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Open Access

Essay

Engaged research and its implications for transformation in climate adaptation sciences

Abstract

Transformative climate adaptation efforts, which call for the fundamental reshaping of social systems that inform vulnerability to climate risk, introduce significant ethical and procedural questions for researchers. Engaged research practices, such as co-production and participatory action research, may be useful in addressing these complex questions and pushing adaptation research towards more transformative ends. However, there are also ethical and procedural concerns plaguing participatory knowledge production, and scholars claim engaged research efforts have failed to meet goals for transforming scientific practice. Recent literature in adaptation, climate services, sustainability science, and environmental governance, illustrates the ongoing challenges and unresolved tensions holding engaged research practices back from its transformative aims. This essay suggests three areas of growth for engaged researchers in climate services and adaptation: interrogate the aims of research projects, focus on learning outcomes, and evaluate research governance. The essay addresses a wide audience and serves three primary purposes: 1) as a primer for students and early career researchers beginning to explore the history and use of engaged research in climate services and adaptation, 2) as a summary of common challenges for researchers designing and implementing engaged research projects with communities and other stakeholders, and 3) as a blueprint for institutional supporters, including funders and research convenors aiming to improve engaged research outcomes and advance more transformative adaptation.

Citation: Cann K (2026) Engaged research and its implications for transformation in climate adaptation sciences. PLOS Clim 5(10): e0001093. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001093

Editor: Jamie Males, PLOS Climate, UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND

Published: October 27, 2026

Copyright: © 2026 Katherine Cann. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was supported by the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (NOAA RISA) team (Grant NA21OAR4310313) and the Hudson River Foundation to KC.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

Recent progress reports [1,2] have found that most existing efforts to adapt to climate hazards around the world have failed to sufficiently address risk [3–5]. Most contemporary adaptation practice favors incremental, top-down, technology-centered infrastructural solutions that benefit powerful interests and resist challenging the status quo [6–9]. Scholars and practitioners have argued that adaptation practices need to be transformed. In contrast to most existing efforts, transformative adaptation entails radical changes to human-environment relations and shifts in deeply embedded social, economic, and relational paradigms that inform vulnerability to climate risks [10–12].

To transform adaptation practice, adaptation science must also be transformed. Dominant methods of climate research often fail to incorporate appropriate understandings of climate risks or governance contexts where adaptation solutions are implemented. To improve on research methods and produce outcomes that result in more effective adaptation practice, scholars have turned to engaged research [13]. Engaged research for adaptation encompasses collaborative and participatory research processes that engage across multiple knowledge systems, institutions, sectors, or domains to produce scientific knowledge relevant for addressing exposure to and vulnerability from climate risks.

Illustrated by the turn towards climate services and an increasing emphasis on co-production, engaged research methods in adaptation research are on the rise [13]. Adaptation researchers are applying engaged methods to increase research application and use, develop legitimate and appropriate adaptation solutions, broaden participation in scientific knowledge production, and advance equity and climate justice priorities [14–21]. Through its commitments to community empowerment, engaged research approaches have been identified as a pathway towards more equitable and transformative research processes [2,7]. However, scholars claim that engaged research approaches have been limited in scope, scale, and implementation, and have largely failed to achieve their potential for scientific transformation [2,22].

To understand why engaged research efforts fall short in transforming adaptation science and practice, this essay reflects on the role of engaged research in adaptation science, its implications for transformative research processes and outcomes, and future directions for engaged researchers in adaptation and climate services. To begin, the essay traces a brief history of engaged and participatory research traditions and their applications in adaptation science and climate services. Next, the essay highlights key themes that emerge from an extended review of recent literature in adaptation and climate services. These themes, including power and politics, Indigenous and local knowledge, equity, and governance, illustrate opportunities and challenges for transformative engaged research. Finally, the essay suggests three areas for future scholarship to address limitations in engaged research: 1) reflect on research aims, 2) enable research processes that build interpersonal connections and boost social learning opportunities, and 3) evaluate the governance of engaged research processes, in particular, the roles of funders and convenors. I argue that growth in these three areas will move engaged research towards innovative, scalable, equitable, effective, and transformative research processes and adaptation outcomes.

