Seminar Series on Partnerships Delivers Lessons for Students and Instructors

By Drs. Guillermo Auad, James “Jim” Kendall, and Rodney Cluck

In May 2024, 16 instructors from the Department of the Interior, the private sector, Non-Governmental Organizations, and tribal organizations hosted? a seminar series?on partnerships in five individual sessions totaling 7.5 hours. Throughout the sessions, the instructors (including the authors of this essay) emphasized that partnerships are complex social systems shaped by the norms of their specific local environment, but also influenced by the general conditions of society.

In the end all agreed that the seminar series was a worthwhile investment of time for all involved; in fact, the instructors felt that they learned as much from the sessions as the audience. In this short essay, we would like to share a few significant lessons learned from this incredible exercise, which involved 6 months of preparation.

Before we get into any more detail, if you gain anything from reading these few pages, we hope it includes the following three takeaways:

1. Creating, developing, and sustaining partnerships requires not accepting obvious answers and looking beyond the status quo – Thinking Outside the Box is Critical.
2. Highly productive and diverse partnerships are Social Systems that naturally address complex issues and often intentionally ignore arbitrary boundaries. They facilitate a convergence of multiple perspectives on validated and actionable results.
3. Patient, but Tenacious Champions are required for successful partnerships.

Thinking Outside the Box is a Must.

Why? Partnerships are often hard to build partly because there is no one-size-fits-all model or approach for creating, developing, and sustaining them. Partnerships are both an art and science that require creative thinking, or as we prefer to say, a ”larger-than-normal box” for a broader view of transactional and contextual elements.

In the sciences, we have come a long way and there is much experience to build upon. ?However, challenges remain because innovative ideas commonly face extra scrutiny, criticism, and skepticism. Not to mention that it often appears that there are far fewer innovators and “groundbreakers” than there are advocates of the status quo. This being the case, how do we move forward??

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them --Albert Einstein

What we learned from our own experiences and discussions with the audience is that we must work to instill the concepts and benefits of partnerships in newly minted scientists. This might include, for example, policies that encourage early career scientists to develop partnerships within and between educational institutions and with public and private organizations, as suggested by Zharikova and Sherstjuk (2019). This resonated well with the question that one participant asked during the first session:

What organization or agency takes the lead when starting a partnership, and how?

One of us responded that there is usually one or hopefully more participants working, sometimes behind the scenes, to contemplate, propose, or even develop alternative paths forward. This caused us to reflect. Looking down a different path can be difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes risky for these “out of the box thinkers” or – dare we say “Champions”? Coupling this hazardous path with those who may wish to stay the status quo draws not only on one’s patience and tenacity but also requires efforts to build trust. We all agreed, based on our own experiences (and bruises), that more champions and trust-builders are needed to work together to overcome common scientific and societal challenges.

Trust is the shortest route to results ?—Robert G. Allen

Partnerships Facilitate a Convergence on Validated and Actionable Results

Partnerships can be great mitigators of misinformation and disinformation (Frankfurt, 2005), fill information gaps, and help us transition to “an age of factuality” (Auad and Fath, 2022). During our five sessions, we came to realize that we were using our collective decades-long experiences to encourage the development of Champions, and more importantly, “Truth-chasers”. ?We further began to appreciate, along with our audience, the full dimension necessary to funnel the benefits of partnership in building credibility in science, and ultimately scientific literacy across all sectors of society.

With help from our audience, our collective experiences began to coalesce on how substantial and highly integrated partnerships bring together a wealth of perspectives that often converge to support the common good, i.e., societal benefits. This is achieved through collective creativity derived from nothing less than the participation of all partners and possibly even their respective stakeholders. We were “coming to know” that this way of co-producing new understandings, new knowledge, and possibly advances in technology, has a greater, positive impact on society. The inclusivity, integration, and diversity often resulting from broad partnerships can potentially address multiple challenges on multiple issues from local to global scales. The acknowledgement of diverse perspectives, and the added oversight resulting from multiple partners, often facilitates the development of validated, actionable, and more important (i.e., improved and more accepted) information. This co-production of knowledge from varied perspectives and the decisions arrived at may provide greater societal benefits and possibly improve the well-being of the participants. This might also be described as a “Peacebuilding” process.

