Effective long-term management of invasive non-native species (INNS) in South America is a pressing yet complex task. Critically, the environmental, historical, cultural, and economic idiosyncrasies of the region call for the inclusion of a plurality of views from those sectors of society receiving the negative and positive impacts of INNS. This is a multifaceted, and often daunting, task that can be aided by an early identification of stakeholders – those affected by or with an interest in INNS and their management – accompanied by targeted stakeholder engagement. Here, we report the procedures and results of a stakeholder mapping activity aimed at identifying stakeholders and designing engagement strategies. Using expert knowledge procedures, we compiled comprehensive lists of stakeholders for six case-studies in South America: (i) invasive grasses (Urochloa spp.) in Brazil; (ii) glossy privet (Ligustrum lucidum) in Argentina; (iii) lodgepole and Monterey pines (Pinus contorta and P. radiata) in Argentina; (iv) American mink (Neogale vison) in Argentina and Chile; (v) lodgepole and Monterey pines in Chile; and (vi) German yellow-jacket (Vespula germanica) in Chile. Overall, we identified 250 stakeholders, which, based on their interest and influence, were classified into “context settlers” (2%), “key players” (47%), “crowd” (5%), and “subjects” (49%). We outlined strategies to engage with each of these four groups and for each of our six case-studies. Across case studies, communication with stakeholders was the most common engagement strategy proposed (27%; 19 of 70 strategies), followed by active involvement of stakeholders in INNS research and management (23%). Our results highlight the importance of considering power imbalances, as those stakeholders more likely to benefit from INNS were assessed to have more influence over INNS management relative to local and indigenous communities. Our work illustrates how to identify stakeholders in a rigorous and rapid manner, which should be complemented with the involvement of the stakeholders themselves.

Argentina, Brazil, Chile, expert knowledge, long-term management, participatory environmental management science-normative strategies, social actors

Invasive non-native species (INNS, hereafter), those non-native species that have established multiple self-sustaining populations outside their native range, and have spread from their point of introduction (Blackburn et al. 2011), are a leading cause of biodiversity loss and damage to ecosystem services and economic assets globally (Pyšek et al. 2020; Diagne et al. 2021). Consequently, effectively managing the severe impacts of INNS has become a priority for policy-makers and environmental managers worldwide (Early et al. 2016; Turbelin et al. 2016; Robertson et al. 2020). Unfortunately, many of these INNS are too widespread and abundant to be eradicated, and therefore need to be actively managed over the long term to mitigate their negative impacts and restore affected native communities (Dunham et al. 2020; Robertson et al. 2020; Sapsford et al. 2020). As the impacts of INNS on biodiversity, ecosystems, and human well-being vary regionally and locally, management practices must adapt and match these idiosyncrasies to be effective (Núñez and Pauchard 2010; Dunham et al. 2020; García-Díaz et al. 2022).

South America is no exception to these global INNS trends. The number and distribution of INNS have increased in the region since the 1800s (Seebens et al. 2021), leading to impacts on natural ecosystems and local societies and their economies (Speziale et al. 2012; Early et al. 2016; Essl et al. 2020). This is particularly troubling given that South American countries harbour highly diverse natural ecosystems of global significance (Mittermeier et al. 2011). In Argentina alone, there are more than 772 INNS, of which 102 are known to cause negative ecological impacts (GEKKO, Grupo de Estudios en Conservación y Manejo, Departamento de Biología, Bioquímica y Farmacia 2023). In continental Chile and Brazil, existing datasets have reported well over 1,100 non-native species in each country, with hundreds of them classified as INNS (PNUD 2017, Ziller et al. 2020). INNS pose a serious challenge to ecological integrity and livelihoods in South America, and these problems are forecast to increase in the near future (Speziale et al. 2012; Essl et al. 2020; Seebens et al. 2021).