2. A brief history of engaged research and its role in adaptation science

The National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (AC-ERE) defines engaged research as “research conducted via meaningful collaboration among scientists and non-scientist actors” (AC-ERE 2022, 5). Engaged research, as advanced by the AC-ERE and used in this essay, serves as an umbrella term for research orientations and methodologies that rely on deeply collaborative knowledge production across disciplines, sectors, or domains [24].

Engaged research is often traced back to action research and participatory action research (PAR) through the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1940s, Orlando Fals Borda and Anis Rahman in the 1960s, and Paulo Freire in the 1970s [25,26]. Action research and PAR aim to eliminate hierarchical divisions between researchers and research subjects, engage in cycles of action and reflection, and emphasize community participation and empowerment [26–31].

Knowledge co-production is perhaps the most common approach to engaged research in adaptation sciences [18,19,21,22]. Co-production emphasizes the deep social ties involved in the production of scientific knowledge [32,33]. Emerging in the 1970s through the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom [34,35], normative co-production, common in sustainability studies, has been identified as an iterative model of engagement between researchers and invested stakeholders that is used to promote the usability of research outcomes [36–38]. Descriptive co-production, linked to the work of Sheila Jasanoff, Bruno Latour, and other scholars of science and technology studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, highlights the influence of social and political contexts on scientific inquiry and vice-versa [33,39,40].

In the 1990s, post-normal science (PNS) and Mode 2 science emerged to characterize knowledge production processes that diverged from prominent scientific norms [19,32,38]. In contrast to “normal” or “Mode 1” science, which emphasize distinct academic disciplines, researcher-defined inquiry, and a separation of science and society, PNS and Mode 2 science aim to embed science within society, broaden participation in scientific knowledge production, span domains and disciplinary boundaries, recognize the impact of cultures and values on knowledge production, and introduce a greater sense of reflexivity into scientific research [41–45].

Taken together, these approaches emphasize deep engagement between scientists and the public, including stakeholders that will implement or be impacted by the findings of any research project. Engaged research approaches are particularly well-suited to confront the “wicked problem” of climate change, which is characterized both by high levels of uncertainty and fraught decision stakes [23]. In its ideal form, engaged research incorporates diverse streams of knowledge, including lived experiences and applicable governance contexts, which may decrease some uncertainty around adaptation applications and result in more effective solutions. Through its commitments to community empowerment, deep engagement, and reflexivity, engaged research may also result in more equitable adaptation outcomes, fulfilling a moral imperative to include all stakeholders in research and decision-making processes that affect their lives and exposure to climate risks [46].

An emphasis on public participation in adaptation may be traced back to the 1992 Rio Declaration at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, wherein Principle 10 called explicitly for citizen engagement in climate actions [13]. Since then, called for participation and engagement have grown in adaptation practice and research communities. A recent review of academic literature found that attention to public participation and engagement in adaptation has grown almost exponentially since 2000 [13]. Funders of adaptation and environmental research projects are increasingly supporting engaged research, and requiring deeper forms of community engagement or collaborative partnerships [18,47–49]. New institutional forms, including relationships between researchers and practitioners [50] and researchers in transdisciplinary teams [51], are emerging to improve adaptation research outcomes.

Adaptation and climate service researchers have implemented innovative engaged research methods such as citizen science, participatory mapping and GIS, arts-based research, gaming collaborative data analysis, community advisory boards, storytelling, participatory video, walking interviews, and photovoice to forefront local experiences of climate risk and co-create climate knowledge with a variety of stakeholders [13,52–57]. In their idealized applications, these engaged research methods are attuned to power distribution and practice, aim to make research processes more democratic, collaborative, and empowering, and develop more usable, appropriate, and effective outcomes [58].

3. Implications for transformative adaptation science and practice

While there are significant promises for engaged research for adaptation science, scholars have suggested it has failed to reach its “great expectations” [2,22]. To understand the key limitations and challenges facing engaged research, this essay reflects on findings from an extensive review of recent literature relating to engaged research in adaptation, climate services, sustainability science, and environmental governance. The review was conducted over the course of three years in service of developing and deploying a framework to guide co-produced research and university granting efforts [48]. The review methodology was not formally designed, but aimed to capture learnings from many of the most cited articles on co-production and engaged research in adaptation and climate services.

