Critical Stakeholder Engagement: The Road to Actionable Science Is Paved with Scientists’ Good Intentions

Abstract

To help stakeholders such as planners, resource managers, policymakers, and decision makers address environmental challenges in the Anthropocene, scientists are increasingly creating actionable science—science that is useful, usable, and used. Critical physical geography encourages the engagement of stakeholders in the creation of scientific knowledge to conduct actionable science and produce outputs that are directly relevant to stakeholder plans, decisions, or actions. Many scientists, however, lack formal training in how to partner with stakeholders using effective and ethical practices. In this article, we use the core principles for ethical research of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice from the Belmont Report (1979) as a suggested framework to examine the perspectives of stakeholders engaged in climate adaptation science projects. We argue that this framework aligns with the principles of critical physical geography and provides guidance for scientists to make their research more actionable while placing necessary emphasis on ethical considerations. We also challenge scientists to consider the broader ethical implications of engaging with these partners.

为了帮助有关人员(规划人员、资源管理人员、政策制定者、决策者等)应对人类世的环境挑战, 科学家们越来越多地创造可操作科学——有用、可用和使用过的科学。批判自然地理学鼓励有关人员参与科学知识的创造, 开展可操作科学研究, 产生与参与者的规划、决策或行动直接相关的结果。然而, 如何采取有效的、符合道德准则的方式与有关人员开展合作, 许多科学家缺乏正式的培训。本文建议, 应当以《贝尔蒙特报告》(1979)对尊重、行善和正义的伦理研究核心准则为框架, 来探讨气候适应科学研究的参与者的观点。我们认为, 该框架符合批判自然地理学的准则, 能够指导科学家们, 使其研究更具可操作性并对伦理给予必要的重视。我们还呼吁, 科学家们应考虑与这些伙伴开展合作的更广泛的道德影响。

Para ayudar a partes interesadas, como planificadores, administradores de recursos, políticos y tomadores de decisiones, a enfrentar los retos ambientales del Antropoceno, crecientemente los científicos han estado creando ciencia útil, es decir, ciencia que sirva para algo, utilizable y utilizada. La geografía física crítica incentiva el compromiso de partes interesadas hacia la creación de conocimiento científico que conduzca a ciencia útil y que produzca resultados que sean directamente relevantes para los planes, decisiones o acciones de las partes interesadas. Sin embargo, numerosos científicos carecen de entrenamiento formal sobre cómo cooperar con los interesados usando prácticas efectivas y éticas. En este artículo, usamos el principio central de la investigación ética, o sea el que preconiza el respeto a las personas, la beneficencia y la justicia del Informe Belmont (1979) como medio sugerible para el examen de la perspectiva de los interesados comprometidos en proyectos de la ciencia de la adaptación climática. Sostenemos que este marco se ajusta a los principios de la geografía física crítica y suministra a los eruditos una guía con la cual hacer su investigación más práctica, al tiempo que hace énfasis en consideraciones éticas. También desafiamos a los científicos a que consideren aquellas implicaciones éticas de mayor envergadura que surgen cuando se pactan compromisos con este tipo de socios.

Key Words:

• actionable science
• climate adaptation
• coproduction
• critical physical geography
• research ethics
• stakeholder engagement

关键词:

• 可操作科学
• 气候适应
• 合作生产
• 批判自然地理学
• 研究伦理
• 有关人员参与

Palabras clave:

• adaptación climática
• ciencia práctica
• compromiso de los interesados
• coproducción
• ética de la investigación
• geografía física crítica

As dialogue around the Anthropocene unfolds, scholars have identified challenges where humans greatly affect current environmental changes in complex and interacting ways (Crutzen 2006; Butler 2021). Producing knowledge and tools to address these challenges is common to the discipline of geography, with its focus on human–nature interactions, place-based solutions, and cross-scale connectedness (Winkler 2016; Larsen and Harrington 2021; Simm, Marvell, and Mellor 2021). An emerging area of geographic discourse is critical physical geography (CPG), a call to integrate the insights and strengths from critical human geography and physical geography to better understand the impact and consequences of research on society (Lave 2014; Lane, Biermann, and Lave 2018). CPG recognizes that choices made by researchers during knowledge production influence what is studied and how data and results are interpreted, influencing decisions and policies informed by that evidence (Lane, Biermann, and Lave 2018). Hence, CPG encourages geographers to question established norms in methods and analysis and devise new approaches to evaluate and make such choices (Tadaki 2017).

A CPG approach is one way for the research community to respond to Pulkkinen et al.’s (2022) call to consider “the value of values in climate science” (4). Adapting to climate change necessitates many disciplines that research people or nature to produce knowledge associated with causes, impacts, responses, interactions, or other aspects of the issue (Wainwright 2010; Wilbanks and Kates 2010). This “all-hands-on-deck” approach has summoned different ontologies and epistemologies together in a place where practitioners need answers (Popke 2016; Dujardin 2020). For example, concepts of CPG have been labeled in other spaces as “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973), “action research” (Brydon-Miller, Greenwood, and Maguire 2003), and “actionable science” (Beier et al. 2017). In this article, we intentionally relate CPG to concepts and terminology that are primarily found outside of geography (e.g., actionable science—science that is useful, usable, and used; Dilling and Lemos 2011) to enhance cross-disciplinary readability. For brevity, we use scientists to refer broadly to those conducting research to generate new knowledge, recognizing that some readers might debate this usage and acknowledging that people from sectors and disciplines beyond science (e.g., practitioners) frequently act in this space. End users of science outputs are stakeholders in the research process, with their applications of scientific findings, data, and products ranging from being better informed to incorporating content into a plan, decision, or action (VanderMolen et al. 2020). We recognize that Tribal and Indigenous peoples and communities are end users who hold unique rights to sovereignty and self-governance; thus, they are more appropriately designated as rights holders, not stakeholders, in the research process (Sarkki, Heikkinen, and Löf 2021). We nevertheless use stakeholder as an overarching term to identify both rights holders and nonrights holders who have an interest in or concern about the topic of study.

