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Infrastructure and incentives for engaged research are still lacking, say Candice Carr Kelman and colleagues
There is no shortage of environmental and social problems to address in the world. These issues are often wickedly interconnected, demanding deep expertise, political will and collaboration between sectors.
Clearly there are important roles for scientists and scholars to play in addressing these pressing challenges—but for many experts based at universities, especially junior faculty, it often feels not just difficult but professionally risky to put in the time and effort to move into engaged scholarship.
Sometimes, early career researchers are advised to stick to publishing and wait until they get tenure before investing time in building relationships with those in the worlds of policy and practice, as these activities may not be as productive in terms of academic publications.
For a recently published paper, our team interviewed 71 conservation scientists about how they make their work actionable. We identified five levels of investment that scientists can make to produce actionable science, from simply making data accessible and communicating their findings through to networking, collaborating and producing value for society and science (see figure, below).
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We also found that researchers who make the effort to move up these levels, engaging more deeply with society, find themselves facing significant extra workload. Unsurprisingly, the number of researchers at each level falls as engagement deepens.
Lack of incentives
While many universities like to congratulate faculty members who have made their science actionable, co-produced research with stakeholders and turned knowledge into outcomes, few offer meaningful incentives or services for faculty to truly engage and address important challenges, grand or small.
In fact, many junior faculty are discouraged from taking on engaged research, unless they are at institutions with explicitly social missions or disciplinary specialisms, such as agricultural universities. Whoever the relevant stakeholders are—farmers, conservation practitioners, villagers, healthcare providers—engaging with them takes significant amounts of time and effort.
Additionally, there are likely to be other products more useful to stakeholders than a peer-reviewed publication. But if relationships with stakeholders are built and maintained, researchers can be sure that their research questions, grant proposals and products will be relevant and valuable to people who can make practical use of the information being produced.
One problem with focusing on peer-reviewed publications as the coin of the realm of faculty promotion and tenure is that unless they are open access, they are beyond the reach of the public, including many non-profit and public service organisations. Even when such groups can access publications, they often struggle to find useful science in them. Universities should put their efforts behind the campaign to shift the focus of academic publishing from profits to public service.
Spanning boundaries, widening windows
There are two key ways for universities to support their researchers’ efforts to address today’s challenges. First, they should support engaged scholarship and actionable science by investing in the infrastructure, outreach, staff and faculty that can provide an interface between researchers and society.
Research centres should employ skilled convenors, facilitators and organisers able to support co-production of knowledge, facilitating communication and traffic between practitioners and academics. These boundary-spanning staff can help organisations find the right scientists to answer their questions about specific locations, species or social phenomena, and even facilitate collaborative grant-writing to fund applied research.
Second, universities must find fair and meaningful ways to value applied and engaged research. Tenure processes must be more inclusive of non-traditional research products such as maps, tools and reports, which have value even if they do not result in a peer-reviewed publication. Perhaps they helped win a court case, revise a policy or establish a new park. Our proposal for reforming tenure is about widening the window rather than raising or lowering the bar.
It would be a mistake to expect all professors to show both real-world impacts and peer-reviewed publications—not every discipline, or person, is naturally suited to this sort of work. We are also not suggesting that someone should get tenure without publishing at all.
Rather, we are suggesting that universities make their tenure criteria more inclusive of engaged scholarship and actionable research that can demonstrate positive impacts on the world. Some institutions, such as those in the Beyond the Academy sustainability network, are already doing this. To be truly effective, this approach must now become more widespread and pervasive.
Candice Carr Kelman, Simon Lhoest, Chris Barton, Jessica Beaudette and Leah Gerber are affiliated with the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes at Arizona State University in the US.