A range of national and multi-national policies have been formulated and, at least, partially implemented to deal with INNS in South America (Speziale et al. 2012; Turbelin et al. 2016; Faria et al. 2023). These include the Chilean “Estrategia Nacional Integrada para la Prevenciόn, el Control y/o Erradicación de las Especies Exóticas Invasoras ” (Comité Operativo para la Prevención, el Control y la Erradicación de las Especies Exóticas Invasoras 2014), the “Estrategia Nacional sobre Especies Exóticas Invasoras ” in Argentina (Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible 2022) , and a wide variety of policies in Brazil (reviewed recently by Faria et al. 2023). Additionally, trans-national organisations such as MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market) have produced guidelines for member countries, including Argentina and Brazil with Chile as an associated country, to tackle the INNS problem (“Lineamientos para la Elaboración de un Plan para la Prevención, Monitoreo, Control y Mitigación de las Especies Exóticas Invasoras”; MERCOSUR, 2019). These are relatively recent initiatives that still need to be adopted widely, and assessing their efficacy in addressing INNS will require continued monitoring and research (Núñez and Pauchard 2010; Speziale et al. 2012; Faria et al. 2023). Counter to these initiatives, past and ongoing policies that promote the use of INNS in South America continue to create a misalignments in objectives that hampers progress in INNS management in the region (Reyes and Nelson 2014; Baggio et al. 2021; Faria et al. 2023).

The potential success of these INNS management policies hinges on accounting for the constraints imposed by a low availability of context-specific ecological information, high socio-cultural diversity, policy mismatches, strong dependence on natural resources, and limited funds for addressing the challenges posed by INNS (Núñez and Pauchard 2010; Speziale et al. 2012; Faria et al. 2023). In particular, there is potential for conflicts of interest and identity over INNS use and management due to the diversity of actors involved and how they perceive and receive INNS impacts depending on their economic activities, interest, income levels, and asymmetries in power and access to resources (Beever et al. 2019, Shackleton et al. 2019a; Sax et al. 2022). For example, some INNS are used for wood and cellulose production (e.g., pines, Pinus spp., and gum trees, Eucalyptus spp.) and recreation and tourism (e.g., trout, Salmo trutta and Oncorhynchus mykiis, wild pigs, Sus scrofa, and red deer, Cervus elaphus), providing important economic and cultural benefits for certain societal sectors (Defossé 2015; Ballari and Barrios-García 2022; Sax et al. 2022). Additionally, many INNS are highly dispersive, requiring large-scale temporal and spatial management over large tracts of land with different uses and tenures to overcome their capacity to rebound and reinvade following population suppression (Oliver et al. 2016; Glen et al. 2017; Banks et al. 2018).

Many South American countries have economies based on natural resource use and extraction. They generally include extensive areas that have been converted to monocultures of non-native species, often owned by trans- or multi-national companies that usually hold very different views of nature, natural resource use, and sustainable development than do indigenous and traditional peoples and local communities (hereafter ITPLCs), and which usually wield much more power in decision-making processes (De Castro et al. 2016; Oberlack et al. 2016; De la Mora 2023). This leads to a situation in which those most dependent on land tend to be those most excluded from environmental governance structures, further fuelling inequity in natural resources use and management (Bateman and Mace 2020; Löfqvist et al. 2023; Tedesco et al. 2023). This inequality is a matter of general concern for global agencies and South American countries when formulating environmental and economic policies (De Castro et al. 2016; Löfqvist et al. 2023).

Considering the complexity of environmental governance in South America, effective INNS management will benefit from a more inclusive approach to ensure that the interests and needs of all stake- and right-holders are met (Crowley et al. 2017; Kapitza et al. 2019; García-Díaz et al. 2022). Inclusive approaches to environmental management aim to recognise the values, preferences, and needs of the diversity of actors involved via transparent, accountable, and participatory decision-making processes, the equitable sharing of costs and benefits across societal sectors, and respect for different rights, identities, and ecosystem management practices (Martin et al. 2016; Raymond et al. 2022; Löfqvist et al. 2023; Tedesco et al. 2023). Inclusive environmental management incorporates the idea of supporting or empowering community-based initiatives and recognises that ITPLCs have the right to decide how to manage their territories and should be involved in decisions (Martin et al. 2016). This is both a reflection of a moral stance on how environmental management should be approached, and of the recognition that a broad engagement with society is necessary to gain the social legitimacy to operate and implement environmental management actions (Bridger et al. 2019; Raymond et al. 2022; Mason et al. 2023). As a consequence, inclusivity has been shown to lead to improved social and ecological outcomes and long-term viability in environmental management, although a certain level of disagreement on objectives and interventions is always expected (Bryce et al. 2011; Alter et al. 2019; Chambers et al. 2021; Newig et al. 2023). In turn, this entails engaging stakeholders, understanding their attitudes and local perspectives, and anticipating and navigating social conflict (Novoa et al. 2018; Kapitza et al. 2019; Shackleton et al. 2019b; Newig et al. 2023). Stakeholder engagement is critical for fostering collective action in formulating and implementing INNS management under complex socio-ecological conditions (e.g., Stokes et al. 2006; Bayliss et al. 2013; Omondiagbe et al. 2017). A vital first step involves identifying stakeholders and analysing their interests and how they relate to INNS to develop engagement strategies that foster stakeholder participation (Reed 2008; Conroy and Peterson 2013; Bridger et al. 2019).

