagement.

6. Outcomes Research opportunities focus on social, behavioral, and environmental outcomes of stakeholder engagement processes, and how to measure those outcomes.