Integration into Research Teams Case Study - Integrating
Research Users into Research Teams KE can benefit from avoiding
preconceptions about the role stakeholders should play.
Professor Alister Scott outlines how an initiative within the
Rural Economy and Land Use (Relu) Programme achieved success by
creating a ‘soup’ that deliberately blurred boundaries between
researchers and research users. The aim of the Managing
Environmental Change at the Fringe project was to pinpoint
better ways of managing places where the town meets the
countryside. Historically, the rural-urban fringe has suffered
from the chaos of unrelated decisions, largely because it’s a
frontier zone not just in a physical sense but also between
natural and social sciences, between the natural and built
environment, between spatial planning system and ecosystem-led
approaches, and between researchers and policy-
makers/practitioners. We needed to break down these barriers and
bring together parties who think in very different ways and
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