Universities increasingly seek public engagement on climate change, yet many initiatives rely on the flawed “information deficit” model, assuming one-way knowledge transfer drives action. This project proposes a replicable engagement architecture that replaces passive communication with epistemic partnership. Through structured, bidirectional feedback between academia and society, public input reshapes research priorities, artistic collaboration generates new knowledge forms, and civic engagement with farmers, NGOs, and communities co‑produces climate‑futures pathways.
Current practice reveals four critical gaps:
- Quality over quantity: engagement is measured by attendance rather than participants inputs for models.
- The accountability: few mechanisms show how public feedback influences scientific work.
- Disconnected outcomes: changes in public opinion rarely translate into changes in scientific assumptions.
- Instrumental use of arts: museum formats are treated as communication tools rather than data‑gathering environments.
The project addresses these gaps through three nodes:
- Arts/Museum: Partnerships with regional museums turn exhibitions into active data‑collection spaces, where workshops and climate‑art installations capture civic values, risks, and priorities.
- Agricultural: a permanent, symmetrical data exchange with regional farmers grounds climate research in lived constraints. Farmer-scientist dialogues identify adaptation limits, validate local data, and surface feasibility conditions often absent from academic modelling.
- University Public Dialogues: Existing formats are redesigned using deliberative question engines that prompt citizens to generate structured research inputs rather than passively consume expert lectures.
The system uses a closed feedback architecture in which participants generate structured inputs across all nodes, and the university transparently reports how each contribution is used, embedding accountability and co‑production into existing institutional formats and shifting the paradigm from informing the public to demonstrating how the public shapes climate futures.
Keywords: Co-production, University-Community Partnership, Bidirectional Communication, Civic Science
Selected References
Chilvers, J. (2024). Remaking public engagement with climate change. Dialogues on Climate Change, 1(1), 49–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768659241293224
Dillon, J., Stevenson, R. B., & Wals, A. E. J. (2016). Introduction to the special section Moving from Citizen to Civic Science to Address Wicked Conservation Problems. Corrected by erratum 12844. Conservation Biology, 30(3), 450–455. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12689
Kasumovic, M. (2025). From observation to understanding: Embedding artistic practice for more effective climate research. Družboslovne Razprave, 41(110), 139–163. https://doi.org/10.51936/dr.41.110.139-163
Leal Filho, W. (2010). Universities and Climate Change, 283 p. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10751-1
Leal Filho, W., Weissenberger, S., Luetz, J. M., Sierra, J., Simon Rampasso, I., Sharifi, A., … Kovaleva, M. (2023). Towards a greater engagement of universities in addressing climate change challenges. Scientific Reports, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45866-x
Nisbet, M. C., Hixon, M. A., Moore, K. D., & Nelson, M. (2010, August). Four cultures: New synergies for engaging society on climate change. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.1890/1540-9295-8.6.329
Sturgis, P., & Allum, N. (2004). Science in Society: Re-Evaluating the Deficit Model of Public Attitudes. Public Understanding of Science, 13(1), 55-74. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625040426
Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001
Examples:
Kiel Museum Night https://www.museumsnacht-kiel.de/
Night of the Profs https://www.uni-kiel.de/de/veranstaltungen/night-of-the-profs
“Portraits of Climate” Exhibition (November 7, 2024 – April 30, 2025) The transfer project
Rent-a-Scientist 2026 funded by the European Union under the HORIZON EUROPE framework programme is free service for school classes to have a scientist design a lesson on a specific topic: https://www.wissenschafftzukunft-kiel.de/de/science_summer/rent-a-scientist.php
The Rent-a-Science-Film initiative is a free offer for teachers to watch a film in a scientific context related to nature or marine research with their students and then work on it afterwards: https://www.wissenschafftzukunft-kiel.de/de/science_summer/rent_a_science_film.php
Scientists for Future (S4F, also Scientists4Future) is a non-institutional, non-partisan, interdisciplinary association of scientists committed to a sustainable future: https://scientists4future.org/ https://info-de.scientists4future.org/
Medina-García C, Nagarajan S and Van den Broeck P (2022) The Leuven Gymkhana: Transdisciplinary Action Research Questioning Socially Innovative Multi-Actor Collaborations in COVID Times. Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 6:746974. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2022.746974