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While stakeholder-driven approaches have been increasingly used in scenario modeling, previous studies have mostly focused on the qualitative elements, e.g., narratives and policy documents, from the stakeholders, but lack engagement of stakeholders with quantitative inputs. In this study, we conducted workshops with a stakeholder group to integrate the participatory mapping of future policies in the simulation, and to compare the environmental impacts after including the participatory mapping. A land system change model named CLUMondo was used to simulate four scenarios, i.e., Business-As-Usual (BAU), Destroying Resources in Owyhee (DRO), Ecological Conservation (EC), and Managed Recreation (MR), in Owyhee County, Idaho, United States. The InVEST models were used to assess water yield, soil erosion, and wildlife habitat under the four scenarios. The results show that the DRO scenario would decrease shrubland and increased grassland, thus leading to less water yield, more soil erosion, and deteriorated wildlife habitat anticipated through to 2050. On the contrary, the EC and MR scenarios reverse the trend and would improve these ecosystem services over the same time horizon. The stakeholder-driven policies appear to influence the spatial distribution of the land system and ecosystem services. The results help to reach a nuanced understanding of the stakeholder-driven scenarios and highlight the importance of engaging stakeholders in scenario modeling and environmental impact analysis. 

Understanding and modeling the trajectories of change in broad level interactions in food-energy-water systems is incomplete when it is undertaken by researchers in isolation from those who live and work in the systems. For models and outcomes to have validity they need to be subjected to sustained development and iteration with stakeholders. This requires a paradigm shift in our thinking of stakeholder engagement from viewing such engagement as an isolated activity or part of the data collection methods to thinking of engagement as a process of knowledge generation. That process hinges on building relationships and building trust, and also sustaining these as long-term relationships through multiple elements of research design and execution. Using the case-study of a mid-size river basin we demonstrate a co-production of knowledge process for food-energy-water systems. The findings highlight the multiple and different ways in which knowledge co-production can be transacted in food-energy-water systems while also generating solutions to the use and re-use of water, energy, and nutrients at the landscape level.