It is often time consuming and increasingly cost prohibitive to undertake large scale qualitative interviews or quantitative surveys to ascertain citizen perspectives to inform policy decisions. In such cases 'experts', that is people who have specialist knowledge or experience with a specific scenario or stakeholder group, could have reliable insight into community perspectives, thereby offering a short-term alternative to large-scale 'direct' research. In this study we compared government, industry and community experts’ perceptions of stakeholder views with the actual beliefs of specific stakeholder groups, in order to obtain information about the stakeholder group's motivations and barriers to pro-environmental behaviour. Findings indicated that the experts' perceptions of the stakeholders’ views were consistent with the beliefs of the stakeholders themselves. Furthermore, the experts often provided valuable contextual information and considerations into understanding the motivations and barriers that are driving the behaviour/s of stakeholder groups. Whilst expert interviews should not replace direct research, they can offer a trustworthy insight into citizen or stakeholder views, particularly in situations where there are limited resources to conduct research directly with the community.