Commentary on Producing Environmental Information from Stakeholder Engagement

This article provides practice-informed advice, guided by and responsive to theory, for policymakers who seek to improve their environmental policies by generating their own informational value from their interactions with stakeholders. First, the article explains a self-reinforcing opaqueness of conventional environmental policymaking and how this opaqueness disproportionately and cumulatively impacts underrepresented communities. Drawing from the literature of social ecology, political economy, and political methodology, the article adumbrates opaqueness’ contributions to environmental injustice and identifies potential benefits of a more informative approach to stakeholder engagement. Next, the article explains specific methods that policymakers can use to convert stakeholder input into greater awareness of the costs, benefits, risks, and tradeoffs presented by a given environmental policymaking. By conducting stakeholder engagement as an interactive and investigative pursuit, oriented toward underrepresented constituencies as well as policymakers’ own problem statement, policymakers can better inform their policies while also improving relationships with the parties those policies affect.