Alignment of stakeholder and scientist understandings and expectations in a participatory modeling project

Participatory and transdisciplinary approaches to research, modeling, and community engagement have become increasingly popular. Yet even when diverse stakeholders and scientists are brought together, it is not clear they share the same understandings of the goals of the participatory process or how stakeholder knowledge will be utilized. Our research documents the degree of alignment in initial expectations between stakeholders and scientists in a large participatory modeling project designed to determine how changes in global trade will impact food-energy-water systems in the eastern Corn Belt/Great Lakes region of the USA. We combined qualitative semi-structured interviews and a quantitative online survey to measure how consistent the expectations and understandings were between scientists and stakeholder advisors at an early stage of the project.