STEP at Virginia Tech

STEP FOCUS: COLLABORATIVE ENGAGEMENT IN POLICY MAKING

“Career success increasingly depends on more than technical expertise; it depends on the ability to tackle wicked problems, promote collaboration among diverse stakeholders, and strategically engage with policy and governance systems. STEP students get these critical skills and become more influential and successful in the science-policy interface.”

Given the different values, interests, and priorities among heterogeneous communities, good practices in stakeholder engagement and deliberation are necessary to arrive at outcomes that are widely accepted as fair, efficient, stable, and wise. The STEP program introduces best practices in collaborative engagement, including techniques such as joint fact-finding and collaborative adaptive management that aim to make the best use of scientific and technical information in decision-making processes. STEP learning objective: Collaboratively engage a broad range of professional and public stakeholders to improve policy decisions.

Bruce Hull Professor, VT Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation