Abstract
Building successful, enduring research partnerships is essential for improving links between knowledge and action to address sustainability challenges. Communication research can play a critical role in fostering more effective research partnerships, especially those concerned with knowledge co-production processes. This article focuses on community-university research partnerships and factors that influence participation in the co-production process. We identify specific pathways for improving partnership development through a prospective analytical approach that examines community officials’ interest in partnering with university researchers. Using survey responses from a statewide sample of Maine municipal officials, we conduct a statistical analysis of community-university partnership potential to test a conceptual model of partnership interest grounded in natural resource management theory and environmental communication. Our findings both support and advance prior research on collaborations. Results reveal that belief in the helpfulness of the collaborator to solve problems, institutional proximity, familiarity, perceived problem severity and problem type and trust influence interest in developing community-university partnerships. These findings underscore the benefits of proactively assessing partnership potential prior to forming partnerships and the important roles for communication research within sustainability science, especially with regard to strengthening partnership formation and knowledge co-production processes.
Highlights
In light of the increasingly complex sustainability problems facing local and global communities and the need to improve the scientific basis for decision making [1], sustainability science elevates the role of research collaborations [2,3] and communication [4] among scientists and stakeholders in developing solutions
Prior to asking participants to rate their interest in pursuing a community-university partnership, we described in the survey that the structure of community-university partnerships varies and offered examples of the various roles municipal officials and university researchers may play in the research process, such as co-defining the problem or co-conducting research
Our research provides a statistical basis for understanding the development of partnerships and the barriers and opportunities for improving engaged research
Summary
In light of the increasingly complex sustainability problems facing local and global communities and the need to improve the scientific basis for decision making [1], sustainability science elevates the role of research collaborations [2,3] and communication [4] among scientists and stakeholders in developing solutions. Many universities are heeding the calls for collaborative research and are making progress on bringing diverse groups together to address sustainability issues, disconnections between the production of knowledge and its actual use in society persist [6]. These persistent divisions indicate that we still have a great deal to learn about how to develop community-university partnerships that facilitate more robust links between the various actors in the knowledge system [7]. Communication research can play a foundational role in helping bridge this gap
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