Stakeholder participation is key for resilience governance and management. Participation is important for bottom-up approaches in adaptive governance, where self-organization and local knowledge are important factors. Different kinds of participation are also important for structural and monitoring issues in multi-level governance. Stakeholders, or NGOs, are in this sense important both in transferring knowledge and information in multidimensional governance structures and for bridging structural or institutional gaps. Emphasizing the role of stakeholder participation can be seen as a democratic and decentralized approach. Participation by the public is seen as an important feature for assuring transparency, legitimacy, and accountability, which have been established as important for governance structures in general. Trust building and effectiveness are also closely tied to issues of participation. Law generally includes pathways for participation at all levels. However, the purpose of participation in legal structures is somewhat different than the purpose of participation in resilience governance.