ABSTRACT
Stakeholder engagement, as an aspect of public participation in certain types of decision-making, has gained popularity due to the diverse impacts of large-scale industrial developments on individuals and communities and the need to involve affected stakeholders in deciphering how to navigate relationships and address adverse ramifications. One effect of this is that focus has tended to be on company–community relations without focusing the lens on researchers and the various methods they use to study such relations in a manner that may be considered meaningful. This chapter addresses this gap by broadly mapping out the state of the field in terms of research methods for community-engaged research and their resonance for meaningful stakeholder engagement (MSE). The primary question driving the chapter is as follows: how do we design research with affected stakeholders in a way that is meaningful from the perspective of research participants? The chapter introduces a spectrum of engagement intensity and applies this typology to undertake a thorough (albeit inexhaustive) thematic review of various research methods, with coverage of some of their pros and cons as well as other broader challenges that underpin the choices researchers make when engaging with researched communities.
