Oregon Sea Grant

This guide discusses collaboration among scientific disciplines and extending that collaboration to include participants outside of the academic world. It outlines various types of collaboration, both among researchers of diverse disciplines and among researchers and stakeholders. It explores collaborations seeking to achieve different goals in natural-resource research and management (sustainability, climate change adaptive management, decision-making tool development, alternative futures exploration). It provides examples of stakeholder engagement in these contexts for the understanding and management of various natural resources, and summarizes literature from other research on science-stakeholder engagement elements. Finally, this guide lists the lessons learned, necessary elements and impacts from these case studies.

The guide is intended as a resource for anyone interested in connecting science producers and science users. It summarizes literature from a broad swatch of resarch with science-stakeholder engagement elements.

Research and text by Laura Ferguson, Oregon State University Marine Resource Management program, with review and contributions by Samuel Chan, Mary Santelmann and Maria Wright