How to dance? The tango of stakeholder involvement in marine governance research Marloes Kraan a,1 , Astrid Hendriksen b,n,1 , Luc van Hoof a , Judith van Leeuwen b , Charlène Jouanneau c a Wageningen University Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies, The Netherlands b Wageningen University Environmental Policy Group, The Netherlands c Innovative Fisheries Management (IFM) - Aalborg University Research Center, Aalborg, Denmark article info Available online 20 June 2014 Keywords: Stakeholder involvement Joint knowledge production Marine Strategy Framework Directive Marine governance research abstract The added value of involving stakeholders in research, especially related to marine governance, seems to be understood today by many researchers and policy makers. This is clearly reflected by the many (EU) research calls explicitly asking for stakeholder involvement. The way in which to involve stakeholders in a meaningful way is however not all that clearly defined. In the EU funded project Options for Delivering Ecosystem-Based Marine Management (ODEMM) an explicit question was the development of options for alternative governance settings, including stakeholder involvement, to implement the Marine Strategy Framework Directive in the EU. In order to arrive at these possible alternative governance set-ups the ODEMM project developed a layered methodology, including structured and unstructured interviews, a survey and roundtable discussions to develop diverse governance options for future ecosystem based models at the regional seas. This paper describes the methodologies used, compares them with best practice from literature, and finally classifies the approach as a joint knowledge production, a tango, in which scientists take the lead but need the stakeholders to come to a dance. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The need to involve stakeholders in marine management and related research, especially associated with ecosystem based management, and more in particular with marine governance, increasingly seems to get acclaimed: ‘a common assumption is that stakeholder participation and Eco-system Based Approach are natural bedfellows and, indeed, the two appear together too often for the connection to be ignored’ [1]. The EU Common Fisheries Policy had incorporated stakeholder participation more than ten years ago in its former reform (2002) by establishing the Regional Advisory Councils and by including stakeholders in the reform process itself [2]. Also the EU research funding system in fact has the view that stakeholder participation is a desirable component [1]; the EU capacities program of FP7 clearly establishes stake- holders as a specifically targeted group, as Small and Medium Enterprises or Civil Society Organisations have become research grant recipients, and their inclusion in research proposals has become a pre-condition. The way in which to effectively include these stakeholder groups— the ‘ how to involve stakeholders in a meaningful way’ is however not all that clearly defined yet. This lack of clarity on how to involve stakeholders has three possible, unwanted side-effects. Firstly, because actively and meaningfully involving stakeholders requires distinct skills and knowledge researchers do not always reach the full potential of stakeholder involvement. Secondly, as stakeholder involvement becomes an end in itself, there is a risk that all factors that hinder meaningful cooperation, such as a lack of time, difference in access to needed resources and the fact that power relations among the parties involved do play a role, lead to a process in which stakeholders are invited to the process but rather as a mere window-dressing exercise. And thirdly, prior negative experiences of stakeholder involvement often lead to ‘ stakeholder fatigue’ [3–6]. Besides, stakeholder participation has a strong normative stance to it; considering major marine management proposi- tions without stakeholder involvement is nowadays not looked favourably upon. The influential article of Arnstein [7], portraying participation by using the image of a ladder, has had the connota- tion of ‘the more the participation the better’ resonating the ‘political correctness’ of stakeholder participation [8,9]. Seminal work of Raakjær et al. [10,11] already portrayed a more distinct system of levels of stakeholder participation in fisheries manage- ment, not necessarily portraying a normative view but a more Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpol Marine Policy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2014.05.010 0308-597X/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. n Corresponding author. E-mail address: astrid.hendriksen@wur.nl (A. Hendriksen). 1 Both Marloes Kraan and Astrid Hendriksen are first authors of this paper. Marine Policy 50 (2014) 347–352