In the United States, scientists have often served as gatekeepers for project development, resource allocation, and information dissemination for publicly funded climate research. Innovations to this traditional model have been proposed and pilot tested for the natural and physical sciences (Castree 2016; Arnott et al. 2020), although certain social science disciplines or subfields have long made use of alternate models (e.g., Alonso-Yanez et al. 2019; Smith 2021). Formal solicitations for grant funding increasingly have requested that scientists document the societal impacts, actions, and benefits as part of the rationale for a project, although they still primarily prioritize the generation of scientific data and peer-reviewed publications (Oliver and Boaz 2019; Bednarek and Tseng 2022). The result of these requests is (1) greater interest among and pressure by funders to have awardees work directly with stakeholders who benefit directly from the research, and (2) increased interest and activity among scientists to learn how to effectively interact with stakeholders.

Yet many of these interested scientists are from disciplines that traditionally receive little training or have little experience in working with decision makers, practitioners, or the public. This gap in knowledge and experience creates an opportunity to critically examine the characteristics of ethical interactions with stakeholders. We examine the perspectives of stakeholders who have been engaged in climate adaptation research projects that were led by academic or government scientists to better understand how these stakeholders perceived the impact of such engagement and the benefits and harms that they experienced. We argue that scientists must proactively consider the ethics of engaging with stakeholder partners, especially when such engagement might not be formally considered human subjects research and already subject to ethical research requirements.

Critical Stakeholder Engagement

Participation of stakeholders during the scientific process, or stakeholder engagement, affords practitioners opportunities to shape decisions that affect their communities or ecosystems of concern, and it can reveal new perspectives on challenges and solutions that might not occur to scientists (Fiorino 1990). Additionally, stakeholder engagement can stimulate social learning by bringing individuals together around a shared problem and improving the context-relevance of findings and outputs (Schmidt et al. 2020). There are many approaches to stakeholder engagement, however—from basic information provision to empowerment as coequal investigators (Bamzai-Dodson et al. 2021)—raising tricky questions for scientists around who they invite to participate in project decisions, when and how that participation will occur, and how dissent will be managed (Sprain 2016).

Although many climate adaptation projects intend to use stakeholder engagement to create actionable science and systemic change, there can be a gap between the intended project goals and the achievement (and documentation) of outcomes, as success can be measured in different ways (Wall, Meadow, and Horangic 2017; Bamzai-Dodson and McPherson 2022). Previous studies have shown that climate services (“the timely production and delivery of useful climate data, information, and knowledge to decision makers”; Brasseur and Gallardo 2016, 79) struggle to move from producing incremental improvements in data quality to creating transformational products that aid better decision-making (Findlater et al. 2021) and that climate adaptation projects that engage stakeholders seldom result in significant changes in cultural norms or power dynamics (Jagannathan et al. 2020). A broad systematic review of studies at the science–policy interface found that although most aimed for ambitious knowledge exchange goals, only around half conducted a data-driven evaluation of usability and even fewer conducted a data-driven evaluation of use (Karcher et al. 2021). Similarly, Pearman and Cravens (2022) found that creators of drought decision-support tools emphasized the importance of stakeholder engagement to the tool-creation process and to tool adoption in decision-making. Nevertheless, those same tool creators primarily conducted engagement in an informal manner and rarely conducted a formal evaluation of the usability or use of a tool (Pearman and Cravens 2022).

Despite existing evidence-based recommendations on the project roles that stakeholders can fill (Carney et al. 2009), strategies for including them (Daniels et al. 2020; Steger et al. 2021), and approaches for evaluating the resulting process and products (Wall, Meadow, and Horangic 2017; Owen 2021), many research projects struggle to fulfill their claims of actionable science. Importantly, scientists with expertise in the theory and practice of engaging with stakeholders might not be consulted by peers nor included on project teams if natural scientists do not value their contributions; 51 percent of forty-nine cross-disciplinary ecologists surveyed in the United Kingdom ranked direct engagement with stakeholders as their first choice for improving the social and human dimensions of their work, whereas only 27 percent ranked working closely with social scientists on a research project first (Lowe, Whitman, and Phillipson 2009). At the same time, building off Arnstein’s (1969, 216) ethical caution against the “empty ritual of participation,” adaptation scientists are recognizing the potential harms of engaging stakeholders without careful consideration of the need for engagement, methods for collecting information from stakeholders, and plans for using stakeholder input to inform project design and outcomes (Lemos et al. 2018; Dilling, Lemos, and Singh 2021). When scientists do not reflect on these issues, the unintended consequences can include mismanaged expectations (Briley, Brown, and Kalafatis 2015), exploitation of resources (especially time), and fatigue (Clark 2008), or even outright hostility (Brittain et al. 2020). Poor engagement can be particularly harmful when working with underresourced or underserved communities. An analysis of 125 climate studies in Indigenous communities, for example, found that 87 percent of them were extractive, using Indigenous knowledge without adequate inclusion or recognition of Indigenous knowledge holders (David-Chavez and Gavin 2018). As Lemos et al. (2018) contended, the gap between the goals and outcomes of stakeholder engagement must be closed to prevent it from “becoming an end in itself, glossing over the very values and goals that often inspire scientists and stakeholders to engage with one another” (723). In other words, more engagement is not always the answer to improving outcomes, especially without consideration of both positive and negative consequences to stakeholders.

Underpinning the production of actionable science and stakeholder engagement are the individual perspectives and values that scientists and stakeholders bring to a project, which contribute to what someone chooses to study, how they form research questions, what methods and data they consider relevant and appropriate, and the context(s) in which they elect to interpret their findings (Khagram et al. 2010). A CPG approach to engaging stakeholders in climate adaptation research would interrogate whether such knowledge production is being led by the people and conducted in the places where climate impacts will be most keenly experienced (Colven and Thomson 2019). One process for accomplishing such interrogation is reflexivity, applications of which range from direct self-reflection by scientists about how their individual perspective influences their decisions to critical thinking by a research team about power and partnership dynamics (Boström, Lidskog, and Uggla 2017; Montana et al. 2020).

Reflexivity is a process by which people can examine their role as a scientist, their positionality, and how their choices influence their science (Holmes 2020; Hakkarainen et al. 2022). Reflexivity can be used to examine ethical considerations across multiple dimensions, including conflicts between scientist and stakeholder value systems and the power dynamics among competing interests (Brittain et al. 2020). This deliberative process can be especially important for establishing reciprocity with traditionally underresourced or underserved stakeholder communities and ensuring equitable distribution of research benefits (Rayne et al. 2022). For example, reflexivity could help scientists to communicate findings in manners that are culturally appropriate or to identify strategies to deemphasize their role as an authority figure in conversations, setting an inclusive atmosphere and leading to more equitable consideration of ideas (Diver and Higgins 2014). In contrast to social science disciplines that emphasize paying attention to the role of the researcher, however, the biological and physical sciences tend to rarely use reflexivity or discuss ethics. When they do, scientists might struggle to move that knowledge from theory to practice (Lowe, Whitman, and Phillipson 2009; Moon and Blackman 2014; Ferraro, Ferraro, and Sommer 2021). To help overcome barriers to reflexivity, Beck et al. (2021) provided practical prompts over four distinct dimensions: understand your purpose, establish real connections, inform and transform, and learn from the past.

