Environmental research has the power to connect with people's everyday lives and spark their imaginations. In 2016: a NERC scientist's graphic illustrating global temperatures spiralling upwards went viral on social media and was then used during the Opening Ceremony of the Rio Olympics, being seen by more than 1 billion people; 12.3 million people watched episodes of BBC's Planet Earth II programme making it the most-watched nature show; over 500,000 volunteers contributed 8 million sightings to the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch; 12,000 people donated the idle time of their computers to ClimatePrediction.net to run climate models; and 500 people were involved in Biohacking and DIY Science experimentation. Our ambition is for large-scale public involvement in participatory research practices, such as citizen science, in order to benefit research, researchers and members of the public. We want to progress from 'engagement' being solely passive consumption of media-channelled facts, or ad hoc one-off contribution to a single initiative, to an ongoing active and routine engagement with environmental research, participating, questioning and debating. Our vision is to leverage the power of the people and their involvement in environmental science at all stages of the research - from research design to explaining the evidence and impact - to address major environmental challenges, co-produce novel research and engage on their own terms. We want to create a generation of researchers who know how to utilise these techniques of successful public engagement and citizen science, and pay attention to the ethical and social implications of participation and the environmental issues in question. We want to establish the research commitment and NGO link that will enable successful co-production of environmental knowledge. Recent research by ComRes (2017) suggests that people's interest in environmental research increases when they are able to make a connection to their own lives. Yet, only a minority understand what constitutes or regularly engage with environmental research, although many want to hear more. In order to create genuine and sustainable change in public engagement with environmental research, OPENER combines the shared enthusiasm for the environment and the public's curiosity for the natural world with the expanding public engagement capacity of multidisciplinary researchers, practitioners, public-facing organisations and community groups. OPENER will scope out and build commitment for a national community of practice (CoP) for public engagement with environmental research. We believe that active public engagement and debate must: 1. be a multidisciplinary and partnership-building endeavour; 2. actively build on existing expertise in citizen science and participatory engagement; 3. acknowledge people have a complex identities, often with contradictory opinions; 4. respect and value all knowledge as meaningful and promote pluralism in expertise; 5. develop increased capacity, interest and skills of researchers and audiences; 6. enable avenues of engagement that acknowledge different needs, interests and availability; 7. facilitate public involvement in all stages of the scientific process and make explicit links to everyday life. Our Team who co-created OPENER is made up of national- and world-leaders in: environmental science (climate, ecology, soil, marine); public engagement and citizen science; cross-disciplinary social science; and public- and membership-facing organisations. We share a commitment to collective learning and embrace the new ways of thinking and doing required to ensure the sustainability of a national CoP. We will engage with a wide range of stakeholders to deliver an intergrated vision, mission, core values and joint activities for public engagement with environmental research in the UK.

The 'University of Local Knowledge' (ULK) is a community project that celebrates local skills and knowledge, helping community members to value and spread their knowledge which in turn will aid community stability. The project has the full support of the local community, and is led in part by a steering group of community representatives. Working with artist Suzanne Lacy, KWMC has begun to capture film clips, or 'classes', in which residents share expertise and co-construct knowledge through events and performances.We will build on this foundation by developing technologies and techniques that help us scale up and study community skill and praxis. The University of Local Knowledge will bring together KWMC and the Knowle West community with a team of academics, artists and educators to study the deployment and use of technologies and techniques to collaboratively develop knowledge to enhance our understanding of the relationships between physical and digital community. We will help capture skills in a University-like structure in order to teach and publicise to others within and beyond the community; individual 'classes' will be assembled into programmes of 'study' that will be housed in 'departments' and 'faculties'. We will build systems through which further 'classes' can be added and pedagogic structures can be changed by contributors. We have chosen University as a deliberately contentious metaphor to provoke debate around what constitutes knowledge and why values are placed on different spheres of expertise. These 'classes' will be films/videos of Knowle West residents describing how to do something that they are an expert at; KWMC have captured an initial pool of examples which can be used to populate ULK. The resulting ULK structure will be visualised as a network of classes, departments and faculties. We will implement such structures within an online web service, and allow users both to comment and upload new classes, but also allow experienced members to adapt and 'mash up' the structure of ULK itself in order to better organise or present programmes of study. These web services will also be displayed in physical installations deployed within Bristol. In addition to configuring programmes of study we will convene a series of events including a conference with 'seminars' arranged in local sites, including shops, libraries and homes, with academics and local experts paired in conversation.