Four key themes that highlight the transformative implications of engaged research in adaptation emerged through this informal literature review: power and politics, Indigenous and local knowledge, equity, and governance (see Table 1). While not meant to comprehensively represent learnings and ongoing debates within the vast literature on engaged research in adaptation and climate services, these broad themes capture central ethical and procedural tensions within collaborative and participatory research praxis and provide critical context for researchers designing and implementing engaged research projects.

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Table 1. Key themes illustrating the transformative potential of engaged research. While engaged methods offers significant potential to make research processes and outcomes more effective and equitable, important barriers persist. This table describes opportunities and challenges associated with each key theme.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001093.t001

3.1. Power and politics of knowledge production

Running throughout the literature on engaged research, and embedded within the themes described below, is the influence of power imbalances and political dynamics on engaged knowledge production. Engaged research has been identified as a process that can shift power to actors not historically involved in science, transforming research processes, outcomes, and researchers themselves [59]. However, power imbalances within co-production partnerships for climate services and adaptation have long been a central tension for engaged researchers [19,22,60]. Failure to address imbalances in engaged research relationships, especially between institutional researchers and other stakeholders, may reproduce the same inequities and harms associated with traditional research, such as knowledge extraction and data colonialism [21,60–62].

Although adaptation research is highly political and connected to deeply held value systems, engaged research efforts led by elite institutional research organizations often attempt to depoliticize research processes, maintain the centrality of science-based frameworks, and force consensus, which leads to further marginalization of non-elite views [22,63]. An emphasis on depoliticized processes may also lead to a lack of critical engagement with the political, social, and cultural contexts within which knowledge around climate risks, appropriate and equitable responses, and ideas of adaptation success are formed and stabilized, and can thus produce maladaptive insights [64,65]. Engaged research, when incorporating deep reflexivity on power differentials and political differences, offers avenues to encourage debate, which may lead to “cooperation without consensus” [66], allow for contestation [22], or even invite resistance [67]—outcomes that advance stakeholder empowerment and can drive more transformative adaptation.

3.2. Indigenous and local knowledge

Engaged research offers the potential for Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) systems to drive adaptation science, which may result in more comprehensive understandings of risk and vulnerability, lead to more culturally or locally appropriate outcomes, and spur innovation and creative practice with greater transformative potential [7,25,68–74]. Indigenous knowledge systems encourage consideration of environmental and social systems in ways that emphasize reciprocity, relationality, mutual responsibility, and understandings of time that differ from dominant strands of climate science [75,76]. Local or community-based knowledge also shifts understandings of climate risks in adaptation research by forefronting how hazards are experienced in everyday life and how specific governance contexts may influence an adaptation project [77].

However, collectively developing knowledge across diverse knowledge systems in ways that are mutually beneficial is challenging [70]. Indigenous and local knowledge systems and dominant scientific paradigms may be incompatible (see [78]), which can result in ILK being undervalued in research and decision-making processes, furthering the exclusion of Indigenous and other stakeholder communities from self-determination. To enhance Indigenous sovereignty and community empowerment, equitable research praxis may require that scientists and other institutional researchers take a supporting role and allow Indigenous and local leadership of adaptation and climate-related research efforts [56,73,79].

3.3. Equity

Engaged research, drawing on roots in action and participatory research traditions, maintains a normative commitment to equity and justice [21,38]. In adaptation research, engaged methodologies like iterative co-production aim to build capacities and capabilities of stakeholders in research projects and empower actors to lead research and decision-making processes [23,80,81]. For example, an engaged research project implemented in Cape Town, South Africa that collaboratively produced knowledge around water governance through a joint storytelling and quantitative data collection approach, enabled grassroot community groups to become trusted climate knowledge brokers who were invited by city government officials to guide public policy development [82]. This example of engaged research demonstrates the justice potential of collaborative work: drawing on diverse and innovative methods can meaningfully empower typically excluded actors to become leaders in adaptation science in their own right, and also develop new forms of data and knowledge around climate risks and responses.

