ABSTRACT. There is growing recognition that public lands cannot be managed as islands; rather, land management must address the ecological, social, and temporal complexity that often spans jurisdictions and traditional planning horizons. Collaborative decision making and adaptive management (CAM) have been promoted as methods to reconcile competing societal demands and respond to complex ecosystem dynamics. We detail the experiences of land managers and stakeholders in using CAM at Las Cienegas National Conservation Area (LCNCA), a highly valued site under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The CAM process at Las Cienegas is marked by strong stakeholder engagement, with four core elements: (1) shared watershed goals with measurable resource objectives; (2) relevant and reliable scientific information; (3) mechanisms to incorporate new information into decision making; and (4) shared learning to improve both the process and management actions. The combination of stakeholder engagement and adaptive management has led to agreement on contentious issues, more innovative solutions, and more effective land management. However, the region is now experiencing rapid changes outside managers' control, including climate change, human population growth, and reduced federal budgets, with large but unpredictable impacts on natural resources. Although the CAM experience provides a strong foundation for making the difficult and contentious management decisions that such changes are likely to require, neither collaboration nor adaptive management provides a sufficient structure for addressing the externalities that drive uncontrollable and unpredictable change. As a result, LCNCA is exploring two specific modifications to CAM that may better address emerging challenges, including: (1) creating nested resource objectives to distinguish between those objectives that may be crucial to maintaining ecological resilience from those that may hinder a flexible response to climate change, and (2) incorporating scenario planning into CAM to explore how climate change may interact with other drivers and alter options for the future, to identify robust management actions, and to prioritize ecological monitoring efforts. The experiences at LCNCA demonstrate how collaboration and adaptive management can be used to improve social and environmental outcomes and, with modifications, may help address the full range of complexity and change that threatens to overwhelm even the best efforts to sustain public lands.

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Participatory approaches to science and decision making, including stakeholder engagement, are increasingly common for managing complex socio-ecological challenges in working landscapes. However, critical questions about stakeholder engagement in this space remain. These include normative, political, and ethical questions concerning who participates, who benefits and loses, what good can be accomplished, and for what, whom, and by who. First, opportunities for addressing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion interests through engagement, while implied in key conceptual frameworks, remain underexplored in scholarly work and collaborative practice alike. A second line of inquiry relates to research–practice gaps. While both the practice of doing engagement work and scholarly research on the efficacy of engagement is on the rise, there is little concerted interplay among ‘on-the-ground’ practitioners and scholarly researchers. This means scientific research often misses or ignores insight grounded in practical and experiential knowledge, while practitioners are disconnected from potentially useful scientific research on stakeholder engagement. A third set of questions concerns gaps in empirical understanding of the efficacy of engagement processes and includes inquiry into how different engagement contexts and process features affect a range of behavioral, cognitive, and decision-making outcomes. Because of these gaps, a cohesive and actionable research agenda for stakeholder engagement research and practice in working landscapes remains elusive. In this review article, we present a co-produced research agenda for stakeholder engagement in working landscapes. The co-production process involved professionally facilitated and iterative dialogue among a diverse and international group of over 160 scholars and practitioners through a yearlong virtual workshop series. The resulting research agenda is organized under six cross-cutting themes: (1) Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; (2) Ethics; (3) Research and Practice; (4) Context; (5) Process; and (6) Outcomes and Measurement. This research agenda identifies critical research needs and opportunities relevant for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike. We argue that addressing these research opportunities is necessary to advance knowledge and practice of stakeholder engagement and to support more just and effective engagement processes in working landscapes.

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ublic Issues Education (PIE) is a term used in the Cooperative Extension Senice to describe a range of multi-party approaches for addressing public issues, from formal conflict resolution procedures to coalition-building and collaborative problem solving. Although some of these activities m part of Cooperative Extension's community education tool kit from its inception, there is a renewed awmness of their potential importance today Among the societal changes making PIE especially relevant today m: the recognition of tradeoffs (read "conflict") among agriculture, environment and development; the advent of new agricultural technologies and/or production practices that address certain problems or productivity constraints, while raising other concerns about social, environmental or community impacts; an appreciation of the potential benefits of collaboration in relation to community and economic development, public health and human/social senices; budgetary and policy changes at state and federal levels that devolve some responsibilities to localities; and an appreciation that many public issues cannot be resolved by government alone, but q u i r e the active involvement of interested and affected parties from the community.cooperatve Extension's community education tool kit, the highly decentralized nature of the system at state and local levels makes it diffiDespite these indications that PIE might be flourishing in cult to know the nature and extent of PIE taking place, the constraints it faces and the requirements for strengthening this form of programming at the local level. The results of a statewide survey in New York, and intensive experiences in one of its regions highlights these issues, and some key tensions and dilemmas that may be relevant in other states, as well. k shown in Table 1, PIE is most commonly involved in natural resource or environmental issues (cited by 40 of the 50 county offices), followed by agriculture (27 counties) and community and economic development (29 counties). PIE is also mentioned frequently in relation to programs for Youth and Family (22 counties), but much less frequently for Nutrition and Food (12 counties) or Health (9 counties). It is unclear to what extent the variation across program azeas &lects the awmness of the respondent, the visibilitylpriority attached to certain program m a s by the respondent or the actual distribution of PIE across these mas. However, the overall results do suggest a high degree of involvement in some type of group processes across the state.