“Stakeholder engagement strategy: monitoring and evaluate the impact in OPERANDUM project”

The OPERANDUM project is designed to address major hydro-meteorological risks through the deployment and assessment of Nature-Based Solution (NBS). The project pursues a co-creation approach and sets up 7 Open Air Laboratories (OAL) in which a user-centric method, characterized by the active participation of the stakeholders, is promoted. Stakeholder engagement in co-designing, co-developing, and co-deploying NBS is becoming a prominent practice in environmental projects and a crucial part of the process is monitoring and impact evaluation of the engagement strategy and actions. Monitoring aims at providing information about the stakeholder engagement processes throughout the project and should not be seen as a separate part of the stakeholder engagement processes or an aim in itself but as a continuous and integral element of the co-creation process. The poster shows the results of preliminary empirical research conducted among the OALs in order to propose some key indicators useful to evaluate the process and the impact generated by the OPERANDUM co-creative approach.  Starting from a theoretical framework, the research selected and discussed some crucial indicators in order to propose an action plan for the monitoring and impact evaluation of OPERANDUM strategy to involve and support the participation of stakeholders, with a specific focus on the tools used so far and those that are in the pilot phases (i.e Stakeholder Forum experimented in OAL Italy). Both qualitative and quantitative methods have been included in the evaluation for the engagement strategy outcome of the projects to be fully understood and, not secondarily, to identify a sustainability strategy beyond the conclusion of OPERANDUM to reinforce the social acceptance, the shared knowledge, and the upscaling of NBS at local, national and global level.