Abstract for: Stakeholder engagement in participatory system dynamics for transdisciplinary research

Transdisciplinary research is useful when addressing complex challenges and its success strongly depends on the relationship of researchers with stakeholders. Research on achieving meaningful stakeholder engagement often takes a static perspective with little dynamic understanding of stakeholder engagement. Thus, this research aims to bring temporality into the analysis of project-stakeholder relationships. We map the changes over time of stakeholder engagement in three case studies. Here, we use BOT graph as a means to distinguish the quality and quantity of engagement. BOT graps prove useful to address stakeholder engagement. We observe a variety of behavioural patterns with the quality of engagement increasing in two of the case studies but dropping abruptly in a third one. It shows that a strong quality of engagement is no guarantee for continuous engagement if based on a ‘thin’ network structure. These insights indicate where researchers need to potentially pay extra attention to the process of building ‘ties’ differently while the network context changes. We hope our work will set the scene for a future research towards more resilience in researcher-stakeholder relationships in transdisciplinary projects.