Stakeholder engagement differs from empirical human subjects research in that engagement is conducted in collaboration with other human partners as opposed to research data being collected from human subjects. Human subjects research holds important historical lessons, however, that can be applied to stakeholder engagement. Prompted by ethically abusive biomedical experiments such as those revealed during the Nuremberg war crime trials (International Military Tribunal 1949; Katz 1996) and the Tuskegee syphilis study (Brandt 1978), the Belmont Report outlines unifying ethical principles to which scientists working within the United States must adhere to protect the interests and rights of human subjects (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1978). The report describes three foundational principles and their application in a research setting: respect for persons (participants are able to provide fully informed and freely given consent), beneficence (benefits of participating are likely to outweigh the harms), and justice (research burdens and benefits should be distributed fairly and equally; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1978). Even today, the report remains the foundation for protective regulation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the principles are codified in the widely used institutional review board (IRB) process.

In the decades since, continued examination has found that the Belmont Report principles are not perfect, nor are they all-encompassing. Examples of identified gaps include overall conceptual vagueness, especially in how the three ethical principles relate to each other (Miller 2003), minimal consideration for the ethics of experimental design (Vollmer and Howard 2010), and an inability to cope with new concerns around big data and participant confidentiality (Friesen et al. 2017). Community-based participatory researchers struggle with the rigidity of the IRB approval process and implementation of these ethical principles, as their research approach requires shared project decision-making and flexible protocols (Shore 2006). In addition, the Belmont Report focuses only on consideration of individual harms and ignores the potential for community harms (Tsosie, Yracheta, and Dickenson 2019; Springgate et al. 2021), which is particularly important in respect to Tribal sovereignty, solidarity, and self-determination (Friesen, Doerksen, and Gunay 2021; Saunkeah et al. 2021).

Perhaps most important, researchers are building on these basic principles by examining the ethical decision space that scientists face outside of formal institutionalized processes for human subjects research (e.g., IRB approval). One case study described using an informal yet nuanced consent process that was continually renegotiated from the preproposal stage until well after the official end of the project (Cockburn and Cundill 2018), and an analysis of five case studies documented the importance to stakeholders of early conceptual benefits (e.g., better understanding of a system) in building a strong trust-based relationship that eventually yielded instrumental benefits (e.g., recommended actions to implement; Ferguson, Meadow, and Huntington 2022). Other scholars have proposed supplementing the Belmont Report principles with appropriate representation (how human and nonhuman elements are represented in a project), self-determination (respect for power and sovereignty), reciprocity (ensuring direct and tangible benefits for partners), and deference (respect for all knowledge systems; Wilmer et al. 2021).

Even with these limitations, the Belmont Report principles can underpin a CPG approach to examine how scientists’ ethical responsibilities extend from human subjects to stakeholder engagement. The core principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice are intended to be foundational to research involving humans, so they arguably should also emerge in any kind of evaluation of research conducted in collaboration with human partners. Previous research in this area has primarily examined the perspective of scientists on why they engage with partners (e.g., Clark 2010; Steger et al. 2021; Pearman and Cravens 2022), yet the voices that can most strongly speak to usability and reciprocity are those of the stakeholders. Here we focus on stakeholder perspectives to better understand the benefits and harms that they experience while participating in knowledge production.

Case Study

The data and results presented here are part of a broader initiative to describe and understand the impact of scientific projects funded by the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC; https://www.usgs.gov/casc/northcentral) during the first five years of its establishment (2012–2017). The NC CASC funds research projects across a seven-state region that roughly encompasses the U.S. Northern Great Plains (NC CASC 2019), where resource managers are already dealing with the direct impacts of climate change to water, vegetation, wildlife, and fish (Conant et al. 2018). These projects are intended to produce scientific information, data, and tools at local to regional scales that can be directly integrated into resource management plans, decisions, and actions (NC CASC 2019). Figure 1 provides four examples of the impacts of climate change to regional natural and cultural resources and research projects funded by the NC CASC in response to these impacts. All four projects were included in this analysis.

Figure 1. Four examples of climate impacts experienced in the Northern Great Plains and projects funded by the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center to aid managers in responding to these impacts. These projects represent a subset of the sixteen projects included in this analysis.

We use the NC CASC project portfolio as an exemplar case study that can provide generalizable results to other cases (Flyvbjerg 2006) because investigators were encouraged from the proposal development stage onward to use coproduction as their stakeholder engagement approach. Coproduction emphasizes an iterative, two-way knowledge exchange between scientists and stakeholders and foregrounds stakeholder challenges to motivate the project design (Meadow et al. 2015; Beier et al. 2017; Bamzai-Dodson et al. 2021). In these applied contexts, coproduction is sometimes termed coproduction (Hegger et al. 2012) to distinguish from its use in science and technology studies to describe the mutual shaping of science and society (Jasanoff 2004). Coproduction can occur at multiple stages throughout a single project (e.g., development of the research questions, selection of methods and techniques, collection of data, tailoring of outputs to support end use) and also can accomplish long-term goals (e.g., coevolution of institutional cultures, improved community well-being) across multiple project engagements (Wyborn et al. 2019). Coproduction has been highlighted as a way to more equitably incorporate the diverse knowledge forms and professional networks of local experts into research and dissemination processes (Laursen et al. 2018). For many, these benefits have resulted in coproduction being elevated as the gold standard approach to stakeholder engagement, although such applications of coproduction are still linearly driven from scientist to stakeholder (Meadow et al. 2015; Beier et al. 2017). Other U.S. federal climate adaptation programs, such as the Department of Agriculture’s Regional Climate Hubs and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Adaptation Partnerships (formerly Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments) program, also emphasize using a coproduction approach to producing science (Averyt et al. 2018).

