From passive outreach to epistemic partnership: how universities can make publics co‑authors of climate futures?
Universities increasingly seek public engagement on climate change. However, most initiatives still rely on the “information deficit” model: assuming one-way knowledge transfer can prompt behaviour change (Sturgis & Allum, 2004). Cook & Overpeck (2019) show this can backfire: educative outreach may increase resistance, especially when communication is experienced as identity‑threatening. This imatters for climate futures research, where implementation depends not only on technical evidence but also on trust, values, social norms, and legitimacy. Chilvers (2024) argues that engagement must be treated as a process through which publics and institutions co-define problems and co-produce legitimacy.
This perspective underpins participatory and civic science approaches. Rather than assuming publics need correction, these approaches recognize that publics hold 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 and participatory inquiry, collective action, and societal relevance must connect to decision-making settings (Dillon et al., 2016). In this view, universities are more than just places of expertise; they also serve as forums for bringing together actors, designing engagement around governance implications, and translating finds into action.
Four critical gaps in current practice:
- Quality over quantity: engagement is measured by attendance rather than participants inputs for models.
- Accountability: few mechanisms show how public feedback influences scientific work (Krause & Schupp, 2019)
- Disconnected outcomes: shifts in public opinion rarely translate into changes in scientific assumptions.
- Instrumental use of non-traditional practices: artistic/museum formats are treated as communication tools rather than legitimate data gathering environments. When arts are treated as “auxiliary”, co-production risks becoming superficial (Kasumovic, 2025).
To address these gaps, I propose an adaptation governance strategy: a replicable engagement architecture that replaces passive communication with epistemic partnership, in which:
- public input reshapes research priorities,
- artistic collaboration generates new knowledge forms,
- civic engagement co-produces climate futures pathways.
The architecture consists of three interconnected 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.
Across all nodes, participants generate structured inputs, and the university transparently reports how each contribution is used. This embeds accountability and co‑production into existing institutional formats and shifts 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
Krause, G., & Schupp, M. F. (2019). Evaluating knowledge transfer at the interface between science and society. GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 28(3), 284–293. https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.28.3.9
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
Norström, A. V., Cvitanovic, C., Löf, M. F., West, S., Wyborn, C., Balvanera, P., … Österblom, H. (2020). Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability, 3(3), 182–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2
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/
https://www.climatemuseum.org/