Securing water for and from ag through effective community and stakeholder engagement
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•48 views
The document discusses a multi-year project called "Water for Agriculture" that aims to promote sustainable water management for agriculture through stakeholder engagement. The project is implementing engagement activities in five communities across Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Arizona. It is researching the impacts of engagement at the individual, organizational and community levels, and linking any changes to biophysical outcomes. The goal is to better understand the process of stakeholder engagement and how it can address critical water and agriculture issues. Preliminary findings suggest engagement builds relationships and trust, but approaches are diverse and its impacts are still within a "black box" that requires more study.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Securing water for and from ag through effective community and stakeholder engagement
Similar to Securing water for and from ag through effective community and stakeholder engagement (20)
More from Soil and Water Conservation Society
More from Soil and Water Conservation Society (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Securing water for and from ag through effective community and stakeholder engagement
- 1. Water For Agriculture Creating an Engaged Approach to Water For & From Agriculture Kathryn Brasier, Professor of Rural Sociology, Penn State Walter E. Whitmer, Project Coordinator, Penn State Weston Eaton, Assistant Research Professor, Penn State Elyzabeth Engle, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, McDaniel College Mark Burbach, Environmental Scientist, Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln Clinton Williams, Lead Research Soil Scientist, USDA ARS Presented at Soil and Water Conservation Society Annual Conference, Albuquerque, NM July 31, 2018 WATER for AGRICULTURE This work is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Water for Agriculture grant no. 2017-68007-26584/project accession no. 1013079 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
- 2. WATER for AGRICULTURE What is the Puzzle? • Increasing push for stakeholder engagement in natural resource management • Assumption is engagement will lead to improved management, but how? • Two fundamental questions: • What is engagement? • What changes because of engagement?
- 3. WATER for AGRICULTURE What Is Water for Agriculture? A multi-disciplinary, four-year cooperative project that promotes sustainable water for agriculture through: - Implementing stakeholder engagement in agricultural landscapes - Testing engagement’s impacts on individual participants and partner organizations - Linking observed changes to biophysical outcomes - Disseminating research outcomes to influence engagement practices - Evaluating our approach to engaged team science
- 4. WATER for AGRICULTURE Specific Goals & Activities • Engagement • Work in cooperation with, and in service to five communities in Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Arizona • Assist these communities in addressing the water and agricultural issues that matter most to them • Research (“The Science of Engagement”) • Conduct pre-/post-engagement research to identify changes at individual, organizational, and community level • Work cooperatively with stakeholders to identify and conduct biophysical research • Identify strategies for effective engaged team science • Dissemination • Assess whether and how stakeholder engagement can address critical water and agriculture issues elsewhere • Consult with partners in Israel and Australia
- 5. WATER for AGRICULTURE What Is Engagement?
- 6. WATER for AGRICULTURE Working Definition: Community-Based Stakeholder Engagement An approach to community-level action that focuses on: • Building relationships and trust; community and sense of place • Surfacing and incorporating views of multiple stakeholders • Recognizing concerns, knowledge, and contributions of all stakeholders • Identifying issues, opportunities; setting priorities • Developing common frame, directions and actions • Leveraging and growing resources
- 7. WATER for AGRICULTURE Engagement Approaches • PA and NE – modified strategic planning and implementation process • Issues and processes driven by local leaderships teams • AZ – modified Delphi technique • Initial community meeting followed by iterative surveys and discussions with a panel of local experts
- 8. WATER for AGRICULTURE Guiding Research Questions • What change in views, understandings, personal norms, personal and collective identity, and civic skills may be evident in individuals who participate in engagement activities? • What change, if any, becomes evident with characteristics of network structures for organizations participating in engagement activities? • What attitudinal, belief, or behavioral changes are evident among residents of communities where engagement activities are undertaken? • How are these changes leveraged to achieve individual and/or organizational actions to manage water for and from agriculture?
