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A review of stakeholder participation studies in renewable electricity and water: does the resource context matter?

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Abstract

The growing scholarship explaining stakeholder engagement in natural resources policy and decision-making has produced theories about how participation does and should occur. Along with yielding more informed decisions that better meet stakeholder needs, numerous other benefits have been attributed to effective engagement practices. Some natural resource contexts, water governance for example, are very well researched, while other emerging decision settings, such as renewable electricity generation, are just gaining attention. Can lessons about stakeholder engagement in one context generalize to another? Understanding whether and how context affects stakeholder engagement could lead to more informed and equitable practices. In this pilot study, we show how the grounded theory literature review method can be used to systematically explore differences in the literatures on stakeholder participation in water governance and renewable energy governance. We find that researchers focus on different phenomena within these two contexts, specifically the kinds of decisions made and who makes them; the type, length, and intensity of stakeholder participation; and the extent to which non-expert stakeholders influence decisions. We suggest two possible reasons for these differences: first, researchers in these two natural resource domains may conceive of and examine stakeholder participation in different ways, asking different kinds of questions; and second, there are real-world differences between these two resource contexts, including different types of stakeholder and institutional capacity, physical differences in the resources and their technical complexity, and scale of the problem. Our research suggests that scholars of stakeholder engagement should pay greater attention to these contextual factors. Given these findings but also the small number of papers analyzed, examination of a larger sample using this method is warranted to generate grounded hypotheses.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Notes

  1. Riparian rights doctrine, the legal doctrine of eastern US states, gives property owners with land adjacent to water bodies the right to use water so long as it doesn’t harm downstream or other users or divert the water out of the watercourse. Prior appropriation doctrine, which dominates western states, allows water to be diverted far from its source, and separates water rights from land ownership. One may, for example, own land but not the right to access water that runs adjacent to it, or conversely, one may own the right to divert water from a distant source to a property that does not abut the watercourse. This doctrine developed because of the need to divert water far from its source in order to irrigate land and hydraulically mine ore.

  2. Some relevant studies may have been excluded from the sample due to the use of the search terms “governance” and “management” and not “regulation.” However, although governance involves regulatory processes, the aim was to select for participatory processes specifically, which would likely fall under the “governance” term, whereas processes occurring within a regulatory framework are less likely to be included.

  3. The number of citations was divided by the number of years since publication to create a normalized metric and avoid biasing our sample in favor of older research publications.

  4. One author conducted the data analysis, and all authors discussed and collectively determined the “categories” for coding, emergent themes and trends across each sample.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments helped to improve and clarify this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Studies, University of Redlands, 1200 E Colton Ave, Redlands, CA, 92373, USA

    Valerie Rountree

  2. School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona, 1145 E South Campus Dr. #315, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA

    Elizabeth Baldwin

  3. Department of Political Science, Whittier College, 13406 E Philadelphia St, Whittier, CA, 90602, USA

    Jeffrey Hanlon

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  1. Valerie Rountree
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  2. Elizabeth Baldwin
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  3. Jeffrey Hanlon
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by Valerie Rountree and verified by Jeff Hanlon and Elizabeth Baldwin. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Valerie Rountree. All authors contributed to revisions and read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Valerie Rountree.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Appendices

Appendix A

Table 2 Grounded theory literature review steps 1–4
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Appendix B

Table 3 Research studies included in the analysis and number of times cited per year
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Appendix C

Table 4 Themes emerging from open-coding of sample papers
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Rountree, V., Baldwin, E. & Hanlon, J. A review of stakeholder participation studies in renewable electricity and water: does the resource context matter?. J Environ Stud Sci 12, 232–247 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-021-00726-w

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