Stakeholder engagement

Choosing a suitable transdisciplinary research framework

By Gabriele Bammer

Author - Gabriele Bammer
Gabriele Bammer (biography)

What are some of the key frameworks that can be used for transdisciplinary research? What are their particular strengths? How can you choose one that’s most suitable for your transdisciplinary project?

The nine frameworks described here were highlighted in a series for which I was the commissioning editor. The series was published in the scientific journal GAIA: Ecological Perspectives in Science and Society between mid-2017 and end-2019.

Choosing among them is not a matter of right or wrong, but of each being more or less helpful for a particular problem in a particular context. And, of course, different frameworks can also be used in combination.

The brief descriptions and figures that follow aim to encapsulate each framework’s key strengths.

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Three principles for co-designing intervention strategies

By David Lam

author-david-lam
David Lam (biography)

What processes are involved when researchers and local actors co-design context-specific intervention strategies? This ‘how to’ knowledge is outlined in the three principles described below. Local actors can include non-governmental organisations, local leaders, community groups and individual activists.

Principle 1. Explore existing and envisioned initiatives fostering change towards the desired future 

This has 3 key steps:

  1. Identifying existing initiatives and knowledge working towards the desired future
  2. Identifying who is involved and leading different existing initiatives
  3. Analysing how existing and possible future initiatives from local actors contribute to changing the state of system elements that need to change for reaching the desired vision or up to an intermediate state.

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What lessons for improving interdisciplinary collaboration emerged from the 2019 Science of Team Science conference?

By Julie Thompson Klein and Ben Miller

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1. Julie Thompson Klein’s biography
2. Ben Miller (biography)

Six lessons emerged from the seven plenary panels at the May 2019 Science of Team Science conference hosted by Michigan State University in the US.

1. Understanding the nature of team science is crucial to monitoring team behavior, including managing conflict, diverse voices, and strong leadership.

The Science of Groups and Teams plenary panel affirmed one approach alone is not sufficient. It featured perspectives from psychology, management, and organizational behavior in two regional research institutions, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

2. Networking and collaboration increase access to pertinent expertise and skills, equipment, and other resources including funding, relevant techniques, education and training, visibility and recognition.

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Transdisciplinary action research: A guiding framework for collaboration

By Steven Lam, Michelle Thompson, Kathleen Johnson, Cameron Fioret and Sarah Hargreaves

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1. Steven Lam; 2. Michelle Thompson; 3. Kathleen Johnson; 4. Cameron Fioret; 5. Sarah Hargreaves (biographies)

How can graduate students work productively with each other and community partners? Many researchers and practitioners are engaging in transdisciplinarity, yet there is surprisingly little critical reflection about the processes and outcomes of transdisciplinarity, particularly from the perspectives of graduate students and community partners who are increasingly involved.

Our group of four graduate students from the University of Guelph and one community partner from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, reflect on our experiences of working together toward community food security in Canada, especially producing a guidebook for farmer-led research (Fioret et al. 2018). As none of us had previously worked together, nor shared any disciplines in common, we found it essential to first develop a guiding framework for collaboration. Our thinking combined the following key principles from action research and transdisciplinarity:

  • reflexivity,
  • participation and partnership,
  • methods and process, and
  • integration.

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Decentering academia through critical unlearning in transdisciplinary knowledge production / Descentralizando la academia a través del des- aprendizaje crítico en la producción de conocimiento transdiciplinario

By Gabriela Alonso-Yanez, Lily House-Peters and Martin Garcia Cartagena

A Spanish version of this post is available

authors_gabriela-alonso-yanez_lily-house-peters_martin-garcia-cartagena
1. Gabriela Alonso-Yanez (biography)
2. Lily House-Peters (biography)
3. Martin Garcia Cartagena (biography)

How can academic researchers working in transdisciplinary teams establish genuine collaborations with people who do not work in academia? How can they overcome the limitations of their discipline-based training, especially assigning value and hierarchy to specialized forms of knowledge production that privileges certain methodologies and epistemologies over others?

We argue that to truly engage in collaborative work, academics need to participate in deliberate processes of critical unlearning that enable the decentering of academia in the processes and politics of transdisciplinary knowledge production and knowledge translation. What we mean by this is that academics have to be willing to acknowledge, reflect upon, and intentionally discard conventional avenues of designing and conducting research activities in order to be authentically open to other ways of exploring questions about the world in collaboration with diverse groups of social actors.

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Stakeholder engagement in research: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum

By Gabriele Bammer

author - gabriele bammer
Gabriele Bammer (biography)

October 2021: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum has been replaced by the i2S Stakeholder Engagement Options Framework.

What options are available to researchers for engaging stakeholders in a research project? What responsibilities do researchers have to stakeholders over the course of that project?

