Do universities support solutions-oriented collaborative research? Constraints to wicked problems scholarship in higher education

Questions persist about how universities should prepare researchers to confront current and future wicked problems. Beyond training, this paper examines whether higher education’s institutional incentives support solutions-oriented, collaborative research and whether these supports are distributed evenly across the academy. Using survey and interview data from 44 researchers working at the food–energy–water (FEW) nexus at U.S. Carnegie R1 universities, the study reveals an uneven institutional landscape that shapes, in different ways, the forms of solutions-oriented, collaborative scholarship fostered across five academic positions. The paper reflects on what these findings imply for higher education’s capacity to nurture wicked problems scholarship and notes the study’s limitations.

Michael Carolan