Removing the gatekeeper to future scenarios: Co-creating research questions grounded in stakeholder concerns over model tractability

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Abstract
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are increasingly criticised as opaque and disconnected from the concerns of those affected by their results. Participatory and transdisciplinary approaches respond to this, but stakeholder input is often simplified, narrowed, or dropped once it meets a model's technical limitations, without explanation. This paper asks what happens when model tractability no longer filters which research questions (RQs) stakeholders can raise in the first place. Drawing on the Horizon Europe project DIAMOND, we describe a transdisciplinary process in which 40 RQs were co-designed with stakeholders across nine themes, eight scoped in advance and one that emerged unprompted, then triaged for tractability against six IAMs. In six of the nine themes, stakeholder input redirected or extended the project's initial framing rather than confirming it, and none of the 40 RQs was rated as requiring no model adjustment. Rather than treating these limitations as reasons to filter questions in advance, we argue that transparency about them should be an output of the process itself. Research questions IAMs cannot yet answer are documented and published as an open repository instead of being silently dropped, turning an unexamined gatekeeper into a visible, contestable record of whose futures still need modelling.

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