Stakeholder Participation Guidance for the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency: Checklist

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, in co-operation with the Radboud University Nijmegen, has developed a Stakeholder Participation Guidance. The authors are Maria Hage and Pieter Leroy. The Guidance is intended to support and guide project leaders at the agency in their choices in the area of stakeholder participation.

After all, knowledge is not exclusively produced at universities and other knowledge institutes. The production of knowledge for scientific policy advice has increasingly become a co-production between scientists, government and civil society. Insight in the knowledge and perspectives of stakeholders outside the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (among whom are societal actors, policy makers and politicians, but also scientists from universities, councils and ‘planning bureaus’) is crucial for our agency to be able to provide high quality and relevant information to the cabinet, the parliament and society at large.

The Guidance for Stakeholder Participation consists of three documents:

• Main Document
• Checklist (this page)
• Practice Guide

The Guidance assists project leaders to think about participation in a purposeful way. It is organised around a number of guiding questions:

• Why do I want participation?
• What about?
• How much participation do I want?
• With whom?
• How?

The goal of the Guidance is not to prescribe protocols, but to stimulate that scientific advisors for policy think critically about how they go about in performing their projects. They are specifically meant to generate reflection. Besides that, the documents are full of useful hints and information.