The Penn State Environment and Natural Resources Institute will host a Water Insights Seminar on April 9 covering research into stakeholder engagement on agriculture water management issues.

Dr. Kathryn Brasier, Professor of Rural Sociology at Penn State, will make the presentation.

Stakeholder engagement has been touted as an effective means to address difficult natural resource challenges. Engagement has the promise of creating more effective long-term solutions by bringing local and scientific knowledge and allowing resource managers to collectively define and champion solutions.

However, these outcomes are far from certain, are resource and time intensive, and require expertise not always available to organizations tasked with addressing resource issues.

Scholarship on engagement has been limited by a lack of a coherent theoretical approach to explaining what changes in people because of engagement and robust data to document those changes.

The Water for Agriculture project addresses these gaps by developing a theory of change associated with engagement and testing this theory empirically in relation to managing water in agricultural landscapes.

The project is working in partnership with 5 communities in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Arizona to develop a collaborative engagement process and study the impacts of the process on participants, on partner organizations, and on biophysical outcomes.

This talk will provide an overview of the theoretical model, outline the research design, describe the engagement processes to date, and highlight preliminary insights.

The Seminar will held from Noon to 1:00 in Room 312 of the Ag and Bio Engineering Building on Penn State’s main campus in State College and is available online via Zoom.

For more information on past Seminars, visit the Water Insights Seminars webpage.

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[Posted: April 5, 2019]

4/8/2019