This post explains what true inclusion looks like in natural resource decisionmaking and why meaningful engagement requires more than inviting communities into a process. It highlights three conditions — participatory infrastructure, recognition, and influence — that help practitioners and funders support community and Tribal partners in shaping decisions about land, water, watersheds, and fisheries.
Here is the story of understanding what true inclusion looks like in natural resource decisionmaking, who defines it, what conditions make it possible, and what philanthropy can do to help.
Decisions about land, water, and fisheries shape the lives of communities long before those communities are ever invited into the room where those decisions are made. For the organizations and practitioners working closest to these issues, that gap between who is affected and who has a seat at the table isn’t new. It’s something they navigate every day. We set out to understand that dynamic more deeply and surface what it would take to shift it. Three research questions guided a year of listening and learning across water, watershed, and fisheries contexts: How do underrepresented and historically excluded communities define open decisionmaking and meaningful engagement? What conditions support flourishing engagement? How can philanthropy support that work?
The research resulted in a brief for practitioners and funders interested in advancing decisionmaking that fosters meaningful engagement and contributes to lasting solutions in natural resource management. Here’s how we got there.
Our team started where good research starts, with what was already known. Reviewing sources across academic and practitioner literature, three bodies of work came up most consistently as the frameworks through which inclusion in natural resource decisionmaking gets defined: environmental justice, civic engagement, and Indigenous governance. Each comes from a different tradition.
- Environmental justice centers the meaningful role of affected communities in shaping the decisions that impact them most.
- Civic engagement scholarship examines how participation processes are designed and whether they give communities a genuine role from start to finish.
- Indigenous governance frameworks center sovereignty, responsibility, and self-determination, grounding inclusion not as something institutions offer but as something that already exists within Tribal Nations’ own systems of law, knowledge, and relationship.
Despite coming from different disciplinary homes, these three bodies of work converged on the same understanding of what true inclusion requires.
With that grounding, we moved into conversations with the people doing and living this work. Our first wave of interviews included frontline practitioners, staff from organizations working directly in natural resource governance, and individuals from Tribal communities sitting at the intersection of natural resource governance and community engagement. We asked people how they experienced natural resource decisionmaking, what conditions helped communities show up fully, what examples stood out as engagement that felt genuine, and what they believed needed to be in place for this work to reach its potential. We synthesized what we heard and then brought people back together in sensemaking sessions, inviting everyone from the first wave to join. We shared the themes we were seeing and asked them to push back, add nuance, and tell us what we were getting wrong. Those sessions deepened our analysis considerably. People who felt alone in this work found themselves in conversation with others navigating the same terrain, and what came out of those spaces only strengthened what the data was saying.
The process itself is technical, bureaucratic, and slow … we’ve stuck with a model that requires people to study the system just to participate or even understand what’s going on at a council meeting.” — Interview participant
Our second wave took a different angle. Natural resource decisionmaking almost always runs through a government entity at some point and the people best positioned to illuminate how that works are those who have been on the inside. This wave focused on individuals who held government positions, worked directly alongside agencies, or navigated formal regulatory processes closely enough to understand those dynamics. We asked them how decisions moved, where communities could have the greatest influence, and what was not always fully recognized in this work. Their perspective added a layer of practicality essential to the full picture and helped us understand more concretely what it takes for community knowledge and priorities to travel with a decision as it moves across institutional levels.
“Just because you create space for people to have a voice doesn’t mean they feel empowered to use it … Any investment needs to account for the time it takes before people feel comfortable contributing.” — Interview participant
Looking across the literature and interviews, we started to see the same ideas again and again. We came to understand open decisionmaking as situations where people most affected by natural resource outcomes have real, ongoing opportunities to shape how decisions are understood, made, and carried forward. Meaningful engagement was described as what makes that possible in practice, supporting participation over time, recognizing multiple forms of knowledge, and connecting engagement to real influence over decisions and actions. Across both, three conditions surfaced as central.
Three Conditions of Meaningful Engagement
| Condition | What It Means in Practice |
|---|---|
| Participatory Infrastructure | Communities are positioned and resourced to participate across the full arc of a decision from problem definition through implementation. Engagement starts before key options are finalized, materials are shared with time to prepare, and the real costs of participation including travel, translation, and coordination, are covered so engagement can be sustained over time and across decision stages. |
| Recognition | Community and Indigenous knowledge are treated as relevant expertise that shapes how problems and solutions are framed. It shows up in the technical and planning discussions that carry real authority, not only in opening remarks, and community priorities are reflected in how success is defined and what trade-offs are considered. |
| Influence | Participants can trace how their engagement shaped a decision, a trade-off, or an implementation commitment. Decisionmakers communicate how input was used and why trade-offs were made, and community or Tribal partners remain involved through monitoring and implementation rather than only deliberation. |
These three conditions only work when they are all present. Participatory infrastructure without recognition means communities stay in the process, but their knowledge gets sidelined. Recognition without participatory infrastructure means knowledge is valued in theory but people cannot sustain their involvement long enough for it to matter. Both without influence means communities have shown up, contributed, and still cannot trace any of it back to what got decided. Each condition makes the others possible and none of them is sufficient on its own.
We know the field is carrying a lot right now. Conditions are shifting, institutions are navigating new pressures, and many practitioners and funders are doing this work with fewer resources and more uncertainty than anticipated. We offer this resource not as a standard to meet, but as a way of seeing, a framework for identifying where the conditions for true inclusion already exist and where there is room to grow. Progress happens when people are honest about where they are and find the piece they can commit to. There can be an entry point here for everyone and we hope this resource helps you find yours.
Get The Resource
If this resonates with the work you do, we invite you to read the full brief here. It includes extended vignettes from the field, a practical ecosystem lens for understanding how decisions move across governance levels, and tools designed for those ready to take the next step.
About the Author
Kerlin Morales, MBA, Analyst, works on community organizing and helps organizations grow stronger by supporting projects funded by foundations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Public Welfare Foundation and local governments. She cares deeply about racial equity and social change, and uses research and data to strengthen communities and workplaces.