Aug 2026· Sustainability Science· 0 citations· 49 references
Abstract
Collaboration across the ‘siloes’ of government is key to unlocking a transformative paradigm shift in climate change adaptation (CCA), yet such ‘mainstreaming’ efforts have been unsuccessful to date. This paper argues that these shortcomings are rooted primarily in the mainstreaming literature’s neglect of people’s worldviews as an integral component of successful collaboration. For an individual’s internal dimensions to be recognized alongside disciplinary knowledge requires inclusiveness and expansiveness in both organizational spaces and in people. This paper presents a novel framework aiming to facilitate inclusiveness and expansiveness in both areas: the CCA Worldview Map. The CCA Worldview Map unpacks the idea of transformation into five dimensions, each with three levels of complexity, which represent distinct phases of the public planning process: When and What, relating to the input; Who, relating to the process; How, relating to the output; and Why, relating to the outcomes and impact. Using interview data from sixteen managers and practitioners at the local government level across Norway, I show how the CCA Worldview Map can be used to map understandings of CCA, unearthing a plurality of worldviews within Norwegian public administration. I discuss the framework’s utility along three lines: as a vocabulary for articulating differing interpretations of CCA and their relationships, thus identifying complementarity instead of conflict; as a tool that consolidates a breadth of ideas from the CCA literature into a single framework; and as an aid in uncovering cognitive dissonance and expanding personal transformative awareness.
What is new?
As financial pressures intensify and research becomes more complex and interdependent, universities are increasingly prioritising collaborative work within and beyond academia. This shift has revealed a significant gap in co-production and collaboration and a critical need for professional support in identifying stakeholders and developing and facilitating partnerships across disciplines and sectors. This paper addresses that gap by combining an evidence base grounded in academic literature with insights from practice to create a transferable framework for research-enabling staff. The framework provides the tools needed to drive the culture shift essential for universities to navigate complexity, strengthen collaboration, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.
What was the approach?
This work combines systems thinking, stakeholder theory, and qualitative, practice-based insights. The conceptual framing draws on a literature review of stakeholder theory from business and management, particularly Freeman’s foundational research, alongside Meadows’ concept of leverage points for systemic change, Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner’s systems convening as a leadership practice, Wheatley’s work on leadership in complex systems, and the UCL Co-Production Collective model for inclusive stakeholder engagement.
The framing is further informed by 33 facilitated conversations conducted in summer 2024 with a diverse cross-section of the UK research ecosystem, including technicians, research managers, professional services staff, and others in research-enabling roles. These in-depth discussions explored power, leadership, recognition, and cultural dynamics in collaborative environments and illustrate emergent patterns that informed the theoretical framing and practical examples presented in this paper.
What is the academic impact?
Effective stakeholder engagement for co-production requires a systematic approach underpinned by the often-invisible infrastructure of research enablers. Achieving this frequently requires a culture shift within the institutions in which we operate. Universities therefore need to design and sustain systems that actively facilitate this culture shift. This paper gives evidence, a transferable framework, and applied examples to equip research enablers to participate fully in this structure by providing a framework and embedding co-production principles in theory and practice.
What is the wider impact?
Behind every successful collaboration is an invisible architecture: research enablers who build trust, connect systems, and create the cultural conditions for co-production. This research makes that architecture visible and actionable, driving a culture shift as institutions design and sustain the infrastructure needed to embed collaboration and co-production at scale.
Helen Elizabeth Bryant, Alys Kay· Journal of Research Manageme...· 0 citations
In commons and institutional research, the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IADF) has proven itself as a useful tool to investigate the complexities of social-environmental systems. It is effective in guiding researchers through the process of understanding complex problem situations. The framework helps to conceptually unravel the institutional scaffoldings structuring human-nature interactions. Yet, a long-standing critique of the IADF and its derivatives is that they fall short of making different workings of ‘power’ explicit, especially those illuminating structural and intersectional aspects. We believe that the IADF holds potential to help operationalise a large variety of perspectives on power and visualise how they may play out in commons governance regimes – a potential that has been underused thus far.
In this paper, we draw on discussions about the necessity and advantages of integrating the study of institutions and power and engage with various conceptualisations of these terms. We reflect on existing proposals for such an integrated analysis, highlighting the contribution of our broad approach to understanding power. Further, we lay out the methodology we used for reviewing literature on power theory and identifying related empirical questions, mapping these questions to different IADF elements in a coding matrix, and creating the basis for the development of a diagnostic tool from this initial mapping. In a section dedicated to theoretical framing, we outline the main approaches to power that inform this paper and then continue to introduce the pathway toward our diagnostic tool through a few exemplary applications, including a discussion on limitations and potential next steps.
