Stakeholder Engagement in Public Natural Resource Management (original) (raw)

The management of public natural resources can be challenging, especially in the face of diverse stakeholders with varied interests and concerns. In most cases, decision-makers lack sufficient data from which to assess the range, intensity, and convergence of community preferences. Traditional attempts to acquire such information from public meetings frequently are constrained by a format that too often permits a few individuals to monopolize or co-opt sessions for their own purposes or agendas. Such experiences in past public meetings subsequently drive community expectations for future meetings, frequently resulting in decreased attendance and a less representative participant base. Consequently, regulators or decision-makers can come to view public meetings as a regulatory obligation of high contentiousness and little utility that must be endured, while other community stakeholders adopt a cynical perspective that assumes final decisions already have been pre-determined. To help ...

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