Managing participation across boundaries: A typology for stakeholder engagement in the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

Stakeholder engagement has become pivotal in the provision of science for environmental policy. Managing such participation at the science-policy interface entails inherent challenges. While engagement contributes to securing the credibility, legitimacy and saliency of the organisations operating across boundaries, it also gen-erates trade-offs between those three attributes that are tricky to balance. We argue that existing typologies of engagement-based on agency, motive and engagement modes-need to capture the dynamics ocurring at the interface. To understand how participation performs at the science-policy bridge, we develop a typology based on the goal and rationale that may play within boundary organisations. Four stakeholders' roles are defined (expert, participant, observer and partner), addressing access, power dynamics and potential impact on organ-isational performance. To test the explanatory capability of the typology, we use ICES (a long-established marine science organisation) as a case study. The typology highlights how participation takes place and impacts ICES performance. The findings also evidence distinctive participation attributes at the interface: stakeholder roles are defined by the process rather than by their profile; moreover, the same stakeholder may interact in different arenas with different roles because the processes are multiple and often recurrent or iterative. For researchers, the typology guides the search for evidence and suggests some hypotheses for further empirical studies while contributing to the theoretical debate. For boundary organisations, it provides means for tailoring participation to navigate diverse demands for policy relevance and scientific integrity, whether they are assessment, advice or solution-oriented bodies.

Automated summary

Stakeholder engagement is crucial in environmental policy provision, but it poses challenges in achieving a balance. To understand participation at the science-policy interface, a typology based on goals and rationales is developed and tested using ICES as a case study. The findings reveal distinctive attributes of participation at the interface, where stakeholders may have different roles in different arenas.