Abstract: Policy making aims to align agricultural production with multifunctional services such as environmental conservation, rural development, and economic competitiveness. Policies counteract or reinforce external driving forces such as climate change, global economic developments, demography, consumption patterns. They considerably affect decision making of farmers. Because of the interaction and non-linear feedback loops with socio-economic and geophysical processes of the land use systems, policies are difficult to design, and their impacts are difficult to anticipate. The policy making community articulates an emerging demand for science based evidence in support of the policy process. Ex-ante impact assessment of policy making provides the legal basis to fuel scientific evidence into the policy process. For researchers, impact assessment is a means to structure the analysis of human-environment interactions. For policy makers, impact assessment is a means to better target policy decisions towards sustainable development. The integration of both requires a mutual understanding of the respective objectives and operational restrictions within the scientific and policy-making domains. This paper provides insight into the process of policy impact assessment and how research based methods and tools can best feed into it. Three aspects are outlined: the co-design of the assessment between policy makers and researchers; the integration of quantitative analysis with participatory valuation methods; and the robustness and transparency of the analytical methods.

Abstract: Research in sustainable agricultural management requires appropriate participatory processes and tools enabling efficient dialogue and cooperation to allow researchers and stakeholders to co-produce knowledge. Research approaches that encourage stakeholder participation are in high demand because they allow a better understanding of human-nature interactions and interdependencies between actors. Participatory approaches also support multiple goals of agricultural management: improved productivity, food security, climate change adaptation, environmental conservation, rural development and policy decision making. Approaches to stakeholder engagement in the field of agricultural management research are manifold. Therefore, selecting the “right” approach depends on the specific purpose and contextualized issues at stake. We analyzed ten stakeholder approaches and propose a new framework with which to identify and select appropriate approaches for stakeholder engagement. The framework consists of three components: whom to engage (i.e., stakeholder type and mandate), why to engage (i.e., research purpose: consult, inform, collaborate), and how to engage (i.e., different methodological approaches). We identified different stakeholder groups (who?): farmers, agricultural actors, land users, and policymakers; different purposes (why?): facilitate engagement process, inform stakeholders, and obtain stakeholder perceptions; and different types of engagement methods (how?): participatory field experiments, desk simulations, interviews, panel discussions and different types of workshops. The framework was applied to arrange these approaches, organize them to improve understanding of their main strengths, weaknesses and supports for identifying and selecting an appropriate approach. We conclude that understanding the different facets of available approaches is crucial for selecting an appropriate stakeholder engagement approach. ;