دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی استخدام، ادغام و حفظ مشارکت ذینفعان در مدیریت زیست محیطی - الزویر 2019

ABSTRACT

Stakeholder participation is now widely viewed as an essential component of environmental management projects, but limited research investigates how practitioners perceive the major challenges and strategies for implementing high-quality participation. In order to address this gap, we present findings from a survey and interviews conducted with managers and advisory committee leaders in a case study of United States and binational (US and Canada) Great Lakes Areas of Concern. Our findings suggest that recruiting and integrating participants and sustaining participation over the long term present distinctive ongoing challenges that are not fully recognized in existing conceptualizations of the process of implementing participation. For example, it can be difficult to recruit active stakeholders to fill vacant “slots,” to integrate distinctive interests and perspectives in decision-making processes, and to keep participants involved when activity is low and less visible. We present strategies that emerged in the survey and interviews for addressing these challenges, emphasizing the building and leveraging of relationships among stakeholders themselves. Such strategies include balancing tight networks with an openness to new members, supplementing formal hearings with social gatherings, making participation socially meaningful, and dividing labor between managers and advisory committees.

 Discussion and conclusion

Although the Great Lakes AOC Program is in many ways unique, we contend that it nonetheless provides insights and raises questions of significance for a wider array of environmental management projects. First, our results carry implications for how to conceptualize the components or stages of stakeholder engagement. Instead of replacing the conceptual model developed by Luyet et al. (2012), we propose to supplement and develop their framework by incorporating the three processes that emerged as significant within our findings: recruiting stakeholders, integrating them into the process, and sustaining the participation of stakeholders over long periods of time (Fig. 2). First, we propose adding the stage of stakeholder recruitment after stakeholder identification and characterization. Second, we propose reframing the stages of structuration, choosing techniques, and implementing techniques as part of a broader process of integration. Finally, we propose adding the process of sustaining participation in a stage that also includes evaluation and monitoring. The expanded model we propose preserves the constraints, pressures, barriers, and opportunities offered by what Luyet et al. (2012) identify as the “project context”: for example, political changes and the attendant shifts in policy and funding priorities.