This project will bring together community partners and academics from 4 existing Connected Communities (CC) projects in a workshop and small working groups to share ideas and experiences and develop guidance and learning materials on ethics in community-based participatory research (CBPR). The project will be supported by international advisors from 5 countries and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) as a partner. Recently interest has grown in CBPR - that is, research tackling issues relevant to communities of place, interest and identity and involving affected people in planning, undertaking, disseminating and using research. This approach is often adopted to give people who are usually the objects of research greater control over the process, to embed research skills in communities and to increase research impact. CBPR approaches are regarded as particularly useful in the context of 'hard to reach' communities, and in research on sensitive issues. Many ethical challenges arise in CBPR - particularly in relation to the power of professional researchers, the blurring of boundaries between community members and researchers and the inflexibility of institutional structures (including university research ethics committees) to cope with unpredictability and complex partnership arrangements. Aims: To deepen understanding of the complex ethical issues and challenges in CBPR and develop ethical guidance, case studies and practical exercises from the UK in a range of settings and disciplinary areas for use in future CC and other research projects. Objectives 1)undertake a rapid review of ethical issues in published findings of all CC projects and a detailed synthesis of 4 existing CC projects. 2)Engage in dialogue with a range of stakeholders, including community partners from the projects, international advisors and NCCPE to identify further ethical issues, share and analyse ethical problems and ways of tackling these. 3)Produce a document and web-based materials offering ethical guidance, case studies, case examples with commentaries and learning materials relevant to CBPR. 4)Encourage improvement in institutional research ethics review, policies, procedures, training and support to take account of the challenges and complexities of CBPR. 5)Develop greater awareness/improved practice among university and community researchers and other stakeholders in relation to ethical issues in CBPR. The project will 1) Finalise 'guidelines on ethical conduct' to be drafted by the current Durham CC project. 2) Produce 4 case studies, each featuring a different CBPR project, written to show how ethical principles are applied in practice and to highlight ethical issues in the project (e.g. how a partnership agreement was put in place). 3) Produce 4 case examples of specific ethical problems/dilemmas, written from the perspective of a research participant, outlining details of particular ethical difficulties (e.g. discriminatory attitudes in the research group). Each case example will be followed by 2 or 3 commentaries - at least one written by a community researcher and another by an academic or research student (including international advisors). 4) Practical exercises for use by CBPR teams and in training for academic staff, students and community partners. The materials will be published on the NCCPE website as a downloadable pdf file and also in sections, to which further cases, commentaries and exercises can be added over time as an on-going resource in partnership with Durham University's Centre for Social Justice and Community Action. The project has potential to benefit academics, research ethics committees, third and public sector bodies, funders/sponsors and communities where research takes place. Dissemination by NCCPE and other bodies will result in raised awareness of ethical issues in CBPR amongst researchers, funders and participants; and improved policies and processes.

This project advances an authentic, strategic community university partnership working across the Connected Communities Programme and beyond. It kick starts a cultural shift that acknowledges community engagement in research as essential to understanding and promoting community university collaborations. One of the drivers for community partners and academics engaged in community university partnership working is the potential these ventures have for improving social conditions and tackling inequalities. Collaboration between communities and universities in the UK as a device for social change is gaining impetus, as more and more partnerships produce findings that demonstrate positive impact. However, there is a major capacity issue for community partners to participate effectively both in individual partnerships with university academics and in the larger strategic policy making groups that have impact and promote good practice. For example, whilst many academics have the opportunity to support any ongoing learning by attending conferences and securing faculty buyouts, community partners rarely get to meet or network to share their experiences and increase their knowledge base. Funding for their participation is hard to acquire. So far, the majority of what we know about what helps and hinders community university partnership working has been presented from an academic viewpoint. The chance to learn from community partner experience and feed this into improving future working and related HE policy is overlooked. We want to set the foundation for a UK wide community partner network that once formed, will influence HE policy and practice: 1: Community partners have co-written this bid and will lead on delivering its objectives in relation to community mobilisation and inclusion. An academic engagement group will work in parallel with community partners. We plan to start by bringing together a group of 20 experienced community partners to share their successes, reflect on the challenges and identify promising practices that support partnership working to tackle social inequalities. To do this, we will create a core planning group of community partners and others, to organise the first UK wide community partner Summit in June 2012, drawing on the expertise of our North American partners. By creating a safe space at which partners can explore their experiences of working with universities openly and freely, we hope to build community partner capacity to influence both the university that they work with and share the learning from this at a national level to inform HEFCE policy and funding. Summit planning will be informed by collating the learning and common issues of concern identified by the CCP, Beacons and SECC projects. 