Stakeholder engagement – Page 3 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Planning transdisciplinary stakeholder workshops: Four practical lessons

May 13, 2025

By Maxine Fromm.

How can transdisciplinary researchers best organise workshops that create a collaborative space for different stakeholders? What practical planning is required? How can organisers meet the challenges of translating a project idea into concrete workshops?

This i2Insights contribution offers four practical lessons gathered throughout a dialogue series on a just industry transition between Dutch representatives from industry, non-governmental organisations, academia and ministries, which was organised by the Sustainable Industry Lab.

Lesson 1: Planning should start from your stakeholders’ needs

As Lisa Andrews and colleagues noted in their i2Insights contribution, Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity, you need to ‘reach stakeholders where they are’ and take into account their knowledge levels, interests and agendas.

Three key strategies enabling artificial intelligence to bridge inequities

April 8, 2025

By Kerstin Nothnagel.

With artificial intelligence transforming many aspects of society, from healthcare to education to economic development, how can it be used to reduce rather than perpetuate inequalities? In particular, given that artificial intelligence can widen gaps by exacerbating existing inequalities through biased datasets, lack of infrastructure, and limited access to resources, how can the benefits of artificial intelligence be brought into the reach of low-income nations and marginalised communities? What practical steps can be taken to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and applied in a way that is inclusive and benefits everyone?

My work has been in the health field, but the findings are likely to be more broadly applicable. I suggest three strategies that would enable artificial intelligence to reduce inequities. The first two are key contributions that researchers can make. The third is a call to policy makers and funders. An example is provided for each strategy.

Mobilizing the Arnstein Gap for better planning

March 18, 2025

By Keiron Bailey.

What is the Arnstein Gap? How can the Arnstein Gap usefully inform future citizen or stakeholder engagement?

Arnstein’s Ladder and the Arnstein Gap

Let’s begin with a brief reminder of Arnstein’s Ladder, which is a description of eight levels of public participation in government decision making developed by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 and illustrated in the figure below. More detail is available in the i2Insights blog post Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum by Gabriele Bammer.

In 2006 my colleague Dr. Ted Grossardt and I introduced the Arnstein Gap (Bailey and Grossardt, 2006), which is the difference between the perceived and desired levels of public involvement according to Arnstein’s Ladder.

Better understanding trust

February 25, 2025January 28, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

Trust is regarded as essential for effective teamwork and stakeholder engagement, so how can we better understand trust? How can that understanding underpin more effective action in establishing trust and in remedying loss of trust?

I use ideas about trust developed by Piotr Sztompka (1999) to reflect on trust in teamwork and in stakeholder engagement in research projects. Stakeholder engagement is divided into two broad types:

engagement with those affected by the problem being researched, and
engagement with those in a position to act on the problem; they are often decision makers.

Sztompka provides a useful definition of trust (p. 25) as:
“a bet about the future contingent actions of others.”

Trust consists of beliefs or specific expectations about others which influence how we act, what Sztompka calls “commitment through action” (p. 26).

The enablers of effective knowledge exchange between science and policy

January 14, 2025January 14, 2025

By Vivian Nguyen and Chris Cvitanovic.

authors_vivian-nguyen_chris-cvitanovic — 1. Vivian Nguyen (biography)
2. Chris Cvitanovic (biography)

What are the practical enabling conditions necessary for effectively implementing strategies to enhance knowledge exchange at the science-policy interface?

To address this question, we undertook a comprehensive and global review of the published literature in the field of environmental management. Specifically, following established scoping review protocols, we examined 56 empirical case studies that document enablers of effective knowledge exchange between science and policy. By doing so, we also identified and provided actionable insights that can help anyone working at the interface of science and policy to enhance their knowledge exchange efforts, ultimately leading to more impactful and desirable outcomes, and ensuring that the benefits of knowledge exchange efforts outweigh the cost of implementation.

Setting up your team for knowledge integration

November 19, 2024October 22, 2024

By Shalini Misra, Megan A. Rippy and Stanley B. Grant.

authors_shalini-misra_megan-rippy_stanley-grant — 1. Shalini Misra (biography)
2. Megan A. Rippy (biography)
3. Stanley B. Grant (biography)

What kinds of collaborative arrangements best foster knowledge integration? Should you keep your team together by forming one big group to work toward your shared goals? Or should you differentiate tasks by breaking work into smaller components and assign the pieces to sub-groups? How large should sub-groups be and how should they be composed? What types of engagement processes lead to successful knowledge integration?

If you have led a large cross-disciplinary research effort, you have grappled with these questions.

We addressed these questions by assessing the linkages between integration processes and research products in a self-evaluation of the first two years of our National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research project on inland freshwater salinization (Misra, Rippy and Grant, 2024).

Breaking boundaries: Transforming research with co-production and bridging knowledge systems

November 12, 2024October 15, 2024

By Truphena E. Mukuna and Alemu Tesfaye Shekunte.

authors_truphena-mukuna_alemu-tesfaye-shekunte — 1. Truphena E. Mukuna (biography)
2. Alemu Tesfaye Shekunte (biography)

What role do communities play in shaping research that affects their lives? How can academia break free from the constraints of traditional disciplinary boundaries to foster more inclusive knowledge production? We explore these questions based on our experience in researching forced displacement.

