Thinking big and thinking small: A conceptual framework for best practices in community and stakeholder engagement in food, energy, and water systems

Authors

Andrew Kliskey, University of Idaho
Paula Williams, University of Idaho
David L. Griffith, University of Idaho
Virginia H. Dale, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Chelsea Schelly, Michigan Technological UniversityFollow
Anna Maria Marshall, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Valoree Gagnon, Michigan Technological UniversityFollow
Weston M. Eaton, Pennsylvania State University
Kristin Floress, United States Department of Agriculture

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-17-2021

Department

Department of Social Sciences; College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science; Great Lakes Research Center

Abstract

Community and stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as essential to science at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) to address complex issues surrounding food and energy production and water provision for society. Yet no comprehensive framework exists for supporting best practices in community and stakeholder engagement for FEWS. A review and meta‐synthesis were undertaken of a broad range of existing models, frameworks, and toolkits for community and stakeholder engagement. A framework is proposed that comprises situational awareness of the FEWS place or problem, creation of a suitable culture for engagement, focus on power‐sharing in the engagement process, co‐ownership, co‐generation of knowledge and outcomes, the technical process of integration, the monitoring processes of reflective and reflexive experiences, and formative evaluation. The framework is discussed as a scaffolding for supporting the development and application of best practices in community and stakeholder engagement in ways that are arguably essential for sound FEWS science and sustainable management.

Publisher's Statement

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13042160

Publication Title

Sustainability (Switzerland)

Recommended Citation

Kliskey, A., Williams, P., Griffith, D., Dale, V., Schelly, C., Marshall, A., Gagnon, V., Eaton, W., & Floress, K. (2021). Thinking big and thinking small: A conceptual framework for best practices in community and stakeholder engagement in food, energy, and water systems. Sustainability (Switzerland), 13(4), 1-19. http://doi.org/10.3390/su13042160
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/14726

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

Publisher's PDF