Methods

The broader evaluation initiative included a document review of project proposals and reports, a survey of stakeholder participants in these projects, and interviews with a subset of surveyed stakeholder participants (Bamzai-Dodson 2022). This article is an analysis of interview data, for which IRB approval was obtained via Colorado State University (IRB ID: 311-18H). The full interview protocol and a more in-depth description of the methods are available within Middleton (2020).

The primary investigators for sixteen distinct NC CASC projects were contacted to identify the stakeholders with whom they attempted to engage in coproduction. Investigators returned 188 unique contacts (all invited to complete a survey for the broader initiative). An interview subsample was generated using two main criteria: (1) identifying the one or two most highly engaged individuals for each of the projects, and (2) obtaining a diverse representation of agencies or institutions. Fifteen individuals from this subsample consented to an interview in which they were asked semistructured questions about their roles, expectations, interactions, and outcomes while engaged in the project. Interviewees identified themselves as filling planning and decision-making roles in federal, state, community, and nongovernmental (NGO) organizations. We use the term Tribal to describe the two interviewees who self-identified as enrolled members of federally recognized Tribes and Indigenous to describe the sole interviewee who self-identified as a non-federally recognized Native Hawaiʻian. Some interviewees disclosed that they held scientific position titles, such as ecologist or conservation specialist, but their primary duty was to serve as a technical expert within their organization and not to conduct novel research.

Interviews were conducted primarily by video chat (or phone when not possible) individually, except for one case when two participants were interviewed together. Recordings were obtained with consent, transcribed by an external service, and checked for accuracy. For consistency, we continue to use the previously published interviewee labels (D1-3, N1-4, R1-2, RD1-6), although the category labels have no bearing on the results presented here. Interviews were coded in NVivo (QSR International Pty Ltd. 2020) by two researchers using a modified grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss 2008). Table 1 is an alphabetical list of all forty-five themes that emerged during initial open coding.

Table 1. Full codebook generated from modified grounded theory approach

All emergent codes

1. Agency/institution need for science 2. Agency/institution planning cycles 3. Barriers to coproduction 4. Barriers to creating plans 5. Barriers to adaptation action 6. Barriers to obtaining scientific information 7. Boundary spanning and trust 8. Characteristics of project 9. Climate science experience 10. Climate science incorporation 11. Communication efficacy 12. Communication problem 13. Coordination work 14. Environmental justice and social inequity 15. Establishment of roles and relationships 16. Expectations of participating 17. Future management priorities 18. Future engagement opportunities 19. Identifying new tools 20. Information provision 21. Information sources for science 22. Institutional characteristics 23. Institutional mechanisms for science incorporation

24. Interaction type 25. Limitations at organization 26. Management plans 27. Management priorities 28. Management strategy 29. Manager–researcher collaboration 30. Mismatch in goals 31. Overall project goals/objectives 32. Partnerships 33. Perception of coproduction overall 34. Perception of project benefits/beneficiaries 35. Perception of project ownership 36. Process for identifying needs/benefits 37. Project information need 38. Project shortcoming 39. Project success 40. Relationship building 41. Role at organization 42. Specific role of stakeholder in project 43. Strengths of coproduction 44. Uncertainties 45. Use of information

During open coding, it became clear that interviewees expressed both benefits and harms to engaging in the research process (sometimes subtly), leading us to more critically reflect on the ethics of stakeholder engagement. We examined the wider literature surrounding stakeholder engagement to generate definitions for what the three Belmont Report principles look like when operationalized in the context of ideal coproduction. We then mapped a subset of the full codebook to each operationalized definition to identify the interview data used in our analysis (Table 2). We explore how our interviewees perceived adherence to these principles in their interactions with funded investigators. Because interviewees constitute neither a random nor representative sample of stakeholders, we do not provide quantitative results of our coding. Instead, our results describe the perspectives of highly engaged stakeholders and qualitatively identify narratives and concepts that warrant further exploration (Rust et al. 2017). We follow published standards for the best available social science (Charnley et al. 2017) to ensure the accuracy, reliability, and relevance of our findings.

Table 2. Belmont principles, definitions, ideals, and key emergent codes used for analysis

Principle	Belmont Report definition	Operationalized coproduction ideal	Key emergent codes
Respect for persons	Participants are able to provide fully informed and freely given consent	•Stakeholders participate in defining and consent to their project roles and responsibilities •Mutually shape and understand project goals and expectations	•Establishment of roles and relationships •Expectations of participating •Perception of project ownership •Specific role of stakeholder in project
Beneficence	Benefits of participating are likely to outweigh the harms	•Hold project benefits to stakeholder (individual, organization, or community) in the foreground •Develop outputs primarily for stakeholder use and secondarily for other venues	•Perception of project benefits/beneficiaries •Process for identifying needs/benefits
Justice	Burdens and benefits are distributed fairly and equally	•Understand and consider historical and present-day inequity and trauma before engaging with underresourced or underserved stakeholders •Build genuine and transparent relationships	•Boundary spanning and trust •Environmental justice and social inequity

Results and Discussion

This section has four subsections, three of which summarize stakeholder perspectives aligned with one of the Belmont principles and the last of which highlights intersections across the three principles. We present discussion and data interpretation alongside the results. Quoted material is lightly edited for brevity, clarity, and to ensure privacy (e.g., removal of filler words, false starts, and identifying information). Any changes do not alter intent or meaning.

Belmont Principle 1: Respect for Persons

The first Belmont principle, respect for persons, specifies that study participants must be able to provide fully informed and freely given consent. Existing recommendations for stakeholder engagement in a research project include identifying the purpose for engagement, the role that the stakeholder will serve within the project, and the mechanism and process for engagement, all prior to the start of the project (Carney et al. 2009). These actions ensure that the stakeholders can clearly understand their role and freely consent to participating in the project. Interviewees in our sample, however, perceived a wide spectrum of understanding and definition around the roles, expectations, and engagement processes across the projects in which they participated. The data presented are associated with the codes: establishment of roles and relationships, expectations of participating, perception of project ownership, and specific role of the stakeholder in the project.