Here, our aim was to design collaborative management actions for INNS across three countries in South America. We show how the application of a structured methodology to systematically identify and map stakeholders can be used to plan engagement strategies. In this sense, we align our work with frameworks that consider the plurality of stakeholders’ views to define and formulate INNS management projects to deliver the most favoured outcome(s) for all (Bridger et al. 2019; García-Díaz et al. 2022; Newig et al. 2023). We included both stakeholders with an interest and influence on INNS themselves (e.g., companies planting INNS trees) and stakeholders with an interest and influence on INNS management (e.g., NGOs controlling an INNS). Some stakeholders may have an interest and influence on both INNS and their management. We focussed on six case studies of INNS plants and animals in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to showcase the applicability of our methods across a range of geographical, ecological, and social conditions. The ultimate output is a series of lists of essential stakeholders linked to strategies that engage them in the process of defining INNS management plans. Our stakeholder mapping tools applied to South America have the potential to become an instrumental method for promoting inclusive INNS management.

The process described here was part of a multi-country, multi-species research project funded under the Latin American Biodiversity Programme as part of the Newton Fund (Lambin et al. 2020), with contributions from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Argentine National Scientific & Technical Research Council (CONICET), the Brazilian São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), and the Chilean National Commission for Scientific & Technological Research (CONICYT), which later became the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID). The project took place between 2019 and 2023, and represented a collaboration among universities, research institutes, and non-governmental organisations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the UK aiming to improve the management of INNS based on six detailed case-studies. Based on researchers’ and practitioners’ opinions and perceptions, our objective was to identify the stakeholders relevant to our case-studies in our study areas (see map in Fig. 1) and propose engagement strategies for the participatory socio-ecological management of INNS.

Figure 1.

Geographical location of our six case-studies (AR: Argentina; CH: Chile; BR: Brazil), the target INNS (common and scientific names), and the number of participants per case-study who completed individual stakeholder spreadsheets containing information on the stakeholders relevant to their system (denoted by the letter N in the legend). The final products were a consensus stakeholder spreadsheet and a consensus engagement strategy for each of the six case-studies.

Early in the project, partners identified that a barrier to effective engagement of stakeholders in the case-study countries was a lack of clarity surrounding the different stakeholders involved and their levels of interest and potential influence on the different study species and their management. It was in this context that we conducted an iterative exercise over the course of six months (April-September 2021), including individual expert activities and two virtual workshops with researchers and practitioners that aimed to: 1) list the stakeholders expected to be impacted by, or have influence on, INNS and their management; 2) map the distribution of different stakeholders in the different study systems along axes of interest and influence, with a view to 3) defining engagement strategies for different stakeholder groups.

Our central instrument was a stakeholder spreadsheet that each participant had to complete independently. Participants then discussed their completed personal spreadsheets with both other members of their same case-study group and the broader group of participants during facilitated virtual workshops. The ultimate goal was to produce a final single stakeholder spreadsheet for each case-study (6 final stakeholder spreadsheets in total). We invited 2–6 participants and experts per case-study, all of them project partners, to participate in this activity. In the case of pines in Argentina, two were invited, but only one participated. We were unable to recruit substitute experts for this case-study since we only invited on-project partners and close collaborators. The stakeholders for Pinus radiata and Pinus contorta were assessed to be the same for both species in both Argentina and Chile and, therefore, the stakeholder spreadsheets were independent for each country but included both pine species together (pines, hereafter). In addition, two participants were involved in two case-studies and, therefore, completed a stakeholder spreadsheet for each. The final number of participants per case-study varied between one and six, all of them co-authors in this paper. Overall, we obtained 21 individual stakeholder spreadsheets and six unique consensus stakeholder spreadsheets. An exemplar spreadsheet and the instructions provided to each participant can be found in the Suppl. materials 1, 2, respectively (see also Table 1), and in a data package archived at the UK Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) which is publicly available (Erazo et al. 2024). In the following sections we describe our methodology in detail.

