Reflecting on stakeholders' perceptions in an Ecological Risk Assessment workshop: Lessons for practitioners

Abstract

A new form of Ecological Risk Assessment aims to improve environmental decision-making through strong stakeholder engagement, often in workshop situations. This wider focus increases interaction between workshop practitioners and stakeholders for reflecting on, and learning from, each others perceptions. In this article, we analyse and discuss a one day workshop that was concerned with trialling this method of deriving an Ecological Risk Assessment. We found that stakeholders had issues with some elements of the workshop process. The decision problem was formulated prior to the workshop and without consultation among all the stakeholders. Consequently, the original decision problem was rejec..