Abstract
Engaged research emphasizes researcher–stakeholder collaborations as means of improving the relevance of research outcomes and the chances for science-based decision-making. Sustainability science, as a form of engaged research, depends on the collaborative abilities and cooperative tendencies of researchers. We use an economic experiment to measure cooperation between university faculty, local citizens, and faculty engaged in a large sustainability science project to test a set of hypotheses: (1) faculty on the sustainability project will cooperate more with local residents than non-affiliated faculty, (2) sustainability faculty will have the highest level of internal cooperation of any group, and (3) that cooperation may vary due to academic training and culture in different departments amongst sustainability faculty. Our results demonstrate that affiliation with the sustainability project is not associated with differences in cooperation with local citizens or with in-group peers, but that disciplinary differences amongst sustainability faculty do correlate with cooperative tendencies within our sample. We also find that non-affiliated faculty cooperated less with each other than with faculty affiliated with the sustainability project. We conclude that economic experiments can be useful in discovering patterns of prosociality within institutional settings, and list challenges for further applications.
Highlights
Leaders in the emerging field of sustainability science emphasize the importance of forging research collaborations that span organizational boundaries, disciplinary cultures and involve stakeholders in the research process as a central, defining feature of the endeavor [1]
With regards to the first hypothesis, we found no significant difference in contributions to Bangor partners between Solutions Initiative (SSI) and UMaine participants
There are a number of ways to view this result, with hopeful and pessimistic overtones for the success of sustainability science projects
Summary
Leaders in the emerging field of sustainability science emphasize the importance of forging research collaborations that span organizational boundaries, disciplinary cultures and involve stakeholders in the research process as a central, defining feature of the endeavor [1]. These boundary-spanning efforts are seen as improving the legitimacy of the research in the view of society at large, and as improving the research itself by allowing research to be co-directed and the resultant knowledge to be co-produced by both scientists and stakeholders [2,3]. Do efforts aimed at improving the ability of scientists to work across such boundaries have a lasting impact on their collaborations, or willingness to cooperate with non-scientists? Here, we take advantage of a large collaborative sustainability science project to conduct experimental measurements of cooperation between research faculty and citizens
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