Presenter: Laura Ferguson, M.S. Candidate in Marine Resource Management
Advisor: Dr. Sam Chan (Oregon Sea Grant, Fisheries and Wildlife)
Committee: Dr. Mary Santelmann (Water Resources, CEOAS) and Dr. Bryan Tilt (Anthropology)
Abstract: Natural resource management and policy is ideally informed by the best available science. Natural resource researchers ideally participate in broader impacts activities to extend the reach of their best available research. Researcher-stakeholder engagement is one proposed solution to overcome barriers to integrating science and management and to achieve both broader impact and science-based policy goals. Literature has documented many researcher-stakeholder engagement process case studies where researchers offer lessons learned and speculate on their impacts, but few offer data on the engagement process structure, the stakeholder perspective of the engagement process, or the impacts of collaboration between academic research teams and scientific stakeholders. This work addresses these gaps by taking a closer look at how one team of researchers engaged with its stakeholders and voicing the perceptions of stakeholders in addition to researchers. Twenty-six semi-structured interviews and an online survey (n=137) were conducted for an in-depth case study of participant motivations to, expectations for, participation in, and outcomes of Willamette Water 2100. Researchers and stakeholders were motivated to participate for social, knowledge, and utility reasons and held different expectations for the roles they would play, the researcher-stakeholder engagement process itself, and the resulting research results. Four types of challenges were identified: lack of a shared vision, differing professional languages, research complexities, and project management. Participants identified successful outcomes including: overcoming challenges, facilitating learning, greater understanding, conversation among diverse perspectives, and improving and extending research results. Researcher-stakeholder engagement in natural resource research can create more relevant science and achieve scientific broader impact goals. This research offers novel evidence of researcher-stakeholder engagement impacts and proposes more specific criteria for broader impact activity evaluation. This research was part of the Willamette Water 2100 project.