Transdisciplinary research partnerships in sustainability science: an examination of stakeholder participation preferences

Abstract

Sustaining coupled natural and human systems requires multiple forms of knowledge, experiences, values, and resources be brought into conversation to address sustainability challenges. Transdisciplinary research partnerships provide the opportunity to meet this requirement by bringing together interdisciplinary scientists with stakeholders in some or all stages of the knowledge production process. However, building partnerships to produce sustainability outcomes is a complex process requiring an understanding of the social psychological and contextual variables impacting partnerships. Here, we explore local government officials' (LGOs') preferences for participation in these partnerships. Using data from a statewide survey, we develop a theoretically and empirically derived model to test the relationship between a suite of factors and LGOs' preferred transdisciplinary partnership style. We find collaboration preferences are influenced by LGOs' confidence that researchers can help solve problems, experience with researchers, the severity and type of problem(s) occurring in the community, and partner trust. Assessing stakeholder partnership expectations may assist partners with co-designing flexible research processes that address collaboration expectations, foster dialog and social learning among project partners, and that increase the potential of research to influence change.

Participation as Relational Space: A Critical Approach to Analysing Participation in Sustainability Research

“…Similarly, in an empirical study on the roles of community development workers in PRA, the nature of the relations and the degree of trust between the community development worker and community are found to be key in enabling and preventing exchange [98]. The development of trust on the side of non-scientific participants relates to whether the researchers are perceived as being competent and capable of solving the problem that non-scientific actors face [114,125]. Furthermore, Maclure et al [92] illustrate that the extent to which non-scientific actors, in their case farmers, feel they can impact on the process, shapes confidence-building and commitment.…”

“…Across the three fields scholars identify the need to further investigate unbalanced power relations and ways of addressing them [60,72,85,86,125,[134][135][136] and find that power relations influence the nature and process of participation [89,119,122]. Questions of power concern both relations between scientific and non-scientific actors and within non-scientific actor groups which might include heterogeneous actors, such as farmers and policy-makers [14].…”

“…Affects synthesis via perceptions of what is an adequate dimension of the participation space to reach a specific aim; incongruence of expectations can lead to controversies and ruptures in the participation space; affects commitment of actors to engage in the participation space and possibly ownership for follow-up steps; [25,48,52,87,89-91, 102,104,107,111, 113,122-124] People and social goods Mutual trust Affects distance between actors and whether the knowledge of others is synthesised; affects via the nature of ties between actors the capacity of the participation space to refigure in case of changing contexts; affects the likelihood of institutionalisation of the participation space; [57,58,60,89,92,93,98,101,104,114,122,[125][126][127] People and social goods…”

“…Affects the continuous negotiation processes inherent to the figuration of a participation space; affects the degree to which these figurations reproduce or disrupt societal structures and/or dominant discourses; affects via the distribution of resources and the validation of knowledge, inequalities among actors and their capacity to produce figurations of the participation space that other participants share; [14,35,55,57,60,72,85,86,89,98,104,105,117,119,120,122,125,[133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][142]…”

Whose knowledge, whose values? An empirical analysis of power in transdisciplinary sustainability research

“…In line with this view of the significance of power at the research-practice interface, scholars have increasingly stressed the need to recognise the entanglements of power and participation in TD research [10,[23][24][25]. Previous studies have examined how power relations among researchers [26], between researchers and practitioners, and among practitioners influence processes and outcomes of participation in research [10,27,28]. Against the backdrop of funding contexts and the wider academic system [29], the unequal distribution of financial and time resources has been found to engender power asymmetries between researchers and practitioners in TD projects [24,30,31].…”