Building stakeholder partnerships for sustainable solutions

Background/Question/Methods

If sustainability science is to achieve its goal of creating and implementing interventions to promote a sustainable future, scientists from a wide range of disciplines must work in partnership with multiple stakeholders and diverse communities to identify and address diverse pressing issues. Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), a partnership between the University of Maine, University of Southern Maine and other institutions of higher education in Maine, studies the ways in which different stakeholders interact with the research process to understand how obstacles to successful “knowledge to action” processes can be overcome (Kates et al 2001). The SSI’s Knowledge-to-Action (K-A) Research Project addresses how individual- and group-level processes link individual stakeholders and community actions and how the sustainability science research process influences and is influenced by these collaborations. The K-A project’s core research question asks how interdisciplinary research teams can build stakeholder partnerships for sustainable solutions.

Results/Conclusions

Hart and Calhoun (2010) argue that “a key step in effective knowledge-to-action initiatives is ensuring that stakeholders play a central role in defining the problem, identifying research needs or information gaps and helping to shape solutions.”  Using a mixed methods approach, the SSI’s K-A team aims to create a model of collaboration, assess communities’ sustainability needs, and understand communities’ preferences for collaboration and communication.  Preliminary results of the K-A project point to the need for greater alignment of university resources and community needs, and to understand that all projects that are important are – to some degree – conflictual in nature and rooted in cultural practices.  Future research must therefore focus on how communities and stakeholders conceptualize their needs and problems in their local language and local contexts.  It is important that K-A researchers help to overcome the language barriers to be able to understand what various sustainability needs are and what solutions would be acceptable to and feasible for respective communities.  To work with communities, a shift in disciplinary paradigms to greater interdisciplinary collaboration should encourage researchers from diverse disciplines to work together with communities, but scholars must learn each other’s scholarly language and develop appreciation for what diverse disciplines bring to the table.