Stakeholders positively described projects that convened them early, established roles and processes immediately, and repeated that information often to ensure well-established mutual understanding and agreement. A federal resource manager shared, “I can’t stress enough, early on in the process, identify the right people to bring in” (RD2). One board member of a water conservancy district highlighted the importance of repeatedly convening the group: “At the beginning of every season, [project investigator] would hold a workshop with [project co-investigator] to get everybody back on board, remind them what we’re doing, what the overall goals were, then, hit the field” (N1). The director of an Indigenous-led conservation NGO highlighted the cultural and relational importance that such processes can hold: “Indigenous attention to protocol and traditional ceremonial opening is everything because this is where we constantly recheck our relationship” (N4). Some stakeholders held negative perceptions when roles and processes were not well-established. A conservation partnerships coordinator with the federal government commented on the ramifications of not defining roles and process: “we really never had a good mechanism that clearly laid out this is what you’re expected to do, this is when we’re gonna touch base, … and that was a horrible, horrible problem for us in terms of communications” (RD5). A federal forest resource planner, however, recognized and expressed frustration around the trade-offs that must be balanced when allocating project time between conducting engagement and research:

So much of the time that we spent was designing the process by which we were going to do the project. If we all were at a point where we knew how it was going to be designed, then you could just leap into the [science] part of it. (D2)

Stakeholders identified that social exchange in both informal and formal settings was key to establishing affinitive trust (trust based on emotional judgments about the trustee’s qualities; Stern and Coleman 2015) based on shared values, cooperative experiences, and social connectedness. A faculty member at a Tribal college stated, “The most important thing we can do is just get together and talk” (N3). Multiple stakeholders mentioned the importance of informal interactions, such as “occasionally sitting down and drinking a beer” (N1), to developing and strengthening relationships. That board member of a water conservancy district continued, “To actually be out there in the field and working with these guys … , I really value the people we have here on our public lands right now” (N1). The Tribal college faculty member also shared the importance of interactions outside of institutional structures in creating a sense of trust and shared identity:

Being able to visit with [the investigators] not necessarily in a formal structure, after hours, over dinner, over a beer, that kind of interaction is really, really critical. … I always felt very comfortable, and I never had the sense that this was in any way an exploitative relationship. (N3)

Stakeholders also expressed appreciation when scientists were willing to engage in practitioner-led spaces, as one extension specialist recounted:

A lot of these scientists that were involved do not attend [land manager organization] meetings[, but the investigator team’s] willingness to engage beyond just handing off a bunch of information … was really good. (R1)

Stakeholders perceived that a weak relationship between themselves and the scientist(s) could lead them to be protective of their time and resources. Stakeholders also hinted that the stigma of being a bad partner can stay with a scientist beyond the span of a single project and influence future engagement. One federal park ecologist implied that stakeholder wariness in a project was based on prior negative experience with the project investigator:

The [manager group] went into this [project] very cautiously. Part of it was probably who was leading the research. (RD3)

A federal conservation specialist alluded to how previous negative experiences with some investigators caused them to be protective of their group’s data with all outsiders:

People will tell you that we’re a difficult group to work with because we won’t share data unless we see a benefit to it or something. … It takes time and effort to organize the data, compile it, give it to somebody, and then explain it, and then sometimes it gets used incorrectly. (R2)

This interviewee continued on to explain how their protectiveness was motivated by a perceived waste of resources when data and information were used incorrectly: “It slays me to see some of this money squandered the way it is, so that’s where I’m coming from” (R2).

Stakeholders mentioned three distinct roles that they could play in the research process: an advocate who helps obtain funding or other support prior to or during the project (also described as a “cheerleader” [N1] or “promoter” [N3]); a provider of contextual information to the research team during the selection and design of research methods and outputs; and a verifier or disseminator of findings at the end of a project. The first role was described by a federal park manager as being “on the ground level of getting grant funding for it and writing supportive letters” (D3), whereas Indigenous and Tribal stakeholders perceived themselves as advocates within the projects for their communities and as advocates for the projects within their communities. One faculty member at a Tribal college described offering insights to the project team about “what we might try to do differently or what we might explore from a unique Indigenous lens” (N3), and a Tribal water manager expressed “the big hurdle was to get [the Tribal business council] to agree to the study, and I did that” (RD6). The second role was described by a state natural resource manager as “primarily providing technical assistance in the context of the needs of [our state] and our agency” (D1), and a federal forest ecologist characterized themselves as “the point person from the science perspective” (RD1). Finally, although stakeholders recognized the importance of their third role in bringing research to applications, they also perceived it as being too late to make adjustments to enhance usability if it was their only engagement encounter. An extension specialist described how investigators “were ‘window shopping’ information” (R1) when they brought together a large group of managers at the end of a project to see if anyone could use the final products. Although providing important touch points for two-way communication, these three stages of engagement in the research process fall short of an ideal of iterative engagement in coproduction.

Importantly, stakeholders engaged poorly in a project often did not perceive themselves as fully integrated team members; instead, they described being brought in as needed based on the priorities and interests of the scientists. A federal forest ecologist summarized this lack of integration into the project: “There was a sense that this is … the scientist’s project that they want to make useful to you, as opposed to going into it with ‘we are co-owners’” (RD1). One federal park ecologist shared the perception that investigators appeared with preconceived notions about stakeholder needs (“This is what we’re going to do to help you out”) instead of truly listening to managers (“Hey, here’s this opportunity. What do you guys think or need?”) (RD3). A Tribal water manager reflected on their frequent false or token inclusion in a project by expressing their desire “to be at the table and not on the menu” (RD6). Multiple stakeholders stated that they wanted to see what the research team was doing “behind the curtain” (RD3) during the “radio silence” (RD5) between meetings and to play a more active role in the research process. An extension specialist shared that being engaged solely at the investigator’s behest could cause them to be cynical about intentions:

They call you three years in and say, “Hey, we need a fact sheet and a workshop. Can you put this together?” And so you get kind of cynical about that approach, obviously. (R1)

In the context of stakeholder engagement, we align the first Belmont principle with open communication and agreement on the role of stakeholders in the project and how that role was established. Stakeholders mentioned best practices for meetings, such as mutually defining goals and objectives early, establishing rules of engagement together, and feeling that inclusivity was being prioritized (Golden et al. 2021), which helped them understand their role and expected responsibilities. When poorly engaged in a project, stakeholders mentioned frustration over wasted resources and time. In turn, these feelings could eventually affect the reputation of the scientists, leading stakeholders to engage with them cautiously or not at all in the future. Ideally, scientists should ensure that stakeholders have a clear understanding of and consent to their roles and responsibilities within a project, with continued check-ins throughout the lifetime of a project (Carney et al. 2009) to ensure effective and respectful use of resources and time (Clark 2008; Buxton et al. 2021).

