CLIMATE ADAPTATION SCIENCE TO ACTION: MEASURING USE OF CASC-FUNDED RESEARCH

The eight regional and one national Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs) work with academic and federal researchers to provide decision-relevant science concerning climate change and climate adaptation to natural and cultural resource managers. The CASCs encourage and facilitate coproduction of science, a practice by which researchers and end-users collaborate throughout the research process to ensure the decision-relevance of the final product. However, like any other scientific endeavor, it is difficult to know whether the research produced has been useful to or used by its intended audience. We have applied program evaluation literature and methods to address this question by building an evaluation approach for research funded by the Southeast CASC in its first-round funding, from 2011-2016. The evaluation will be modeled after the Theory of Change (ToC) we have developed around the research, where relevant variables will be analyzed using structural equation models to mimic the ToC structure. Our evaluation approach will be refined and published for use by similar groups, including other regional CASCs, in the future. In this presentation, we will focus on the development and early results of the survey instrument developed to measure stakeholders’ use of each research project. The survey development process includes multiple rounds of interviews and working group review, as well as building on previous relevant literature, and will be validated using factor analysis.