Iasc-Ecn Power Collective, Désirée Schwindenhammer, Lavanya Suresh et al.· International Journal of the...· 0 citations
This paper examines how new policy concepts are taken up in practice, focusing on the Circular Economy of Water (CEW) in the Netherlands. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with practitioners from different governance levels, regions, and sectors, we analyze how CEW is interpreted, reshaped, and mainstreamed into existing water-governance structures. We identify six lock-ins that constrain CEW's implementation and three mechanisms through which it is mainstreamed. Our findings show that lock-ins and mainstreaming mechanisms are closely interconnected: While CEW adapts to existing systems, it can also reinforce them, at times leading to rebound effects or supporting business-as-usual practices. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the dilemmas related to CEW governance, offering insights to enhance sustainable water management practices and transformative changes. We argue that design-oriented approaches can inform how CEW is imagined and implemented, helping to reconsider whether it addresses the causes of unsustainable practices or offers temporary fixes.
Noelle M C G Lasseur, D. Beukers, K. Holstead et al.· Ambio· 0 citations
Digital transformation (DT) remains central to information systems and public administration scholarship, particularly amid the rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). This study presents a systematic literature review of 125 peer-reviewed articles published between 2021 and 2026 to synthesise contemporary public-sector DT dynamics. Following the PRISMA 2020 reporting standard and thematic synthesis, the review maps conceptualisations of DT, identifies key organisational, technological and environmental drivers, and examines their implications for public value. The findings indicate that DT is predominantly conceptualised as a sociotechnical and public-value-oriented process shaped primarily by leadership, organisational culture and strategic alignment rather than technological investment alone. Organisational and managerial factors emerge as the most consistent predictors of transformation outcomes across diverse institutional contexts, while technological and environmental conditions influence the pace, direction and unevenness of implementation. Despite the rapid diffusion of AI and GenAI in government practice, only a limited proportion of the literature substantively engages with AI, and fewer studies address GenAI, large language models or foundation models, revealing a widening gap between technological developments and scholarly inquiry. Building on the established organisational-technological-environmental framework, the review identifies four additional explanatory dimensions: citizen co-production, digitally induced administrative burden, street-level administrative reconfiguration, and multidimensional public-value evaluation. The study concludes by identifying priorities for future research on GenAI governance, accountability and equity, while offering practical implications for public managers and policymakers pursuing AI-enabled public-sector transformation.
Objectives: This study examines INA-DIGITAL as a flagship initiative for Indonesia’s Collaborative Digital Transformation (CDT) toward 2045, aiming to understand how multi-stakeholder collaboration, technological readiness, and citizen-centric principles shape digital governance. Prior work: Grounded in CDT theory, which emphasizes network governance and socio-technical systems, the research addresses challenges such as institutional fragmentation and digital divides. Approach: A qualitative design was employed using documentary analysis, secondary literature review, and NVivo 12 Plus for thematic coding, cluster analysis, and visualization. Results: Results reveal strong correlations among organizational readiness, citizen-centric service, and service delivery, confirming that progress in one area reinforces others. Narrative and mapping analyses highlight INA-DIGITAL’s positioning as a collaborative ecosystem integrating governance, technology, and public engagement. Implications: The study concludes that INA-DIGITAL exemplifies a holistic approach to digital transformation, though its success depends on balancing infrastructure readiness with accelerated service innovation. Limitations include reliance on secondary data and absence of primary stakeholder interviews, restricting generalizability. Value: Future research should adopt mixed-method approaches, integrate longitudinal tracking, and explore comparative cases across Southeast Asia, complemented by advanced analytics such as social network and sentiment analysis to deepen insights into collaborative mechanisms and public trust in digital governance.
Rio Yusri Maulana, A. Sutan, Aditya Romadhon et al.· Journal· 0 citations
By attending to the broader historical and societal contexts that shape organizational members’ interpretations of diversity management, embedded sensemaking analysis surfaces context-specific tensions that may otherwise remain hidden. The study proposes a methodological strategy that combines cue interpretation, stance analysis, extra-discursive referencing, and contextual issue-framing to trace how these tensions emerge. The approach is illustrated through a comparative case study of White men in South Africa and the United States, a group whose sensemaking is consequential for the implementation of diversity management. Analysis of 32 middle managers shows how context-specific tensions are patterned differently across the two settings. In South Africa, these tensions are explained by perceptions of compromised quality, the need to be indispensable, and the value of scarce skills. In the United States, they are shaped more by moral awakening and insider–outsider dynamics. Rather than treating these tensions as direct outcomes, the study interprets them as observable patterns through which deeper explanatory mechanisms can be inferred. On this basis, the article argues that embedded sensemaking analysis can help diversity management practitioners diagnose context-specific tensions and develop context-informed responses that are more closely attuned to local conditions.