Although much has been written about the potential of engaged research to drive equity outcomes, there remains limited evidence that engaged research meaningfully advances climate justice [17]. After decades of pushing for more participation in science and public services, many avenues for participation remain tokenistic and offer little in the way of greater public control [83,84]. Researchers have named this phenomenon the “participation paradox,” noting that participatory research methods are never neutral, and in fact, may serve to limit dissent and contestation [13,22]. For example, a drought response planning process in Santiago, Chile that characterized itself as participatory, was found to have privileged elite views over those from marginalized communities as a strategy to limit debate and reach consensus, after the latter groups began to push for national water reforms, rhetoric that was considered to be overly political by the coordinators of the project [85]. Without sustained attention to how participation processes work in practice, engaged research processes nominally designed to promote equity, risk reproducing histories of exclusion and disproportionate vulnerabilities.

3.4. Governance: funding, convening, and evaluating engaged research

Literature on engaged research highlight the governance challenges of financing, organizing, and assessing engaged research projects and outcomes. Challenges to effective and equitable engaged research such as stakeholder fatigue, uneven power dynamics, time, and cost, may be mitigated through careful and deliberate project design and implementation [23]. Some recommended strategies for making engaged research processes more horizontal and mitigating power differentials between convenors and other stakeholders in a project have emerged in the literature, including granting equal control over funding, co-designing research questions, and collaboratively disseminating results in a multitude of modes for diverse audiences [15,21,48,60].

However, many co-production processes fail to achieve aims of equitable governance, even when best practices are implemented. For example, a small grant program set up by university researchers to fund locally led adaptation projects and establish collaborative relationships between climate scientists and adaptation practitioners in the Northeast U.S. encountered challenges ensuring effective and equitable outcomes [48]. Though researchers designed a framework to establish transparent and trusting relationships, reduce burdens on practitioners, and support mutual learning outcomes through a community of practice, they encountered hurdles including institutional difficulties to expediently fund partners, insufficient time to co-develop projects, and inadequate funding to meet data needs. An evaluation of the program highlights the messy nature of engaged research, but also offers learnings to improve future governance of similar efforts, including streamlining funding and setting realistic goals [48].

4. Critical questions and future research directions

This essay highlights only some of the many recommendations for improving the transformative potential of engaged research in adaptation, climate services, sustainability science, and environmental governance [16,17,21,22,63]. In an attempt to narrow these somewhat broad and sweeping calls and apply learnings from the long histories of engaged research traditions, I propose three areas for growth in engaged research praxis to guide transformative adaptation (see Table 2): interrogate normative aims, enable social learning, and evaluate governance. These recommendations should guide researchers, practitioners, and funders in implementing more effective and equitable engaged research processes.

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Table 2. Proposed areas for growth in engaged scholarship. This table outlines three areas for growth for engaged research in adaptation and climate services and suggests questions to help researchers, convenors, and funders design and implement better engaged research projects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001093.t002

4.1. Interrogate normative aims

Engaged research programs signal normative commitments to participation, justice, and transformation [21,86]. Many researchers accept these normative ideals as a given and treat engaged research as a panacea to address flaws associated with many existing forms of scientific research. However, learnings from descriptive co-production warn that without deep attention to how goals for engaged research projects emerge and stabilize, even well-designed engagement processes can lead to negative outcomes [64,65]. Increasing interaction between research participants and enabling pluralism are insufficient to capture the full context of knowledge production, especially in relation to a topic such as climate change, which severely disrupts personal values, senses of security, and understandings of justice [87]. Forsyth and McDermott [64] argue that engaged research must go deeper than inclusive stakeholder participation and also include analysis into how seemingly stable understandings of climate risk and justice structure the design of adaptation research projects. To grow the transformative potential of engaged research within adaptation, scholars must take seriously learnings from science and technology studies, which urge deep attention to how priorities for engagement, equity, and adaptation itself are formed.