Here we show how facilitated workshops with researchers and practitioners can be used to plan more inclusive and strategic stakeholder engagement in INNS-related activities. Inclusive environmental management, which aims to ensure process and outcome fairness, is a cornerstone of good practice when tackling complex socio-ecological issues such as INNS management and accompanying ecosystem restoration (Frumento et al. 2019; Chambers et al. 2021; Löfqvist et al. 2023; Tedesco et al. 2023). While, ideally, stakeholder mapping should be carried out with direct involvement of the stakeholders themselves, our experience highlights three critical elements for designing and conducting INNS management activities in South America that aspire to be inclusive: 1) the complex and diverse network of stakeholders affected or involved in INNS management, and the consequent challenge in mapping these stakeholders; 2) the power dynamics and imbalances in INNS governance and, by extension, in environmental governance; and, 3) the potential conflicts arising from the distribution of positive and negative impacts of INNS perceived or experienced by different stakeholders. We elaborate on these three themes below and conclude by discussing how stakeholder mapping and our revealed engagement strategies can help alleviate these core challenges and advance fair planning in INNS management in South America.

First, our results clearly showed the breadth of stakeholders linked to INNS management in South America, spanning government agencies (at all levels) to private business and NGOs, and including up to 97 different stakeholders in the case of pines. Such a breadth of stakeholders will naturally result in a diversity of views and identities, contributing to the complexity of INNS management at both design and implementation stages. Acknowledging this diversity is key to inclusive and effective INNS management planning (Kapitza et al. 2019). Facilitated activities can encourage participants to be as objective and wide-ranging as possible to include all stakeholders who might reasonably be expected to have some interest in and/or influence over management of a focal INNS. This reflects a positive aspect of implementing our structured methodology with only researchers and practitioners. Specifically, our structured and iterative process can help to reduce the likelihood of bias in stakeholder selection, compared with a narrow focus on engaging stakeholders with whom researchers and practitioners already have relationships or are easier to engage with (Groves and Game 2016). That said, this type of activity should be seen as a starting point for stakeholder engagement, with the next steps being active engagement through the different strategies outlined in this paper.

Our stakeholder mapping also revealed important practical lessons to be considered when designing and conducting such activities. First, the extent of the area covered matters, as our larger case-study (African grasses in the Brazilian Cerrado) relied on high-level stakeholder categories given the very large number of potential individual stakeholders, compared to highly disaggregated stakeholder lists for more local case-studies where participants had a high degree of existing knowledge or prior engagement with stakeholders (e.g., German yellow-jackets in Chile). High-level stakeholder lists for large areas can be used as building blocks to develop more detailed lists for smaller areas embedded within them. Second, stakeholders can be shared across multiple INNS, as in our pines case-studies. This opens the door to improved multi-INNS management if the knowledge and resources available can be pooled across multiple target species (Brandt et al. 2023). Therefore, we encourage researchers and practitioners embarking on stakeholder mapping exercises to consider whether stakeholders might be common across multiple INNS. Last but not least, the management of some INNS requires cross-country coordination (Lambin et al. 2020; Faria et al. 2023), such as in our American mink case-study (Argentina-Chile). In such cases, researchers and practitioners from the relevant countries should identify organisations with similar remits and those empowered with establishing international collaborations, together with more local stakeholders. Additionally, these networks will serve to expedite the transfer of knowledge between different areas facing the same INNS.

Our results show that most of the stakeholders identified were expected to be highly interested in INNS and their management, which is expected given the nature of our mapping exercise. However, there were clear divergences in the expected influence that these stakeholders might wield in decision-making and the success of on-ground interventions. More specifically, government agencies, landowners and large companies were expected to be influential, whereas ITPLCs were thought to have much less influence over decision-making. This reflects the wider pattern of inequity in environmental governance in South America, which speaks not only to the lack of effective participation in existing governance systems and mechanisms, but on a deeper level, is driven by a lack of recognition of fundamentally differing notions of nature, culture, territory, and conservation (De Castro et al. 2016; Martin et al. 2016; Ulloa 2017). It is in this sense that co-planning engagement strategies identified in our exercise could be important (Table 2). These could take the form of co-developing management strategies, participatory elaboration of formal documents, and the creation of instances for collaborative decision-making (Powell et al. 2023). These strategies align well with work on co-production in sustainability, and existing principles and recommendations drawn from this field can guide such co-planning strategies (Norström et al. 2020; Chambers et al. 2021). For example, researchers, local communities, and practitioners can engage in the iterative co-development of simulation models of the system to achieve a shared understanding of the system and jointly evaluate INNS management options (Parrott 2017; Samson et al. 2017; Dunham et al. 2022).

