TORCH D7.1 - Stimulating co-Creation of Challenge Driven R&I
Creators: name: TORCH Consortium
Publisher: name: CHARM-EU
Year: 2022
Subjects: R&amp;I
Public engagement
Transdisciplinarity
Citizen Science
European Universities Alliance
Challenge-driven research

description: Public engagement and transdisciplinary science are crucial to realizing open science and in making progress towards excellence and challenge-driven research and innovation. Many universities around the globe, including European universities, are navigating their ways to develop an understanding of the concepts of public engagement and transdisciplinary science and to integrate these into their core mandate as a university and operationalize these in their research and education activities.

The objective of this report is to present the results from TORCH project WP7 research on public engagement and transdisciplinary science, especially on Task 7.1: Collect and share existing modalities and practices for stimulating co-creation of challenge-driven research and innovation with societal stakeholders.

We have conducted empirical analysis at the five partner universities of CHARM-EU: Utrecht University (UU), Eötvös Loránd University Budapest (ELTE), Trinity College Dublin (TCD), University of Barcelona (UB), University of Montpellier (UM). We have studied 31 good practices, conducted 66 semi-structured interviews, 10 focus group discussions, and analysed university policy and project documents related to open science, public engagement and transdisciplinary science.

Initiatives presented in this report are considered as “good practices” which includes wide ranges of research, education, and the interface between education and research-related activities, networking platform, programmes, structural and policy innovation, all to contribute to solving societal challenges, especially within the research domain of sustainability. These good practices presented us important lessons to be learned, especially in terms of incentives and disincentives of public engagement and transdisciplinary sciences at the different levels and challenges ahead for truly realising the vision of open science. We conducted analyses of incentives and disincentives atfour levels: the individual level, the university level, the systemic levels, and the level of stakeholders.

The results show that many universities have, to some extent, incorporated public engagement and transdisciplinary science as part of the wider agenda for opening up science. However, not all universities have a centralised or dedicated university policy and structure in place concerning open science, public engagement, and transdisciplinary science. The findings show that good practices on public engagement and transdisciplinary science (both research and education) are abundant. The existing initiatives, however, are fragmented and rely heavily on bottom-up, individual/team leaderships in initiating public engagement and transdisciplinary science.

Though universities vary quite a lot in terms of attention paid and progress made towards open science, public engagement and transdisciplinary science, universities show similarities in terms of incentives and disincentives for conducting public engagement and transdisciplinary science. The most prominent incentives at the individual level are peer support and internal motivation, while disincentives are mostly related to lack of capacity and rewards and recognition for scientists to pursue a career through public engagement and transdisciplinary science. Regarding the university level, the existing structure and policies such as university strategic visions on open science and ambition to leverage the role of the university to address societal problems in place are an incentive. This includes rewards and recognition systems, existing infrastructures and the work of pioneer institutions in leading the public engagement and transdisciplinary science initiatives. Disincentives at the university level ranged from a lack of resources to a lack of physical space/infrastructure that can allow collaboration, visibility, operationalization, mainstreaming of the open science programme to facilitate public engagement and transdisciplinary science. In addition, a lack of attention to vulnerable and marginalised groups was also mentioned as a disincentive for public engagement and transdisciplinary science at the university level (UB).

In terms of societal stakeholders, incentives include availability of networks, opportunities for lifelong learning and also access to scientific information and financial support. Meanwhile, disincentives for societal stakeholders to be engaged in public engagement and transdisciplinary science-related activities are the excessive bureaucracy of the university, lack of interest from the university partners to deal with topics related to inclusiveness. At the systemic level, current funding systems at the regional (EU) and national level have been served as important incentives. However, several disincentives at the systemic level were reported, including the lack of quality assurance, especially related to the evaluation of “good” public engagement/transdisciplinary science, competition across initiatives, the divergence of EU and national policies, lack of national policies, which shows lack of political interests on this topic, and lack of institutionalisation. The COVID-19 crisis was also mentioned as an important hindrance at the systemic level. It blocks the access of communication among stakeholders and science and reduces the effectiveness of public engagement and transdisciplinary science-related work.