There can be no true peace without righteousness – Jocelyn Soriano

Partnerships Deliver Societal Benefits

In a search for meaningful and truthful outcomes, partnerships can build highly useful and actionable products for the society upon which they are embedded. In this process, partnerships have promoted and facilitated the development of “cultures of care” (Gilbane et al., 2022), where partners develop trust and share common values of care for the environment, each other, and ultimately to the society where they belong and are embedded. This is no small task, and it is a slow process: it takes time to realize the benefits of these engagements, and this includes the building of trust between partners and a sense of joint ownership. In a culture of care these common values often include trust, quality communication, high transparency, and common or complementary goals, among others.

Then going back to the question asked by a member of the audience, do we need more partnership Champions? ?Undoubtedly yes! ?There are a plethora of societal challenges and at all scales, from local to global, that we must address: climate; food, water, and energy security; health, e.g., pandemics; etc. These challenges can negatively impact all aspects of society and at all scales. It can be disheartening to pause and realize just how divided and fragmented efforts can be when addressing such issues that span multiple boundaries.

We must view partnerships as a working arm of society, targeted to examine challenges through a view of multiple perspectives, looking past arbitrary boundaries to find the common good. So, partnerships even those focused on what would previously call the “hard sciences” are complex social systems creating the possibility of transforming challenges into opportunities.

The following quote from Elinor “Lin” Ostrom points to the need to address this complexity in governance.

The need for institutional and stakeholder diversity suggests that building resilience into the system requires designing complexity to govern complexity.? --Lin Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.

And this is why we often state:

Partnerships are Good Government -- Rodney Cluck

Moving forward.

Yes, partnerships are very hard work, but worthy of the effort. When investing in such endeavors it is important to bear in mind that, from a sociological perspective, partnerships resonate well with the ethos of science, particularly with the norms of Universalism and Commonality as defined by Merton (1973), while they also intersect with scientific integrity considerations (Kraemer-Diaz et al., 2015; Troughton and Obasi, 2022).

Or, to bring it closer to home, more “bang for the buck.”? But looking still deeper, partnerships often provide a more comprehensive picture in terms of developing new understandings, while delivering more and better societal benefits as a direct result of the former. And yet, there are still missed opportunities.? But it’s not all bad news. We are seeing more and more entities – governmental, industry, non-governmental organizations, academia, etc. – utilizing the principles of partnerships more often and taking the bold move of establishing strategic engagement coordinators and even offices. While more still needs to be done, the cadre of entities seeing this path and taking on the work is expanding.

In the five sessions of our seminar series , we emphasized the importance of recognizing that partnerships are critical components of larger social systems and, in particular, of society in general. We noted parallels between the creation of partnerships and how coaches of many sports assemble their teams and develop their plays. We also pointed out that self-organizing systems become sustainable when they achieve a healthy balance between resiliency and efficiency. However, more resilience is not necessarily better, a common misconception. This is because natural systems, e.g., socio-ecological systems exhibit natural tradeoffs between resilience and efficiency and therefore a specific balance between them (a “sweet spot”) is often associated with optimum systemic health.

We found that many partnerships begin at a stage characterized by low resiliency and low resources. As such, it is perhaps critically important to prepare future partnership-building Champions in both the art and science of navigating and adapting in these early phases. This is where there is a need to develop connectivity; inject flexibility; create positive redundancies; and build diversity of perspectives, expertise, seniority, gender, ethnicity and more.

Champions are made from something they have deep inside of them. A desire, a dream, a vision. --Mahatma Gandhi

In today’s world we need more Champions to create and develop partnerships so we can “do more with less!” This, in some cases, might become a matter of survival, such as in developing countries where, for example, subsistence fishermen must work collaboratively in their communities so they can feed themselves and their families more effectively (King and Faasili, 1999). The bottom line is that it can be ?a matter of survival.

Talking about survival, a few years back one of us (Guillermo) spoke to a survivor of the 1972 Andes plane crash (see the movie “Society of the Snow”) and was told? ? ?We made it because our only chance of surviving was to work together and, maybe less obvious, he added, working together brought out the best of each of us…we were never that good in our lives as we were on that mountain. Partnering for the common good and getting better individually. Does it really get any better than this? We think not.

If most people already know the benefits and the need for partnerships and if executive orders, national policies, and federal strategies call for increased partnering and partnerships, why don’t we see them more often? Why do we need to promote them? In our 2021 book “Partnerships in Marine Research,” we conclude that, despite everything, there is still not enough awareness, education, promotion, and recognition of the societal benefits of partnerships and those who champion them and make them a reality.

As a fresh example, one of our instructors reported that their employer did not recognize our seminar series as a legitimate training or continuing education endeavor.

