Stakeholder engagement in research: The case of retrofit 2050 research project

Stakeholder engagement has recently been increasingly identified as key to research projects success. Stakeholder engagement is often seen as communication of the completed research project findings; however engagement with stakeholders that focuses on communicating with and involving them in the knowledge production process is increasingly accepted as the best practice. The study aimed at exploring how the Retrofit 2050 research team engaged fully with relevant stakeholders. The study examines how key stakeholders were recruited, engagement approaches and how the whole process was managed. It illustrates the application of the approaches for stakeholder analysis, engagement and knowledge exchange strategies. This research presents a literature review that considered the power of stakeholder engagement to sustainable urban retrofit research and identified the main process of stakeholder engagement and management. The authors provide participatory and participant observational research perspective of how key stakeholders were engaged throughout the research process. The findings indicate that, engaging with key stakeholders in research can legitimise the result and improves the quality of research output. The study highlights that, personal or one-to-one method of stakeholder engagement is the most commonly used approach to promote stakeholder-researcher relationships. It provides a research case study that can serve as a reference for the systematic consideration of other research teams about the practical approaches for stakeholder engagement in interdisciplinary sustainable urban environment research projects.