Belmont Principle 2: Beneficence

The second Belmont principle, beneficence, emphasizes that the likely benefits of participating in a study should outweigh the potential harms that a participant might experience. Stakeholder engagement in the research process is predicated on the assumption that an upfront understanding of needs is directly linked to greater benefits at the project end (McNie 2007). Some interviewees, however, perceived that consideration of research benefits to them by scientists was a “check that box” (RD1) exercise in response to requests for proposals from funding agencies that require or encourage consideration of end-user needs. The data presented are associated with the codes: perception of project benefits or beneficiaries, and process for identifying needs and benefits.

An extension specialist described the tension between stakeholder-driven objectives and those that are motivated by federal funding priorities: “The problem is if it’s not an issue or a topic that has relevance among your constituent basis, then this is a fairly meaningless project” (R1). A federal conservation specialist also highlighted the pressure on investigators to conduct cutting-edge science: “Researchers will take the money to address the question, but they will change it to fit some ecological theory that’s hot at the moment or something that they think is more publishable” (R2), going on to say: “My experience with a lot of researchers … is that our role is to help them get the money and then the product just sorta goes its own path” (R2). This conservation specialist continued on to recognize that not all of their previous experiences had been negative and that there were research partners who were genuinely committed to creating actionable science: “Some of the folks that we work with are very good about making sure that our questions get answered, … so a lot just depends upon people” (R2).

Tribal and Indigenous rights holders expressed that scientists needed to consider the benefits and harms of the research project to the community as a whole in addition to the benefits and harms to an individual person or agency. The director of an Indigenous-led conservation NGO highlighted the importance of considering relationships and community from project inception: “The biggest component is the relational component—how do we do this with each other in the community?” (N4). These rights holders also asserted that scientists working within their communities need to improve their understanding of Tribal sovereignty and how it affects the ways in which Tribal policies and actions are decided. A Tribal water manager shared an example of how cooperative decision-making occurs within their Tribe:

We’re a sovereign nation, and that sovereignty is such a strong statement that people don’t really realize it. … We meet collectively at a town hall meeting, every so often, and there’s an issue that needs to be addressed and discussed, maybe a resolution will come out of that discussion, establishing Tribal law. (RD6)

As Whyte (2013) argued, traditional knowledge is communally held and shaped, so in many communities, all members must be provided a transparent opportunity to engage in conversations about the risks and benefits of participating in a project.

Rights holders expressed that enhancing a scientist’s individual dispositional trust (the general tendency to trust within a given context; Stern and Coleman 2015) with a community was critical to demonstrating that they would receive benefits from a project. A faculty member at a Tribal college stated that scientists should be prepared to demonstrate their genuine commitment when engaging with their community: “We’ve had people for a century come and tell us they’re going to save the Indian, so there’s suspicion often and wariness, … and you need to be prepared to deal with it” (N3). A Tribal water manager expanded on the process of building trust early by saying: “[The co-investigator] developed the trust with Tribal members and Tribal committees, and once that trust is established, then things happen a lot more smoothly” (RD6). This water manager continued to describe the importance of identifying the key individuals with whom to build trust: “The very first thing that [the co-investigator] did [in a previous project] was address the elders and that’s what she did here. … Most people, if not all people, don’t understand that” (RD6).

Stakeholders perceived that the benefits of the research project could be more tangible when the team committed to equitable inclusion and integration of nonresearch partners. A federal hydrologist expressed a positive attitude toward a research team that strove to be as inclusive as possible:

They listened to everything—they were very methodical in writing ideas down and capturing everything—so I knew that they were going to put on a good organized workshop, keep things moving, and come out with a great product. (N2)

An extension specialist shared that their experience coproducing project outputs as a group was “an ideal situation” because “the modeling was characterized properly but the message was also delivered in a way that was palatable” (R1). Even when the research team was genuinely committed to delivery of benefits to stakeholder partners and implemented a robust engagement plan, however, stakeholders sometimes still saw project benefits as “[falling] short in providing actions” (D3). A federal forest resource planner stated that trying to identify a common set of needs across multiple stakeholder groups that could be met with a single product “was biting off way too much than could be done in that workshop” (D2). A federal hydrologist confessed that, even after creation of what they considered to be a successful product, there was still a gap between information that was usable and information that would be used by managers:

As far as implementing these things, it still seems kind of abstract. … Take these tools and actually put them on the ground? I just don’t know how that’s going to happen. If that’s even going to happen. (N2)

When engaging stakeholders in a project, the second Belmont principle aligns with scientists foregrounding benefits to the stakeholder and intentionally designing and producing outputs for use in plans, decisions, or actions. Multiple interviewees, though, perceived a lack of follow-through from their research partners toward addressing their needs and ensuring that they benefited from the process. Tribal and Indigenous partners mentioned the importance of considering community benefits and understanding the role of community-based decision-making in the research process. Interviewees highlighted scientists who took the time to include and listen to diverse viewpoints, transparently incorporated stakeholder needs, and developed themselves into trusted sources of information as likely to prioritize project benefits to partners. Scientists need to ensure that (individual, organization, or community) benefits to the collaborating stakeholders are highlighted throughout the project and that outputs are developed primarily for stakeholder use and secondarily for other venues.

Belmont Principle 3: Justice

The third Belmont principle, justice, reminds scientists that the benefits and burdens of a study should be distributed fairly and equally. To avoid exploitation in stakeholder engagement, the burdens and benefits of engaging in the scientific process need to be divided fairly and equally among team members. Our protocol did not explicitly ask interviewees to discuss the benefits and burdens of participation in a particular study, so we instead chose to focus our analysis on emergent codes related to the distribution of societal benefits and burdens over time. In our data, themes related to societal exploitation and equity primarily appeared in our interviews with Tribal and Indigenous stakeholders, although we believe that these results are relevant to other communities that have experienced inequity and trauma. The data presented are associated with the codes of boundary spanning and trust, and environmental justice and social inequity.