- 9. WATER for AGRICULTURE Inside the Black Box of Engagement: Building and Activating Community Capacity for Managing Water in Agricultural Landscapes Sense of Community •Collectively held values, norms, and vision •Sense of place Frame of issues, solutions Empathy; Understanding of others Obligation to others Level of commitment •Sense of responsibility for problem Expectations for self and others to act Potential for positive impact Efficacy Ability to solve problems •Leadership; collaboration Planning and decision- making Capitalizing on diverse views Incorporating research, science, data Activation of resources •Social Human Cultural Built Natural Economic Political Adapted from Chaskin’s Community Capacity concept Community Engagement
- 10. WATER for AGRICULTURE Longitudinal, Replication Case Study Design 5 Cases in 3 States BaselineDataCollection Stakeholder Interviews Network Analyses Community Surveys EngagementEvaluation Event Evaluations Focus Groups with Leadership Teams Event Observation PostDataCollection Stakeholder Interviews Network Analyses Community Surveys
- 11. WATER for AGRICULTURE Where are we now? YEAR ONE – PRELIMINARY RESEARCH YEARS TWO AND THREE – STRUCTURED ENGAGEMENT PROCESSES YEAR FOUR – FINAL ASSESSMENT/IMPACTS Literature reviews Relationship building and trust Sharing findings Conceptual Model development Review of current networks and biophysical data Model refinement Stakeholder identification Issues identification Stakeholder interviews (Pre) Assess Information/research needs and opportunities Stakeholder interviews (Post) Identify preliminary biophysical data sources and needs Priority setting & implementation plan Assess practice and environmental change Social network analysis (Pre) Engagement plan Social network analysis (Post) Community surveys (Pre) Implementation activities, action research Community surveys (Post) Formative and Process Evaluation
- 12. WATER for AGRICULTURE What We’ve Learned (so far) about Science of Engagement • “Black box” of engagement • Growing literature • Diverse engagement definitions, approaches • Limited audiences • Uncoordinated science • Shallow engagement • What is our “value-added” in communities? Do no harm! • How do biophysical and social scientists engage in this space? 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Articles on Stakeholder Engagement in Ag/Water, by Year
- 13. WATER for AGRICULTURE What We’ve Learned (so far) about Team Science • Administration matters: • Timely, iterative communication • Distance technology has its limitations • Cross-cutting team organization • Creating a new culture? • Common language • Disciplinary cultures and reward systems • Clarify expectations about ways of working on team projects • Transparency of resources, budgets • Strategies and technologies: • Relationship building => trust • Working principles (charter) • Publication guidelines • Everyone needs a job • Reflexivity
- 14. WATER for AGRICULTURE Thank you! For further information, contact: Kathryn Brasier Professor of Rural Sociology Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education Penn State University 814-865-7321 kbrasier@psu.edu http://water4ag.psu.edu/ This work is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Water for Agriculture grant no. 2017-68007-26584/project accession no. 1013079 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
- 15. WATER for AGRICULTURE Working Definition: Stakeholders All those who either can affect, or will be affected by, a decision or initiative • Farmers, producers, and ag businesses • Ag organizations • Local governments • Water authorities • Environmental organizations • Community and interest organizations • Regulatory agencies • Service and information providers • Researchers • Landowners and other residents Concerted effort to expand participation beyond “usual suspects”
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon. My name is Kathy Brasier, and I’m the project director of a USDA funded water and agriculture grant. We are just finishing our first year of the project. I’m going to talk about the project, where we’ve been in this first year, and what we’ve learned so far.
- Over last few decades, increasing push from funders, agencies, stakeholder groups and others to do stakeholder engagement – assumption that this will improve management outcomes. But we don’t have a really good handle on what happens in engagement and what it can produce, particularly in agriculture. The core of our project is fundamentally to figure out what engagement is and identify the social, behavioral, economic, and biophysical changes that are made possible by that engagement.
- Purposes of our project are to unravel these concepts and assumptions around engagement, operationalize and test them
- Our goal is to move toward this higher end – toward the involve/collaborate and perhaps empower ends of the spectrum, depending on the role of indivdiuals in the process
- Working in 5 different locations we need to be flexible in exactly the type of engagement we do. However, we identified these pillars that cut across all of the engagement processes.
- So the 2nd core part of the project is to test engagement, to unpack what happens to people and organizations because of participation.