As issues affecting management of natural resources have become more nuanced and complex, participatory and engaged management approaches have received more attention in both practice and scholarship. Current literature on these approaches predominantly focuses on individual or comparative case studies, with a wide variety of theoretical and applied frameworks cited across populations, disciplines, and resource sectors. In the past decade, a number of literature reviews have also emerged to summarize major findings across case studies, but have tended to be narrative in nature and/or focus on one particular resource type or engagement technique, limiting our ability to make systematic assessments within and across a variety of resource sectors and participatory approaches. Therefore, this meta-analysis of engagement in natural resource management uses a systematic literature review approach to uncover what recent scientific literature can tell us about how scholars and practitioners define and approach stakeholder engagement and the role it plays in guiding resource management in two distinct but interrelated sectors: agricultural land and watersheds. Specifically, this systematic analysis asks the following questions of the literature sample: (1) how are “engagement” and “public/stakeholder” defined, (2) what are the philosophical underpinnings of the engagement/participatory approaches, (3) what participatory techniques are used in engagement practice, and (4) what are the outcomes of these engagement practices within and across agricultural land and watershed management? The sample for this study includes empirical, peer-reviewed articles on engagement within natural resource management collected via the Web of Science indices, with parameters including year of publication (2000-2018), language (English), and territory/country (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland). The final research sample (N=~200 articles) will be analyzed using NVivo qualitative data analysis software according to coding frames developed to match the four research questions. This presentation will review the outcomes of the meta-analysis across and within the resource sectors, as well as a proposed framework for organizing and understanding the existing relationships between engagement definitions, philosophies, practices, and outcomes in current empirical literature and consideration of approaches for future research and practice.
