Key Challenges to Stakeholder Engagement in Sustainability Contexts: Insights from Researchers and Practitioners

Stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as vital to developing interdisciplinary solutions to complex sustainability problems, such as phosphorus management. At the same time, several challenges and barriers may arise when engaging stakeholders in practice. This study identifies key challenges in engagement and explores how they may be addressed. Using an online survey of 121 researchers and practitioners engaged in sustainability work in the U.S., along with 10 interviewees, data were analyzed using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Key results from this study identify two main sets of challenges and needs, as well as the relationships between them. First, participants identified “top down” challenges to engagement, including limited funding, resources, organizational support, and time, alongside “bottom up” challenges related to recruitment and retention, inclusive representation, trust-building, facilitation skills, and balancing stakeholder expectations. While prior studies have noted important factors and case-specific challenges, this study is the first to systematically document these challenges and needs across a range of fields and highlight interconnections between structural resource limitations and practitioners’ ability to build and sustain meaningful stakeholder relationships. Future research can build on these findings to enhance the field of engagement by advocating for more resources to conduct engagement and developing methods to better assess success of engagement practices.