So where are we? What’s next? Well, this is where Champions must meet the challenge and carry the message of the The National Oceanographic Partnership Program:

Partnerships are invaluable tools when resources are limited; what appear to be obvious priorities to all but do not fit “squarely” within the wheelhouse of a single organization or sector; or, just too big for any single entity.

So, to bring this essay to a conclusion, our Tip of the Day:

Think big, don’t be shy, socialize your ideas. Pick up the phone and call a colleague. Ask them: “What do you need, can I contribute? This is what I need, and I need you”?? --Guillermo Auad

While also keeping in mind what one of our esteemed colleagues and mentors taught us:

Working together is often more fun! --Mel Briscoe

Bonus Feature:

If you are wondering about our seminar series referenced here and want to know a bit more before you invest your time, the series included five sessions covering motivations, history, a primer on solidarities, an introduction to complex social systems, and a description for bridging organizations as the catalysts of partnerships (session 1). Then we describe case studies (session 2) and present new approaches to public-private partnerships and collaborative work with philanthropic organizations (session 3). In session 4, we address the topic of Partnering with Tribes, and conclude the series with lessons learned, a discussion on the role of policies in promoting and facilitating partnerships, and an outlook for the future (session 5). The sessions were well received and included participation from 16 federal agencies including the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Authors

Dr. Guillermo Auad is an oceanographer working on research coordination, and scientific integrity and quality. He graduated from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and brings 35 years of experience combining research, management, and lecturing. His publications included the use of ocean observations and models to study oceanic and atmospheric physics, as well as the adaptive dynamics of socio-ecological systems.

Dr. James (Jim) Kendall is an oceanographer specializing in the application of science, ocean exploration, and Indigenous knowledge to address marine resource issues. He has held positions in academia, private industry, and state and federal government. He currently lives in Metairie, Louisiana.

Dr. Rodney Cluck is an environmental social scientist with interests in the nexus between “use-inspired” science and policy.? He has worked on numerous multidisciplinary projects incorporating social values and Indigenous Knowledge into decision-making.?

Disclaimer: This essay was authored by Dr. Guillermo Auad, Dr. James (Jim) Kendall, and Dr. Rodney Cluck in their personal capacity. The opinions expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the Department of the Interior, or the United States government.

Acknowledgements: ?Many thanks to Dr. Prakash Rath and Dr. Alan Leonardi, for their reviews and constructive suggestions and to Michael Plummer, our BFF, and… "The Editor!"

References Cited.

Auad, G. and Fath, B.D., 2022. Towards a flourishing blue economy: Identifying obstacles and pathways for its sustainable development. Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, 4, p.100193.

Frankfurt, H.G., 2005. On bullshit. Princeton University Press.

Gilbane, L., Ambrose, R.F., Burnaford, J.L., Helix, M.E., Miner, C.M., Murray, S., Sullivan, K.M. and Whitaker, S.G., 2022. Long-term sustainability of ecological monitoring: perspectives from the Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network. In Partnerships in Marine Research: Case Studies, Lessons Learned and Policy Implications, Auad, G., and Wiese F. (eds), pp. 109-129, Oxford, UK, Elsevier.

King, M. and Faasili, U., 1999. Community‐based management of subsistence fisheries in Samoa. Fisheries Management and Ecology, 6(2), pp.133-144.

Kraemer Diaz, A.E., Spears Johnson, C.R. and Arcury, T.A., 2015. Perceptions that influence the maintenance of scientific integrity in community-based participatory research.?Health Education & Behavior,?42(3), pp.393-401.

Merton, R.K., 1973.?The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations. University of Chicago press, pp.1-278. ISBN: 0-226-52091-9.

Troughton, L. and Obasi, A., 2022. An exploration of practices affecting research integrity in global health partnerships.?BMJ Global Health,?7(8), p.e009092.

Zharikova, M. and Sherstjuk, V., 2019. Maintaining Scientific Integrity through Academic-Industrial Research and Development Cooperation. In?ICTERI?(pp. 398-408).

Notes/Definitions:

Champion By champion it is meant a highly driven person with the ability to advance a given idea, project, engage with others, and converge on a mutually beneficial outcome.

Complex System A large number of interconnected elements (species, humans, banks, companies) having diverse properties, functions and characteristics, which collective structure and processes defines the system itself and its overall dynamics.

Disinformation is false information spread in order to deceive people; while Misinformation refers to wrong information, or the fact that people are misinformed (Cambridge Dictionary).

Scientific Integrity Generally speaking, the adherence to common and/or well accepted practices of the universal scientific community when conducting scientific or scholarly activities. The extended oversight implied by the involvement of several partners favor the enhancement of public trust and increase transparency and accountability.