Understanding trade-offs in project stakeholder engagement: evidence from participatory environmental research

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1. Introduction Stakeholder engagement is fundamental for good environmental governance and crucial for both steering environmental projects and achieving robust and widely accepted outcomes. The 2000s saw substantial growth in stakeholder research with stakeholder engagement becoming a widely used and influential concept in both academic literature and management practice (Kujala et al., 2022; Bridoux and Stoelhorst, 2022). The expansion of research projects that include participation of stakeholders is noticeable and particularly evident in the field of environmental governance, where promised benefits of engagement include generating results that are directly relevant to society and decision makers, enhancing the communication of results to broader audiences, increasing stakeholder understanding of and trust in science, promoting active citizenship, and increasing adaptive capacity (Hollmann et al., 2022; Smyth et al., 2021). Engaging stakeholders in research projects is considered important for local data collection, fostering legitimacy, and communicating results (Kammer-Kerwick et al., 2025; Reyes-García et al., 2022). Moreover, ensuring the inclusion of multiple perspectives can facilitate learning among actors, improve resilience (Johnston et al., 2024) and minimize conflicts (Nesheim et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2022). Other strands of the engagement literature, for example (Dawkins, 2013; Hossu et al., 2022; Lavallee et al., 2012) highlight additional rationales for stakeholder engagement, including its status as a democratic right and components such as representation, transparency, process legitimacy, trust and fairness. It is therefore not surprising that stakeholder engagement is of fundamental importance to research and capacity building projects, and often mandatory for third-party funding. However, stakeholder engagement is a broad concept involving diverse processes and intentions (Kujala et al. 2022). It can refer to basic communication and consultation with stakeholders, but also more advanced forms of participation, including partnerships with co-decisions, co-production, and knowledge co-creation, which are the most ambitious forms of stakeholder engagement (Akhmouch & Clavero, 2016; OECD, 2015; Arnstein, 1969). The impact of stakeholder engagement however, is widely recognized as being highly context dependent and shaped by multiple factors, such as process design, the actors involved, and existing power relations (Renn et al., 1993). Accordingly, appropriate mechanisms and formats for participation are debated, and discussions on the extent of public participation that is desirable or legitimate in decision-making processes continue (Kujala et al., 2022; Renn et al., 1993). Only a small share of research projects establishes a link between engagement activities and the core concepts of stakeholder theory (Huzzard, 2021). Stakeholder theory itself faces challenges in project practice because of its abstract ideals, practical time and budget constraints, limited engagement capacities, and conceptual difficulties. The fragmented nature of research on stakeholder engagement has led to a wide range of terminological discussions and interpretations (Lawrence, 2006). Hence, despite advances in the field, it can be argued that we lack a clear and established terminology to adequately characterize, analyse and evaluate stakeholder engagement (Jolibert and Wesselink, 2012; Kujala et al., 2022; Whitley et al., 2025). There remains a notable gap in holistic frameworks for assessing stakeholder engagement and mapping trade-offs and dilemmas inherent to the engagement processes. Research on stakeholder engagement highlights tensions and trade-offs between competing values such as inclusiveness, and efficiency, as well as the practical challenges of achieving trust and equitable participation in complex multi-actor settings (Klein et al., 2019; Meier et al., 2023; Wenzel et al., 2025). At the same time, earlier critiques note that engagement processes are rarely evaluated in a structured or theory-driven manner (Esmail et al., 2015; Ray and Miller, 2017) This paper presents the approach to stakeholder engagement undertaken as part of the H2020 research project OPTAIN “OPtimal strategies to reTAIN and re-use water and nutrients in small agricultural catchments across different soil-climatic regions in Europe”. OPTAIN aimed at including participatory strategies to model the environmental and socio-economic performance of Natural/Small Water Retention Measures (NSWRM) in 15 cases across Europe (Magnier et al., 2024). For stakeholder engagement Multi-Actor Reference Groups (MARGs) were created in all the OPTAIN cases for joint fact-finding and co-creation of knowledge between local research teams and stakeholders. The conceptual understanding in OPTAIN was that enabling successful results relied on the ability of the project and the local research teams to facilitate meaningful stakeholder engagement associated with building relationships and trust, providing added value, and procedures for fair and effective engagement situations. The dedicated stakeholder engagement work package in OPTAIN provided an opportunity to generate empirical evidence through in-depth interviews with research teams, capturing their perceptions of engagement processes, as well as through the monitoring of stakeholder interactions. This paper explores the establishment of the Multi-Actor Reference Groups and the continuity of engaged stakeholders in OPTAIN and enquires about the added value of stakeholder engagement for research tasks. The extent to which the engagement processes were fair and effective is investigated by analysing data from interviews with research teams in OPTAIN. In the context of the specified benchmark themes for fair and effective engagement (Rowe and Frewer, 2000), dilemmas and challenges experienced by the local research teams are discussed. The paper contributes with empirical insights to debates on stakeholder engagement in complex sustainability projects. The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows: Sections 2 Theoretical concepts, 3 Methods present the conceptual framework for discussing engagement and the methods employed in the project. Section 4 presents the results, describes the establishment of the stakeholder platforms in the OPTAIN cases, including the development of relationships and trust with the stakeholders, and it evaluates the undertaken engagement process for added value, fairness and effectiveness. Section 5 examines constraints, dilemmas, and trade-offs in the context of stakeholder theory and discuss strategies to overcome obstacles in participatory modelling, fostering critical reflection and learning throughout the project lifecycle. Finally, section 6 presents key concluding remarks.

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