Recent work has begun to explore these questions, especially in the arena of climate justice. For example, O’Grady [88] examined how environmental justice conceptualized by government actors has structured adaptation projects in the U.S., finding that in some cases, particular efforts to promote equity activates political agency for some, but precludes it for others. Similarly, Won and Seto [89] investigate how practitioners operationalize equity in nature-based coastal adaptation, finding that overly general or “boiler-plate” language in adaptation plans limits the possibilities for practicing targeted or multidimensional equity. Grove et al. [90] introduces the idea of “absurd” relationships between justice and resilience, aiming to destabilize narrow analytical frameworks and open new pathways for understanding diverse practices of climate justice. Together, these works aim to trouble universal and normative ideas around climate justice and adaptation and enable new modes of analysis that can guide future engaged research. Future research should apply these learnings and extend them to understand how knowledge around climate risks and engagement are operationalized across scales.

4.2. Enable social learning

While formal research outcomes such as uptake and use, plan development, and project implementation are important measures of successful engaged research, there are also important “intangible” outcomes [19,91]. Many studies have found the most “useful” outcomes of engaged research processes to be new interpersonal connections and network building, unique understandings of research problems and the world around us, and innovations in adaptation design [7,92–94]. For example, an evaluation of a grant program in the Great Lakes region that aimed to collaboratively create usable knowledge to guide adaptation, found that the most successful funded project was one where knowledge outputs were secondary to network development [93]. This finding was unexpected for the grant-making institution and forced them to think differently about how they could build their impact in the region by investing in boundary spanning and network building.

Though long acknowledged as a benefit of engaged research in adaptation and sustainable development [59,95], social learning is still undertheorized as a mechanism for driving transformative change [96]. Other outcomes of engaged research projects, including embodied dynamics and affect, that may be “invisible” to research institutions and funders, have only recently been centered in adaptation science [65,92,97]. Several recent community-engaged research efforts in adaptation aim to change this pattern and integrate innovative and creative modes of knowledge production, such as performance art, attention to encounter, and multispecies or material ethnography, to offer new avenues to more deeply explore embodied and affective adaptation [92,98–100]. While these efforts have advanced understandings of how engaged modes of research can open up new pathways for transformation, there is still limited understanding of how engaged research praxis can build collective political capabilities [61,81], as well as how to make these outcomes “visible” to research funders.

Because evaluations of most engaged research projects focus on the knowledge products that emerge from projects [63], “intangible” outcomes, such as social learning, interpersonal connections, and new expressions of solidarity, are underexplored and undervalued in most engaged research processes. While engaged research can serve to challenge power asymmetries and advance climate justice, there is a noted gap in understanding what research methodologies work to both identify and strengthen political capabilities of marginalized populations experiencing climate risks [55,61]. Taking seriously the idea that creating spaces for social learning and new relationships is a form of adaptation [101], and that building political capabilities and agency enable challenge systemic marginalization [81,102], engaged researchers should both practice and evaluate innovative methods to better understand their potential for empowerment and social transformation.

In a recent review on engaged methodologies, Tschakert et al. [61] found “best processes” for enhancing political capabilities were sustained, iterative, and agency-enhancing; fostered mutual learning, deliberation, and contestation; and built solidarity. Shared or co-learning, in particular processes that included learning about decision-making processes and emphasized reflexivity, iterativity, and capacity building, was found to enhance political capabilities, as well as trust and solidarity [61]. Engaged research can lead to communal sensemaking, which has been identified as a process for building empowerment and solidarity [103]. Similarly, recent works calling for “affective” adaptation [92] and “compassionate” climate research [104] draw attention to the emotional and embodied acts of knowledge production and their impacts on transformative outcomes. Future engaged research in adaptation science should clarify the concept of social learning and implement and evaluate new and existing methodologies that advance communal sensemaking and create collective political capabilities to drive climate action. Future projects should also practice affective and embodied knowledge production and acknowledge their potential for reframing adaptation as a relational process.

4.3. Evaluate governance

Although literature on engaged research is rife with reflections on methods and lessons learned [22], barriers to achieving equitable engaged research processes persist [48]. A recent call to reframe engaged research as a governance process, rather than exclusively a knowledge generation process, aims to shift focus towards the design of institutions that enable actionable, equitable, and transformative engaged research [63]. Echoing this call, and drawing attention to specific institutions that convene and fund engaged research efforts, I argue future engaged research projects should more concretely examine the roles of institutional actors in improving the processes governing engaged research.