However, for such strategies to be equitably implemented, different systems of knowledge and values must be recognised, respected, and reflected in the decision-making processes themselves and in the results of such processes (Dechoum et al. 2019; Frumento et al. 2019; Tedesco et al. 2023). For example, our American mink case-study in Chile (Los Rios Region) began when small land-holders and subsistence farmers started experiencing losses of chickens to mink depredation, and raised the problem with the local government agency. This led to the design and implementation of a community-based campaign to foster knowledge about the American mink and control their populations. Furthermore, whilst high-level government agencies were the most frequent “key players”, many local government agencies were seen as less influential and were classed as “subjects”. This is in part due to reduced access to resources or land ownership at local- relative to medium-level government agencies such as Province and State governments or local and regional delegations of central and Federal-level governments (e.g., National Parks agencies). In summary, our results present examples of the widespread ‘top-down’ approach to environmental management, and highlight the need for addressing power imbalances at multiple governance levels.

Our results highlight potential power imbalances that need to be considered for equitable INNS management, especially as not only were landowners expected to have more influence than were ITPLCs, but they are also the main “key players” expected to experience positive economic and socio-cultural impacts from INNS. This is in contrast to the local communities, who are expected to experience only negative impacts from INNS. This contrast is unsurprising given the history of the region, and has been exacerbated by diverging goals pursued by different agencies of the same government (e.g., see Faria et al. 2023 and Pelicice et al. 2023 for the case of Brazil). This is despite the fact that government agencies were the “key players” most frequently experiencing negative impacts across all three categories (ecological, economic and socio-cultural). For example, pine plantations were incentivised by the state in Chile in the 1970s leading to concentration of these plantations in the hands of forestry companies that own and manage large areas (Reyes and Nelson 2014). Similarly, the use of African grasses as forage for cattle in Brazil has been promoted by agencies supporting primary industries, whilst simultaneously being combated by environmentally-oriented agencies (Baggio et al. 2021). While likely a challenging task, these policy misalignments need to be resolved for the effective implementation of INNS management strategies (Powell et al. 2023). Landowners also hold the key to accessing areas where INNS management should be undertaken. Failing to secure access can sometimes – but not always – impede the effective management of highly mobile INNS or act as sources of ecologically-damaging INNS of economic value for the landowner (Glen et al. 2017). Such divergent costs and benefits of INNS to different stakeholders have the potential to polarise opinions on the importance of, and approaches to, INNS management, leading to conflicts (Beever et al. 2019; Kapitza et al. 2019).

Accounting for positive impacts is essential to ensure that ITPLCs do not bear the brunt of INNS negative impacts while landowners reap the benefits, reinforcing existing inequalities. From an ecological perspective, it is important to consider the possibility that some INNS may play an important ecological role once widespread and integrated in the ecosystem, and managing them might lead to unintended consequences affecting the ecosystem in unforeseen ways (Brandt et al. 2023; Carpouron et al. 2023). Navigating the negative and positive impacts of INNS will be a delicate and context-specific decision in which government agencies, as “key players”, might be indispensable actors mediating and pre-empting conflicts (Newig et al. 2023). This can be guided by the following key tenets of sustainability and equity (Bateman and Mace 2020; Löfqvist et al. 2023; Tedesco et al. 2023): 1) account for the potential irreversible damage by INNS on the environment and manage them accordingly (Vimercati et al. 2020; Lockwood et al. 2023); 2) explore the substitutability of INNS’ positive impacts with native species or non-native species with a low risk profile to prevent the incentivisation and spread of INNS of value (e.g., Pelicice et al. 2023); and 3) consider the distributional effects of INNS and their management upon different societal sectors, with an emphasis on ITPLCs (García-Díaz et al. 2021). Guidelines for the sustainable use of non-native trees of economic importance exist (Brundu et al. 2020), and the investigation of potential substitutes for ecologically-damaging INNS is recognised in INNS policy documents such as the “Estrategia Nacional sobre Especies Exóticas Invasoras” in Argentina, which lists INNS of productive use in its “Category 2” (Gobierno de Argentina 2021). Social multi-criteria evaluation, cost-effectiveness analyses, and a diversity of tools for evaluating the positive and negative ecological and socio-economic impacts of INNS can support decision-making to formulate interventions whilst considering their positive and negative impacts (Bacher et al. 2018; Etxano and Villalba-Eguiluz 2021; Vimercati et al. 2022).

