ADVANCING SCHOLARSHIP AND PRACTICE OF STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT IN WORKING LANDSCAPES

Our project will promote sustainable agroecosystems by identifying the state-of-the-science, knowledge gaps, and research opportunities for achieving sustainable management practices and conservation outcomes through stakeholder engagement. The long-term goals of this project are to (a) create a national network of scholars, practitioners, stakeholders, and agency personnel working on engaged approaches to research, planning, and decision-making on complex socio-environmental problems, (b) identify key gaps in our understanding about the effectiveness of stakeholder engagement processes in producing beneficial social and environmental outcomes in working landscapes; and (c) develop a research agenda for addressing these gaps. We will convene a two-day workshop focused on socio-environmental problems in agricultural working landscapes. The workshop will gather together multidisciplinary researchers from a range of fields working on the science of engagement and practitioners and stakeholders doing engagement to achieve the following three objectives:Objective 1: Facilitate new collaborations to foster future research and community engagement projects.Objective 2: Disseminate a workshop summary of leading scholarship and research gaps to researchers and practitioners. Objective 3: Disseminate cutting-edge scholarship on the science of engagement.