Despite increasing inclusion of stakeholders in research, there seems to be little guidance on how to do this effectively. Here I have adapted a framework developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2 2018) for examining how the public are engaged in government decision making. The research-modified IAP2 spectrum, written from a researcher perspective, is shown in the figure below.

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Good practice in community-based participatory processes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research

By Jan Chapman, Alyson Wright, Nadine Hunt and Bobby Maher

authors_jan-chapman_alyson-wright_nadine-hunt_bobby-maher
1. Jan Chapman (biography)
2. Alyson Wright (biography)
3. Nadine Hunt (biography)
4. Bobby Maher (biography)

How can participatory process in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities be made adaptable and flexible? How can theoretical frameworks take into account the cultural and geographical complexities of communities and their contexts?

Here we provide five key principles that we have found useful in engaging communities in the Mayi Kuwayu Study (https://mkstudy.com.au/).These include: community decision-making; involvement in study governance; community capacity development; effective communications; and, long-term and multi-engagement processes.

Community decision-making

A key principle is to seek community endorsement and decision-making from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander governance groups on their community’s participation in the study.

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Theoretical framework for open team science / オープンチームサイエンスという考え方

By Yasuhisa Kondo

A Japanese version of this post is available

author yasuhisa kondo
Yasuhisa Kondo (biography)

What is open team science? What challenges does it deal with and how?

What is open team science?

In our experience, projects are commonly disrupted by socio-psychological boundaries, particularly at the initial phase of team building. Such boundaries are often generated by asymmetric information, knowledge, wisdom (wise use of knowledge; Bellingen et al., 2004), values, socio-economic status, and power among actors.

We have developed a theoretical framework that considers open science as an open scientific knowledge production system, which can be interlinked with transdisciplinarity as a driver of boundary spanning to develop a new research paradigm. We call this open team science.

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Participatory research and power

By Diana Rose

Diana Rose
Diana Rose (biography)

Can even the most well-designed participatory research really level the power relations between researchers and the relevant community? The key issues are who sets the research agenda, who drives the research process and governs it, and who interprets information. In all these aspects of research, the aim is for the community to no longer be ‘subjects’ but equal partners.

In this blog post, I outline challenges to achieving this mission, so that we can be realistic about what’s involved in trying to achieve equal partnerships. The difficulties identified are not proposed as tensions to be ‘solved’ but as dilemmas that can be articulated so as better to facilitate good practice, not reach an unattainable perfect state.

In my research on mental health services, my team and I are mental health service users ourselves and are therefore more intrinsically part of the community being researched.

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Five principles of co-innovation

By Helen Percy, James Turner and Wendy Boyce

authors_helen-percy_james-turner_wendy-boyce
1. Helen Percy (biography)
2. James Turner (biography)
3. Wendy Boyce (biography)

What is co-innovation and how can it be applied in practice in a research project?

Co-innovation is the process of jointly developing new or different solutions to a complex problem through multi-participant research processes – and keeping these processes alive throughout the research.

Our experience has been applying co-innovation as a research approach to address complex problems in an agricultural context, however, the principles apply well beyond agriculture.

Co-innovation is most suited to hard-to-solve technical, social, cultural and economic challenges. Such challenges have no obvious cause and effect relationships, as well as many different players with a stake in the research problem and solution. These include policy makers, industry, community members, first nations representatives and others who are involved in the research as partners and stakeholders.

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Ten things to know about how to influence policy with research

By Helen Tilley, Louise Shaxson, John Young, and Louise Ball

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1. Helen Tilley (biography)
2. Louise Shaxson (biography)
3. John Young (biography)
4. Louise Ball (biography)

How can research influence public policy so that it is based on the best-available evidence? What different ways of working are required of researchers? Here are 10 things researchers from the UK’s Overseas Development Institute have found helpful.

1. Know what you want to influence

Being clear about the policy issue, theme or process you want to change is the first step to effective policy influencing. Are you looking to influence legislation, or a change in government policy? You might want to encourage greater investment in a certain programme or approach, or a change in practice. You might want to influence perceptions or attitudes, or the language people use around an issue.

2. Know who you want to influence

Who has the power to enact a change in a policy process or change the debate on an issue?

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Practical tips to foster research uptake

By Emily Hayter and Verity Warne

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1. Emily Hayter (biography)
2. Verity Warne (biography)

How can researchers and policy makers work together to foster more systematic uptake of research in policy making?

In a series of workshops at the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s Evidence and Policy Summer School on migration and demography, participants identified some of the most critical stages where scientists and policymakers interact: problem definition, research process, and communication of results. We then built up a bank of practical ideas and suggestions for each stage. Although the focus of the workshops was on migration and demography, our suggestions have broader relevance.

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