The rights all people have for involvement in environmental decision making has long been established yet collaborative resource management has had mixed success. Natural capital; the renewable and non‐renewable natural assets that benefit societies, and the flow of ecosystem services these assets provide, are increasingly promoted as approaches that ensure consideration of the environment in decision making. Natural capital and ecosystem services concepts can facilitate participation in decision making by explicitly describing the role of the environment in sustaining society. Increased promotion of these approaches requires consideration on how best to involve stakeholders, those involved and affected by a decision, in the process. We conducted a systematic search to identify where stakeholders have participated in natural capital, ecosystem services and nature’s contributions to people decision making, creating a systematic map of 56 case studies. While many papers discussing stakeholders and these concepts were found, few actively engaged stakeholders in a decision‐making process that used the concepts and therefore were included in the map. Where stakeholders were involved, engagement methods included focus group discussion, stakeholder negotiation and scenario development, as well as ecosystem service ranking and mapping. Ranking for prioritisation of ecosystem services was common, with a bias towards using services with a direct tangible economic benefit; food production and tourism, are both prominent examples. A limited number of case studies performed robust participatory methods evaluations, offering little indication of how best to use natural capital or ecosystem services in participatory approaches. Therefore, the work highlights need for greater evaluation of participatory processes involving natural capital to ensure stakeholder engagement is efficient, productive and useful to all involved. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

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Inclusive, comprehensive Stakeholder Identification and Mapping processes are vital for successful environmental management. This is relevant as multi‐disciplinary collaboration becomes increasingly popular, and the diversity of people influenced by, or involved in, the management of most projects is greater than ever before. Understanding how relevant parties are analysed in environmental management programmes is required to enable robust and considered methodologies as well as successful, just and equitable outcomes. The aim of this study was to improve the attribute mapping process, increasing transparency and ensuring representation is both comprehensive and equitable. A rapid scoping review of Scopus and Web of Science was undertaken to collate and analyse peer‐reviewed, published evidence on stakeholder analysis, with a focus on the mapping processes involved in identifying stakeholders and their attributes. Of the Initial 359 identified papers, 61 were included after three stages of screening. Our results indicate that there is little consistency among practitioners to ensure that Identifying and Mapping Stakeholders is representative: <20% of Case Studies (n = 9) checked the relevancy of their stakeholders after identification. Additionally, definitions at all stages of the stakeholder analysis process were inconsistent across the case studies. Fewer than half of the Case Studies included a definition of Stakeholder (n = 22) or of stakeholder analysis (n = 25). Capturing a representative sample of relevant parties, without compromising on efficiency, financial or practical constraints, is difficult. Having consistent definitions for the term Stakeholders and stakeholder analysis within environmental management is an important step. Based on the scoping review, we formalise the Analysis process into six stages. Through the scoping review findings, a decision support tool, MAPTkit (Mapped Attribute Profiling Toolkit) was developed to visualise the heterogeneity and representation of stakeholders across several user‐determined attributes. This tool is non‐prescriptive, drawing attention to potential issues with stakeholder analysis, such as misrepresentation of real‐world stakeholder communities. This ensures engagement across the full range of people to ensure that environmental management projects are multi‐disciplinary and collaborative, while promoting fair and equitable representation.