Most engaged research efforts are convened by scientists at research institutions, such as universities or government agencies, and literature on engaged research notes the responsibility of these actors to design equitable and effective processes [19,22]. While specific recommended practices have emerged in the literature, including ensuring all actors have equal access to funding, control over research design, and opportunities to disseminate findings [17,18,23,60], other recommendations are abstract. Further, most existing recommendations for improving engaged research governance are situated at the onset of collaborative research projects, for example, building trust and iterative partnerships and establishing transparent goals before submitting a grant proposal. While paramount for the success of an engaged research project, this focus on the “on ramp” of the project may come at the expense of attention to “off ramps,” including monitoring and evaluation.

For example, to maintain collaborative research relationships, some scholars suggest partners should maintain connection for longer than traditional grant or research project cycles [21]. However, without funding to support engagement, it may be unethical in some contexts to expect non-institutional partners to dedicate their time to maintaining a relationship when they are not compensated. Even within well-funded research institutions, scholars, especially those in the early stages of their careers, are not incentivized to maintain transdisciplinary connections at risk of forgoing professional advancement within disciplinary expectations [105]. Questions relating to keeping up relationships after engaged research project funding dissolves are virtually unaddressed in the literature.

Monitoring and evaluating outcomes of adaptation efforts have long been underemphasized, in part because of difficulties in attributing changes, understanding counterfactual scenarios, and evaluating over long timescales [4,106,107]. Evaluating the impacts of participatory governance are similarly challenging and require attention to multiple perspectives [108]. Attention to evaluation is growing in research and practice [109]. Recent academic studies have suggested comprehensive frameworks for evaluating the impact of co-production on adaptive capacity [110] and community-led methods for monitoring adaptation efforts [55]. However, existing methods for evaluation, which are often limited to measurable metrics, reliant on consensus, and time-bounded, may fail to capture these second and third order effects of transformative change [19,96,97]. To understand the true social or material transformations of engaged research for adaptation, novel methods need to be developed and supported by research institutions and funders.

Beyond supporting evaluation and monitoring, funders have a large role to play in guiding transformative engaged research for adaptation and climate services [47–49]. While calls for engagement continue to rise in grant-funded projects, mechanisms for funding remain relatively static. For example, small nonprofit partners are required to front the costs of their engagement rather than receive upfront payment, which is outside of the bounds of possibility for some organizations [48]. In order to stimulate more transformative engagement, especially between non-academic or government research partners, innovative funding mechanisms should be developed, tested, and reviewed. Due to recent limitations to climate research funding, especially in the U.S., strategies for how institutional researchers can support engaged research efforts requires urgent attention.

5. Conclusion

In the U.S., networks of knowledge production and governance of climate-related research are being rapidly reshaped. Key funding streams and institutional support mechanisms for climate research are currently disappearing and expected to further dematerialize. While these shifts present unprecedented challenges for adaptation researchers and practitioners in the U.S., there is no more important time to apply engaged research processes to expand the networks of adaptation knowledge production and build collective power to better respond to the climate risks facing our communities. Engaged research represents an opportunity to build solidarities between the public and the scientific community by creating spaces for broader and more inclusive knowledge production, encouraging innovation, and developing political capabilities to push forward a transformative adaptation agenda.

However, engaged research is not a panacea, and without careful planning and implementation, collaborative and participatory methodologies can reinforce many of the harmful norms in scientific research that early forms of participatory research sought to address. This essay provides learnings for a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, and funders aiming to avoid common pitfalls and advance the transformative potential of engaged research for adaptation. For students and early career researchers looking to understand how collaborative science fits within adaptation scholarship, this essay situates contemporary scholarship within the long history of participatory research traditions. For researchers, practitioners, and funders designing and implementing engaged research projects, this essay reflects on key themes and tensions and suggests a blueprint for funders and other research convenors to improve engaged research praxis. Deep engagement with the outstanding ethical and procedural questions structuring engaged research processes in adaptation and climate services may enable outcomes that transform unsustainable and unequitable paradigms and lead to safer and more just climate futures.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Drs. Robin Leichenko, Karen O’Neill, and Tammy Lewis for their helpful guidance and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Thank you also to Dr. Marjorie Kaplan for sharing her expertise on co-production and prompting discussions that guided my thinking about research governance while writing this essay.

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