The challenge of traditional research methodologies

Historically, much research in the Global South has been dominated by Western perspectives and methodologies. These often lack cultural relevance and fail to engage meaningfully with the communities they study. Consequently, the resulting body of knowledge can be disconnected from the lived realities of those studied. In addition, disciplinary biases often overshadow the philosophical underpinnings of research methods. Researchers may adopt a ‘positivist’ or ‘constructivist’ stance or prefer ‘quantitative’ over ‘qualitative’ methods.

Designing serious games to address transdisciplinary problems

November 5, 2024October 8, 2024

By Katharina Gugerell.

katharina-gugerell_2024 — Katharina Gugerell (biography) (photo credit: BOKU University)

What are serious games? What are their benefits? What is involved in developing serious games?

Serious games are digital, analogue or hybrid games designed in a way that goes beyond pure entertainment. They aim to educate or inform players or evoke discussions and conversations and provide an environment for futuring processes – in various fields, such as land-use, healthcare, water management, commons or natural hazards.

By integrating engaging gameplay elements with real-world scenarios or real-world contexts, serious games are expected to facilitate (different forms of) learning, interaction, world-building and scenario-building, as well as critical reflection on social, cultural, consumption and production practice. These games can incorporate real-time simulations, joint problem solving, and interactive storytelling to immerse participants into the topic. Serious games are celebrated for their motivational, emotional and entertaining aspects, that allow players to become familiar with different perspectives of complex problems or engage in futuring processes in a very intuitive and emotional way.

A framework for transdisciplinary boundary work

October 1, 2024September 17, 2024

By Lisa Andrews, Stefania Munaretto, Heleen Mees and Peter Driessen.

authors_andrews_munaretto_mees_driessen — 1. Lisa Andrews (biography)
2. Stefania Munaretto (biography)
3. Heleen Mees (biography)
4. Peter Driessen (biography)

What are the challenges in engaging different actors and integrating knowledge across disciplines? What does it mean to do this work ‘well’? What brings about successful engagement, boundary crossing and knowledge integration to enable impact? More specifically, how can transdisciplinary research project actors collaborate to produce outputs and foster societal impact?

The following framework identifies 12 boundary work activities to support transdisciplinary research project actors to collaborate, co-create and integrate knowledge that leads to societal impact across project phases. Here, impact is defined as the desired long-term societal, economic and/or environmental changes agreed upon by the involved transdisciplinary actors based on the problem and scientific knowledge gaps they aim to address, with impact resulting from a chain of events to which the transdisciplinary project has entirely or in part contributed.

Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity

March 13, 2026August 20, 2024

By Lisa Andrews, Bárbara Willaarts, Andreas Panagopoulos, Radhika Kanade, Nelson Odume, Bodil Ankjær Nielsen and Ingrīda Brēmere.

authors_andrews_willaarts_panagopoulos_kanade_odume_ankjaer — 1. Lisa Andrews; 2. Bárbara Willaarts; 3. Andreas Panagopoulos; 4. Radhika Kanade; 5. Nelson Odume; 6. Bodil Ankjær Nielsen; 7. Ingrīda Brēmere (biographies)

Are there similar challenges, responsibilities, and methods in transdisciplinarity across countries, scales, contexts and actor types?

In exploring five transdisciplinary case studies from projects on the topics of the water-energy-food-environment nexus and climate change adaptation, we identified three main lessons learned. These were common across the cases from South Africa, India, Greece, Latvia and Denmark, despite their different contexts, types of actors and project structures. These lessons were shared in a workshop at the 2024 Sustainability, Research and Innovation (SRI) Congress in Finland.

Photovoice as a participatory research method

August 19, 2026July 30, 2024

By Jule Marie Huber, Claudia Bieling, María García-Martín, Tobias Plieninger and Mario Torralba

mosaic_authors_huber_bieling_garcía-martin-plieninger_torralba — 1. Jule Marie Huber; 2. Claudia Bieling; 3. María García-Martín; 4. Tobias Plieninger; 5. Mario Torralba (biographies)

How can research effectively engage vulnerable and marginalised groups on issues that affect their lives? How can local knowledge, opinions, and experiences be captured in a way that identifies their concerns and priorities?

Photovoice is a research method that uses photographs taken by participants to encourage dialogue within the community. It was developed to empower marginalised groups and promote community action, and is also more widely useful as a participatory method. It has been used for issues in public health, immigration, homelessness, disability, youth and sustainability.

In this i2Insights contribution we describe a 7-step procedure for using photovoice, noting that considerable flexibility is possible.

Step 1: Development of a research design

Researchers (ideally with involvement of participants) define the objectives of the study along with the timeframe and spatial dimensions, and interview or discussion and analytical protocols.

Embracing Afro-centric philosophies to decolonize research

July 16, 2024

By Truphena Mukuna

How can researchers ensure that they de-centre Western-centric research methodologies, methods and theoretical frameworks so that the research is localized, and the researcher and relevant community voices are heard? How can Afro-centric philosophies be mainstreamed to ensure that the research deconstructs the epistemic injustice that currently exists?

In this i2Insights contribution I explore four African philosophies – Sankofa, Ubuntu, Ujamaa, and Harambe – to show how they can provide valuable insights and foster more inclusive and transformative research practices. Although my work is on forced displacement, these philosophies are relevant to a broad range of research in the African context.

Sankofa: Learning from the Past

The Akan concept of Sankofa, symbolized by a bird looking backward while moving forward, emphasizes the importance of learning from the past to build a better future.