| Summary: | Stakeholder participation in environmental management is increasing. Environmental agency personnel, however, often lack training in communication and conduct of participatory processes. How they interpret participation affects how it is practiced, which in turn affects the outcomes of participatory projects. This study explored how participation was interpreted within the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland (SCSI) and how this interpretation affected implementation in two land restoration projects: Farmers Heal the Land (FHL) and Hekluskógar. How the SCSI district officers experienced and dealt with stakeholder interaction was also explored. The main methods were semi-structured interviews with SCSI staff, FHL farmers and members of the Hekluskógar collaboration committee, and participant observations during district officers’ visits to FHL farmers. The study builds on the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism. The findings revealed that the SCSI interviewees focused primarily on the outputs, or products, of the participatory processes. The outputs fulfilled their expectations and many of the other interviewees’ expectations as well. Other consequences of the “product focus” were, however, less attention to factors related to the participatory processes themselves, e.g., ensuring ongoing interaction, stakeholder influence and joint gains, and attending to other stakeholders’ process-related expectations. This caused dissatisfaction among some of the other stakeholders. It also seemed that limited efforts had been made to adapt the agency itself to participatory approaches. The district officers handled interaction with farmers in a way that promoted collaboration and had improved relations between farmers and the SCSI. This contact helped the SCSI to support and influence farmers’ land restoration activities, and thus to achieve the agency’s main goals. Insufficient resources for stakeholder interaction and a legal duty to assess vegetation condition on farmland complicated the district officers’ ...
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