Deliverable report D1.3 of the EU Horizon 2020 Project OPTAIN (Grant agreement No. 862756) This report presents the stakeholder engagement activities that were carried out between late 2021 and the end of 2025 in OPTAIN. It provides an understanding of how stakeholders co-produce knowledge by examining both researchers’ and stakeholders’ perspectives, tracking progress against established benchmark objectives, and evaluating the impacts of engagement efforts. Summary This OPTAIN deliverable D1.3: “Report on actor involvement, MARG activities and experiences” is an output of OPTAIN’s Work Package (WP) 1: Case studies and harmonised multi-actor approach. It complements two other reports on stakeholder engagement in OPTAIN: D1.1 “Stakeholder mapping report, covering the case studies” and D1.2 “Workshop and workshop report on how to establish and nurture MARG for constructive engagement in water – agriculture -environmental conflict related issues”. While the first two reports focused on the preparatory phase for stakeholder engagement, this report sheds light on the implementation and evaluation phases. This deliverable should also be seen in connection with other OPTAIN deliverables, particularly those adding a social scientific component to the project, such as D4.5: “Attractiveness and socioeconomic assessment of NSWRMs” (Monaco et al., 2024), and all the four deliverables from the WP6: Synthesis and policy recommendation. This report presents the stakeholder engagement activities that were carried out between late 2021 and the end of 2025. It deepens understanding of how stakeholders co-produce knowledge by examining both researcher and stakeholder perspectives, tracking progress against established benchmark objectives, and evaluating the impacts of engagement efforts. The report demonstrates that meaningful involvement depends on relevance, added value, and trust among participants. The engagement process itself is evaluated using nine benchmark criteria developed by Rowe & Frewer (2010). The analysed achievements of the benchmark criteria are based on the logged interactions, interviews with the case study leaders about meaningful engagement, and responses to the stakeholder questionnaire. Furthermore, the report discusses typical tradeoffs in stakeholder engagement and possible strategies to address them. By bridging the gap between theoretical and empirical knowledge on stakeholder engagement in research projects, this deliverable provides valuable resources for future planning, implementation, and assessment of stakeholder involvement in knowledge co-creation projects. Chapter 1 provides an introduction and presents the OPTAIN project objectives and research activities. Chapter 2 offers a theoretical anchoring for the report by reviewing relevant literature on stakeholder engagement in research projects. Chapter 3 presents the methods and evaluation frameworks used for organizing the data. Finally, Chapter 4 presents empirical results from monitoring of the engagement activities across the 14 case studies over the five-year duration of the project. Chapter 5 discusses tradeoffs in stakeholder engagement in environmental modelling research projects. Chapter 6 presents the concluding remarks and lessons learned. Important additional materials such as data, templates and questionnaires are provided in the Annexes.
Nesheim et al. (Sat,) studied this question.