Universities increasingly seek public engagement on climate change, yet many initiatives rely on the flawed “information deficit” model, assuming one-way knowledge transfer (and/or education) can prompt behaviour change or action (see critique by Sturgis & Allum, 2004). Cook & Overpeck (2019) further show that educative approaches can even produce boomerang effects, increasing resistance especially among individuals who perceive science communication as identity threatening. For climate futures research, this matters because implementation depends not only on technical evidence, but also on trust, values, social norms, institutional credibility, perceived efficacy, and legitimacy.
Chilvers (2024) emphasizes that participatory formats must be responsive to social learning, power, and the dynamics of publics’ concerns. Engagement should be treated as a process in which publics and institutions co-define problems and co-produce legitimacy (Chilvers, 2024). This aligns with broader engagement research that moves away from “information delivery” toward structured interaction and iterative learning. This yields explicit governance questions for universities:
– Which publics are engaged and how?
– What counts as knowledge?
– How does engagement affect institutional decisions and model assumptions?
This provides the rationale for participatory and civic science approaches: rather than assuming publics need correction, these approaches assume publics bring socially grounded expertise, while scientific work benefits from dialogue and negotiation.
Civic science becomes a pathway to tackle “wicked problems” where data alone is insufficient so participatory inquiry, collective action, and problem framing connected to societal needs must connect to decision-making contexts and responsibilities (Dillon et al., 2016). In this view, universities are not only sites of expertise; they can serve as platforms that convene actors, design participation around governance implications, and translate findings into action.
State-of-the-art also shows engagement is not inherently transformative. The crucial question is whether university practices genuinely alter knowledge authority and influence broader societal processes or whether they remain primarily outreach and visibility.
To explain how participation can work in practice, concept of boundary objects and translation (Star & Griesemer, 1989) can be used where collaboration between amateurs and professionals succeeds when shared objects allow coordination without requiring full consensus. In climate civic science, boundary objects may include standardized observation protocols, datasets, mapping tools, or visualization formats that make lay observations compatible with scientific analysis. This helps universities understand design choices: participation often succeeds not by eliminating difference, but by constructing interfaces that allow different forms of expertise to interact while maintaining each group’s meaningful categories.
Building on that perspective, I asks how universities can move beyond one-way climate communication and instead become infrastructures for epistemic partnership, in which publics shape the research, governance, and implementation of mitigation and adaptation pathways.
I propose an adaptation governance strategy: a replicable engagement architecture that replaces passive communication with epistemic partnership (i.e., structured, bidirectional feedback between academia and society).
In this model:
– public input reshapes research priorities,
– artistic collaboration generates new knowledge forms,
– civic engagement with farmers, NGOs, and communities co-produces climate futures pathways.
Four critical gaps remain in many university engagement efforts:
- 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 (Krause & Schupp, 2019)
- Disconnected outcomes: shifts in public opinion rarely translate into changes in assumptions within scientific work.
- Instrumental use of non-traditional practices: artistic/museum formats are treated as communication tools rather than legitimate data gathering environments. If arts are treated as “auxiliary,” co-production can become superficial (Kasumovic, 2025).
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
Cook, B. R., & Overpeck, J. T. (2019). Relationship-building between climate scientists and publics as an alternative to information transfer. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.570
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