Tribal and Indigenous interviewees perceived that issues around environmental justice and social inequity needed to be addressed directly even when they were not a main project objective or when doing so was new and uncomfortable for most scientists. These rights holders felt directly acknowledging these issues was critical to demonstrating genuine interest in their communities and building procedural trust (trust that the process will be legitimate and transparent; Stern and Coleman 2015). The director of an Indigenous-led conservation NGO expressed that, although the trauma stemmed from historical events, the repercussions of those events were still present in their community even now:

Add to [this project], the wrinkle of an Indigenous culture and a local base community that sees itself in opposition to the large framework. … Being able to step in there and then look at these historic traumas, how they’re shaping the conversation even 200 years later. How do you right those unrightable wrongs? Nobody was present at the initial infraction. Everybody’s living with a reverberation of … a bomb that has gone off in slow motion. (N4)

A faculty member at a Tribal college shared the importance of consideration of issues centered on justice and equity and that ignoring them could continue a lack of trust in the engagement process:

A lot of scientists can sometimes get uncomfortable, [but] you’ve got to make a linkage to issues of justice [and] of extreme income and wealth inequality. … Trying to tell someone on a reservation that they should be super concerned about what’s going to happen in ten years, twenty-five years, fifty years, they’re saying no, what I’m concerned about is we don’t have running water. … Being aware that there might be other more immediate problems that people are facing, you’ve got to be sensitive to do that. … Really addressing climate change will help them address some of those issues of social justice, of environmental justice, of education inequalities. … You’ve got to make that connection because if you don’t, … then they just tune out. “Oh god, here’s another great scientist who has come to tell us all the things that we should be doing.” (N3)

Stakeholders expressed that boundary actors (themselves or others) could pull project contributors together, help accelerate relationship building by leveraging their prior relationships and knowledge, and produce more just and equitable outcomes. These boundary actors are people who span across and can navigate among multiple disciplinary, institutional, or cultural spaces (Goodrich et al. 2020). A Tribal water manager shared how their ability to act as a representative on behalf of the project was integral to quickly generating feedback from the community and interpreting that feedback for the project team:

I was the key person or the catalyst that pulled [these meetings] together because there was a certain amount of trust that I had with the … individuals that we needed … . There has to be a trust developed in a reservation community environment before there are people willing to expound their thoughts and their concerns. … You need a local person to articulate your thoughts and to take the local people and have their thoughts articulated back to you and just have a cordial meeting in the beginning about what can happen and what expectations your client might be thinking about. (RD6)

The director of an Indigenous-led conservation NGO described their ability to cut through boundaries between partner groups on a project: “It’s like everybody’s in their own stratified slice, and they argue about where they are in the lasagna, but it’s all cheese to me. … I don’t see the stratifications.” (N4). An extension specialist, however, expressed the potential relational harm that boundary actors might experience when representing project scientists to individuals and groups with whom they have built trust:

You can think of trust with [on-the-ground] groups as a kind of capital … that you’ve earned over the years. I may burn a lot of my trust capital delivering this message, and I may get very little back. (R1)

We align the third Belmont principle with a need for scientists to think about environmental justice and equity before engaging with underresourced or underserved stakeholder communities. Tribal and Indigenous interviewees expressed that projects should not be conducted with their communities or on their lands without consideration of historical and present-day inequity and trauma. Scientists who conduct engagement in underresourced or underserved stakeholder communities need specialized skills and knowledge to prevent exploitative and extractive relationships (Chief et al. 2015), training for which is demonstrably lacking within the scientific community (Kirby et al. 2019). If scientists lack or are unable to obtain the necessary skills to address these issues, they can use boundary actors as intermediaries instead to ensure procedural trust in the research process. These boundary actors put their own partnerships with a community at risk on behalf of the scientist, however, and can experience relational harm if engagement is poorly executed. Scientists must carefully contemplate and thoughtfully execute their intended engagement strategy to prevent these communities, or any boundary actors who act on behalf of the project team, from experiencing additional harms. The justice principle suggests a high standard that must be met for ethical reasons. Conversely, it suggests that project teams that do not have adequate time, resources, or expertise to address these issues would be better off not engaging with stakeholders within their project or perhaps even leaving a particular research question to be addressed by a team better situated to undertake it in a just manner.

Connections Between the Belmont Principles

The Belmont principles are not mutually exclusive nor independent; each supports the others. Attention to one makes accomplishing the others easier, and conversely, inattention to one makes accomplishing the others harder. Across all three principles, our results emphasize the importance of building relationships with intention and care, as interviewees described the value of cultivating dispositional, affinitive, and procedural forms of trust (Stern and Coleman 2015). Actions taken by scientists to improve relationships with partners can generate multiple forms of trust and demonstrate commitment to multiple Belmont principles, and conversely, actions that break trust can erode multiple principles (Whyte and Crease 2010).

Respect for persons emphasizes early, frequent, and open conversations between scientists and stakeholders, which can improve the benefits of participation by allowing stakeholders to consider how the project can benefit their communities and institutions under less time pressure. A federal resource manager shared, “I like to invest a lot more time up front on something because if you cheat and take shortcuts at the start, you’re going to end up with a poor product, and then you’re going to end up doing a lot more work on the back end” (RD2). When afforded time throughout the project to give and receive feedback, stakeholders can influence the project trajectory, increase benefits to affected jurisdictions, and use their time more efficiently.

On the other hand, when projects circumvent partners by engaging in a nontransparent manner, stakeholders might feel forced to participate in projects that result in no tangible benefits. A federal conservation specialist stated:

We’ve had many cases where people will talk to folks at the regional office and sell something, and it sort of then gets forced down onto the field against the wishes of the field … forced marriages don’t always end up working out real well. (R2)

Different power dynamics between scientists and stakeholders, or even within stakeholder organizations or communities, can result in unjust and inequitable outcomes, even when scientists are looking for “win–win” situations whereby all partners receive benefits.

While engaging with stakeholders, justice underpins or reinforces the other two principles by requiring that scientists provide recognition to stakeholders for the important role that they play in determining project outcomes and successes (Honneth 2004; Whyte 2011). In particular, scientists must draw attention to and deconstruct those historical traumas or burdens, current processes or resource gaps, and potential future choices that can undermine a healthy relationship among scientists, stakeholders, and their beneficiaries. The director of an Indigenous-led conservation NGO described how recognition and elevation of Indigenous social protocols supports clarity of project roles and objectives: “that ceremonial opening and departing each time you meet, it gives each party a moment to express whatever they need to express, including the dissension, and that’s what you want to know immediately” (N4).

The interactions among these principles and full context of stakeholders’ working environment and culture result in complexity and nuances that can be more easily navigated with education or training in the skills necessary to conduct critical stakeholder engagement (e.g., Rozance et al. 2020; Motzer et al. 2021). This needed capacity goes beyond an academic understanding of the Belmont principles and requires significant emotional intelligence skills such as facilitation, communications, and conflict resolution (Cravens et al. 2022). Even though most biological and physical science programs do not include training in such skills, geography programs that teach applied and critical ways of thinking, including CPG, are natural places to develop leaders in critical stakeholder engagement (Kelley et al. 2018; Hall and Moore-Cherry 2022).

