How practitioners negotiate and balance their goals for regional sustainability transformation in collaborations with universities

Complex regional sustainability problems require the engagement and collaboration of diverse actor groups, introducing their specific competencies and resources. In this context, transdisciplinary regional partnerships between universities and non-academic stakeholders can play a crucial role for co-producing adequate solutions. However, the perspectives and needs of practitioners—non-academic stakeholders from business, politics, and civil society—in such partnerships remain underexplored. This study therefore shifts the focus to practitioners, addressing two core questions: (1) What do practitioners aspire to and require when they cooperate with universities to promote sustainable regional development? (2) What is their view on sustainable regional development and how does that relate to the views of university researchers? Using Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development as a case study, we analyse two transdisciplinary regional transfer projects to explore the motivations and expectations of practitioners as well as the dynamics in these collaborations. The findings reveal that practitioners value trust, clear communication, and immediate outcomes and benefits as well as long-term institutionalised cooperation. The study shows that practitioners are willing to negotiate with university partners the conception of regional sustainable development and to contribute to the regional common good, if the cooperation takes their interests and the regional context into account. Key success factors identified include: (1) fostering trust through bottom-up, locally embedded initiatives, even if they require adapting sustainability goals; (2) using organisational structures such as advisory boards to separate operational decision making from substantive negotiations; and (3) establishing long-term intermediary structures to sustain partnerships beyond single projects.