We reiterate the caveat that our exercise and results stem from the informed opinions of our expert participants on the stakeholders of each case-study. Additionally, the number of participants per case-study varied substantially (from one to six). These features imply that our results should be interpreted with caution and cannot be extrapolated beyond a preliminary assessment of stakeholders and a tool to help practitioners and researchers establish an initial basis for understanding and engaging their stakeholders. A robust understanding of stakeholders will require at least two components. First, it would be desirable to engage a greater number of participants for each case-study to an extent that is commensurate with the area each covered. For example, while five participants is a reasonable sample size for the German yellow-jacket case-study, one participant, as in the case of pines in Argentina, is clearly insufficient. Similar activities should seek to actively recruit participants from diverse backgrounds to achieve a comprehensive picture of the potential stakeholders, and more accurate expert opinions by summarising across experts within each case-study (Groves and Game 2016). Secondly, INNS impacts and perceptions of stakeholders should ideally be elicited from the stakeholders themselves, and identified iteratively.

Despite these limitations, our stakeholder mapping was a valuable first step. Our engagement strategies proved useful in framing and guiding our project activities both prior to and after the workshop. In total, we conducted 91 engagement activities across our case-studies, including press releases in Spanish and Portuguese (e.g., Chile: https://www.diariosostenible.cl/noticia/actualidad/2022/09/impulsan-control-comunitario-de-chaqueta-amarilla-en-rio-cruces; Argentina: https://radio3cadenapatagonia.com.ar/capacitacion-sobre-especies-exoticas-invasoras-en-el-parque-nacional-lago-puelo/; Brazil: https://agencia.fapesp.br/an-international-research-group-proposes-six-guidelines-for-managing-the-impacts-of-invasive-species/35298), the organisation of eight workshops with decision-makers and protected area managers (e.g., Brazil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GNrA2k_bgo), participation in multiple conferences and workshops related to INNS and their management, presence at local fairs to raise awareness, contributions to technical documents on INNS and their management in the local languages (Spanish and Portuguese), actively connecting with researchers and practitioners beyond our case-studies yielding ongoing collaborations (Zaninovich et al. 2023), and 17 training workshops to build capacity and capability.

In conclusion, effectively managing the multidimensional socio-ecological issue of INNS requires the collaborative action of multiple stakeholders, from researchers to government agencies and ITPLCs (Novoa et al. 2018; Alter et al. 2019; García-Díaz et al. 2022). This calls for establishing and maintaining strong linkages among researchers, practitioners, decision-makers, and the community, which in turn hinges on an accurate understanding and deep communication with the relevant stakeholders. As more policies and initiatives are being formulated and implemented to tackle INNS in South America, our stakeholder mapping tools can be used to produce engagement strategies to bolster and strengthen connections between those with a shared interest in a focal INNS. Moreover, as we have showcased here, such an exercise in mapping stakeholders can uncover “key players” instrumental to INNS management and power imbalances that require specific attention (e.g., “subjects”), as well as identify potential conflicts that need to be managed carefully. Thus, we echo previous work highlighting the value of stakeholder mapping for environmental management in general, and for INNS management in particular (Stokes et al. 2006; Reed 2008; Samson et al. 2017; Novoa et al. 2018; Newig et al. 2023). This approach can be expected to result in enhanced social, ecological, and economic outcomes of INNS management, although it cannot be assumed to be a silver bullet and will require active research and adaptability to improve and match the needs of the local context (Alter et al. 2019; Pagès et al. 2019; Chambers et al. 2021; Newig et al. 2023).

Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero, Gobierno de Chile, is one of the CONTAIN project partners, and it is represented by ER in this paper. However, the opinions and results presented in this document are entirely those of ER and may not represent SAG position on the topic.