Thinking Big and Thinking Small: A Conceptual Framework for Best Practices in Community and Stakeholder Engagement in Food, Energy, and Water Systems

Andrew Kliskey,Paula Williams,Valoree S Gagnon,Chelsea Schelly,Weston M Eaton,David L Griffith,Anna-Maria Marshall,Kristin Floress,Virginia H Dale

doi:10.3390/su13042160

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.

Highlights

The expanding focus in science on big system interactions is epitomized by research at the nexus of food-energy-water systems (FEWS), variously referred to as energyfood-water systems (EFW), food-water-energy systems (FWE), water-energy-food systems (WEF), and food-land-energy-water (FLEW) systems
The goal of this paper is to review FEWS related literature to assess the state-ofknowledge in community and stakeholder engagement, including contributions to date for identifying best practices, and to develop a conceptual framework for best practices in community and stakeholder engagement that can serve as the scaffolding for the FEWS
The importance of stakeholder engagement in FEWS research is highlighted by the substantial number of papers that refer to stakeholder or community engagement (217), in many cases acknowledging that engagement is essential

Summary

Introduction

The expanding focus in science on big system interactions is epitomized by research at the nexus of food-energy-water systems (FEWS), variously referred to as energyfood-water systems (EFW), food-water-energy systems (FWE), water-energy-food systems (WEF), and food-land-energy-water (FLEW) systems. It is no longer sufficient to treat a single system in isolation; to be able to develop solutions to vexing questions of demand and availability of food, energy, and water requires explicit examination of the system-level interactions among all three sectors. “Thinking big” in FEWS refers to the expansive systems nature of food, energy, and water operating. Sustainability 2021, 13, 2160 at broad spatial and temporal scales and the far-reaching ramifications for society of food, energy, and water, both individually and collectively. Thinking big requires addressing questions such as how does water availability, driven by climate and hydrologic conditions, support and limit agricultural crop production and at the same time support and limit energy production, and what are the relative trade-offs and feedbacks among these systems? A key part of the Food and Agriculture

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