Conclusions

Our study investigated the perceptions of stakeholders about their involvement in coproduced climate adaptation research projects funded by the NC CASC. Our qualitative analysis of the interview data was informed by the three Belmont principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Although stakeholder engagement does not necessarily require formal IRB oversight like empirical human subjects research, we argue that the Belmont principles can help inform an ethical and critical approach to stakeholder engagement. Intentionally or not, scientists whose practices aligned with our operationalized versions of the Belmont principles were perceived to be transparent, committed to stakeholder interests, and trustworthy. In contrast, stakeholder engagement that was inconsistent with the Belmont principles caused individual or community harm, especially when inadequate consideration was given to why stakeholders needed to be engaged and how their contributions would be incorporated into a project. Although proactive practices by scientists might occur by coincidence or simple kindness, intentional focus on the Belmont principles could lead to more consistently ethical outcomes in climate adaptation.

Optimally, scientists can improve trust and collaboration by providing a high standard of care to the people with whom they engage in joint knowledge production and by striving for their actions to be beyond performative. If scientists are unable to move past tokenistic (and thus unethical) engagement, it might be preferable to not engage with stakeholders to preserve their willingness to embrace future engagement opportunities with other researchers. For those unsure of how to proceed ethically, scientists with specialized skills and experience in engagement and facilitation can be added to the project team (Wilmer et al. 2021). When scientists who lack proper training and expertise choose to conduct empirical social science on their own, it can result in inappropriate application of methods and inadequate reporting of results (Moon et al. 2016; Martin 2020) in addition to unethical engagement. Project investigators without training or expertise in stakeholder engagement and actionable science approaches would be well served to consider including at least one person who brings these relevant skills and past experience to reduce the risk of unintended harm and improve project outputs and outcomes. Social science researchers on project teams, however, also require their own line of inquiry (Robinson et al. 2019); for example, enriching our understanding of social phenomena (e.g., governance, norms), social processes (e.g., decision-making, communications), and individual attributes (e.g., values, behaviors; Bennett et al. 2017) that affect management challenges around climate adaptation.

In particular, interviewees highlighted the importance of addressing issues of environmental justice and equity even when doing so would be uncomfortable for many scientists and could be perceived as advocacy. Scientists often see themselves as honest brokers in policy and decision-making settings, individuals who provide factual information on possible outcomes without promoting any specific end result (Pielke 2007). CPG, though, acknowledges that scientists make many subjective choices, such as deciding what factual information is considered relevant or meaningful enough to present to stakeholders (King and Tadaki 2018). To resolve this tension, scientists could focus on procedural justice—advocacy for consistent, fair, and transparent processes that consider power imbalances and that result in more ethical and equitable engagement between project contributors (Ruano-Chamorro, Gurney, and Cinner 2022). While prioritizing procedural justice, scientists can use reflexivity to consider the authority that they hold within their role (Durose et al. 2023) and their ability to disrupt the balance of power within a community (Reyna et al. 2021). Ultimately, through direct collaborative engagement, scientists can learn to recognize and reciprocate the value of contributions they obtain from a community in the way that is seen as beneficial and requested by that community (Reyna et al. 2021).

Study limitations result from the scope of our data, which is constrained geographically (i.e., U.S. Northern Great Plains), has a small sample size (n = 15), and might miss key stakeholder populations. Importantly, our interviewees only included three Tribal and Indigenous individuals, although portions of their perspectives should still be generalizable to Tribes and Indigenous communities as a whole and to other underserved or underresourced populations. Additionally, we did not explicitly include questions about previous scientist or stakeholder experience and training regarding relevant topics, such as facilitation or research ethics, and engaging with stakeholders is a skill that scientists can build over time (Goolsby, Cravens, and Rozance 2023). Despite these limitations, our results help us understand the experiences of stakeholders engaged in these projects, examine how ethical those interactions were, and identify directions that warrant further research and action.

In this article, we describe how poor engagement of stakeholders in coproduced climate adaptation projects can lead to individual or community harms and how critical stakeholder engagement can result in benefits such as actionable scientific outputs. Although we use climate adaptation as the use case for this article, we believe these ideas are applicable to addressing other environmental problems. For example, the United States faces pressing questions around the quantity and quality of available future water resources under both a changing climate and a changing set of human activities, with increased use of citizen science as one highly recommended strategy for response by the scientific community (National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine 2018). Critical stakeholder engagement could be applied to such a project by encouraging scientists to consider which citizens are engaged in data collection and how their roles are defined, how those data will be used, and how benefits to the citizen are ensured, whether there are any community sensitivities around sharing such data openly, and how to limit data voids in communities where citizens might not have time to volunteer. As a discipline, geography has a history of critically blending ideas from different traditions to think more broadly about the world, and geographers are uniquely poised to contribute across disciplinary boundaries to knowledge production to address environmental problems of the Anthropocene, including adapting to climate change.

Acknowledgments

Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Jill Lackett and Lindsey Middleton conducted the data collection. We are grateful to our peer reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on this work. Special thanks to Katherine R. Clifford for her early peer review and comments, which improved the concepts in this article, and to Kate Malpeli and Louise Johansson for their design work on Figure 1.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey South Central and North Central Climate Adaptation Science Centers.

Notes on contributors

Aparna Bamzai-Dodson

APARNA BAMZAI-DODSON is Acting Regional Administrator of the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, Boulder, CO 80303. E-mail: [email protected]. This work was completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a doctorate degree in Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on the theory and practice of engaging stakeholders in the creation of actionable science for climate adaptation and is intended to improve the production of usable knowledge to support decision-making.

Amanda E. Cravens

AMANDA E. CRAVENS is a Research Social Scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, Corvallis, OR 97330. E-mail: [email protected]. This work was completed while she was employed at the U.S. Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center. Her research interests include the translation of scientific information into decision-making, policies and institutions that influence environmental management, understanding the cognitive and social processes that make decision support tools work effectively, and the role of creativity in science.

Renee A. McPherson

RENEE A. McPHERSON is an Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma and University Director of the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, Norman, OK 73019. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research includes the societal and ecological impacts of climate variability and change, regional and applied climatology, and severe local storms.