2: The Summit should inspire and enthuse attendees so that they help advance the recommendations and actions from the Summit at local, regional and national levels. The experience should help sustain and build the resilience of community partners so that they feel fit to shape conversations and influence policy regarding issues of power, equity, shared decision making, funding and sustainability. Working groups will be established to provide the vehicle/mechanism for community partners to contribute to Summit follow-up activities. A significant feature of this stage will involve community partners and CCP academics meeting together to continue dialogue and action immediately after the initial Summit to produce high quality outputs. 3: We will create a hub for a self-sustaining community partner forum to collectively share and learn from the Summit when project funding ceases. It is vital that the capacity built through this project is available to future CCPs and feeds into strategic developments for individual universities, HEFCE and the Research Councils. Post project resources will be available for academics and community partners to use, hosted through a dedicated presence on the NCCPE website

Decision-making about heritage is changing and changing with it are definitions of 'heritage'. New legislation in the form of the Localism Act (2011), which aims to give more decision-making powers to local communities, can be located within a wider participatory turn which is questioning professional expertise and institutional legitimacy and is having the effect of pushing the definitions, knowledge, valuing and management of 'heritage' into new areas. To set a responsive research agenda for heritage studies and policy this project will co-design (Phase 1) and co-produce (Phase 2) research through creating new connections between the knowledge and perspectives of people from a range of organizations, communities, groups and perspectives who are situated in different places within heritage decision-making. The project Research Team will work together in the Phase 1 co-design phase through a series of iterative cycles informed by the 'extended' or 'radical' epistemology (Schon 1995) associated with participatory and systemic action research approaches (e.g. Banks et al. 2012; Burns 2007). Ideas we have drawn on relate to valuing and creating space for different ways of knowing such as experiential; presentational; propositional and practical (Heron and Reason 1997), the different ways through which 'knowing' is produced through action, interaction, experience, conceptualization and reflection (after Kolb 1984; Burns 2007, p. 34) and the productivity of feeling confident in what you know (your own perspective and opinions) as well as the productivity of a sense of 'unknowing'(Vasudevan 2011). Our co-design process will happen through a six-step process. In Step 1 'Entry points: Initial Reflections and Conceptualizations' the team will work with the PI to individually delineate their own positions and perspectives. In Step 2 'Workshop 1: Scoping the issues' the team will meet up and use techniques of storytelling and diagramming to scope the issues which will inform the final research design. In Step 3 'New perspectives: Experiential "unknowns" and Reflection', there will be a shifting of perspectives through the innovative use of 'day a life swap' which will see team members spending a day with someone else in the team and, through this, draw on the embodied learning than comes from being in unfamiliar places and contexts. In Step 4 'Workshop 2: Making decisions about the research project' a final workshop will draw on the experiential and reflective learning of Steps 2 and 3 to underpin the co-designing of Phase 2 research and Step 5 'Write and Collaboratively Revise final plan for AHRC'. The final step, Step 6, will see the submission of the 'interim progress report'. The Phase 1 outcomes will be the new relationships formed between team members and the development of a broader network of critical friends for the project. The Phase 1 outputs will be the Phase 2 research design itself, an 'in process' blog and website and a 2 page PDF reflecting on and capturing the co-design process. Looking forward to Phase 2, the Phase 1 Research Team will become the management group and will oversee the research direction. Indicatively we anticipate that we may identify a small number of parallel lines of inquiry that will give us targeted insights into different issues and questions related to the project's guiding question. Drawing on a systemic approach, we might deliberately site these inquiries in different places and use them to illuminate otherwise disconnected aspects of heritage practice and decision-making. These lines of inquiry could be led by any member of the Phase 1 Research Team and certainly might well be led by members of the Research Team not based in HEIs, with support from the PI. The connections between the lines of inquiry might be drawn out in workshops which will increase the reach of engagement and bring together the Research Team and wider academic, professional and community networks.