Effective Stakeholder Engagement in Coastal Transitions

Emerging literature on coastal transitions in the face of the climate crisis establishes a need for identifying appropriate stakeholder engagement processes for long-term coastal transition management. To date, many coastal transition engagement efforts have relied on a top down—decide, announce, and defend—“DAD” model which has been largely ineffective in providing meaningful opportunities for stakeholder engagement. Consequently, in this chapter, we present a “MOM” model for stakeholder engagement that is appropriate for coastal transition contexts. The MOM model is comprised of three stages. First, M—maximise stakeholder capacity to participate; second, O—organise stakeholders into established systems and subsystems; and third, M—manage stakeholders adaptively through transition cycles. In this chapter, we present the theoretical foundations of the MOM model and describe practical ways in which this model can be applied.