Short Abstract

How is societal impact co-produced? This study analyses reports from Brazilian postgraduate programmes to map the impacts emerging from university-stakeholder interactions. It presents a new typology of impacts—from performative to transformative.

Description

Building an evaluation culture requires moving beyond measurement to understand the relational processes that generate societal value. While co-production and participatory methods are central to this goal, there is little empirical understanding of how different forms of university-stakeholder engagement produce various kinds of impact. This study addresses this gap by asking: what types of societal impact emerge from the interactions between universities and external actors, and what do these interactions reveal about the nature of the evaluation cultures being built?

We use the theoretical lens of “productive interactions” to analyse the official quadrennial evaluation reports of four top-ranked Brazilian postgraduate programmes in Administration. These reports, submitted to the national evaluation agency (CAPES), provide a unique dataset for mapping how programmes articulate their societal contributions. Employing a multiple-case study method combined with a structured three-level coding analysis (Gioia et al., 2013), we systematically deconstruct the reported interactions to develop theoretical propositions about the impact-generation process.

Our central contribution is a new, evidence-based typology of four distinct impacts emerging from these interactions: Co-impact, characterised by mutually beneficial outcomes and transformations for both the university and the stakeholder; Selective impact, which prioritises actions with limited beneficiaries; Reputational impact, aimed primarily at institutional visibility; and Punctual impact, resulting from one-off, short-term actions. This typology reveals a critical distinction between interactions that foster a genuine culture of co-production versus those that perform impact for legitimation purposes.

The findings highlight the power dynamics that shape who is heard. We demonstrate that programmes at prestigious institutions tend to engage with high-status actors, leading to reputational impacts, while programmes with a strong social orientation are more likely to generate transformative co-impact through deep engagement with local actors, particularly Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

This paper provides a novel framework for analysing the quality of stakeholder engagement and its resulting impacts. It offers a critical perspective from the Global South on the challenges of building authentic evaluation cultures in environments shaped by institutional pressures, providing a nuanced understanding that moves beyond a simple evaluation of outcomes to an assessment of the interactions themselves.