Engaging stakeholders in water-energy-food-environment systems assessment and planning:A FutureDAMS guide

This guide proposes a series of steps and principlesfor conducting stakeholder engagement in decisionmaking around water–energy–food–environment (WEFE)interventions, whether building or repurposing newinfrastructures or implementing policies. It outlines a5-step process that can be run alongside multi-criteriaassessment and design of natural-human systems likeriver basins. The guide is our attempt to describe anideal process that can be adapted to each place where itis being used. Our approach is underpinned by the ideathat better decisions will be generated if a broad rangeof stakeholders are included in a genuinely participatorymanner to allow for a holistic, system-scale considerationof development options. Conducting such a stakeholderapproach can even generate consensus across adiverse set of representative actors on a short-list ofinterventions to make in WEFE systems; it can also helpbuild more useful environmental simulation models. Thisdocument therefore sets out the process for achievingstakeholder engagement by describing an ideal standardfor undertaking participatory WEFE assessmentmodelling using established stakeholder methods.