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Shifting contexts: How changes in governance frameworks, stakeholder engagement, and research application influence project outcomes
Citation:
Sharpe, L., K. Williams, AND M. Harwell. Shifting contexts: How changes in governance frameworks, stakeholder engagement, and research application influence project outcomes. A Community on Ecosystem Services, Arlington, VA, December 03 - 06, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
A better understanding of how communities' governance frameworks and approaches to stakeholder engagement relate to project outcomes will assist researchers in developing tools, models, and approaches that are useful to communities and transferable among them.
Description:
The EPA Office of Research and Development’s (ORD) Sustainable and Healthy Communities (SHC) research in community-based decision support (CBDS) includes advancing the science in developing tools, models, and approaches that can be transferred among communities. Recent research on CBDS has focused on advancing the introduction of ecosystem goods and services (EGS), in particular, the EGS that are directly experienced by people (final EGS), into community decision processes. To examine the effectives of this research in CBDS, there is a need to not only understand the EGS science, but also how decisions unfold in practice, including how research was applied, the role stakeholders played, and the structure of the overarching governance framework. We conducted a governance-stakeholders-outcomes analysis assessment across five case study locations, each with different ecosystems and EGS types, decision contexts, and governance structures. Specifically, the analysis focused on exploring four aspects of the case studies in order to better understand how these individual elements related to project outcomes: • The context for the decision the program, policy, and the research questions; • The geography, history, research, and use of tools; • Stakeholder identification, engagement, and participation; and • The project outcomes. Ultimately, this study will provide a better understanding of how shifts in the decision context, the differing ways in which stakeholder roles are defined and applied, and the differing ways in which reseach is integrated can influence project outcomes and perceptions of success.