  A fast-paced policy context is characteristic of energy and climate research,
which strives to develop solutions to wicked problems such as climate change.
Funding agencies in the European Union recognize the importance of linking
research and policy in climate and energy research. This calls for an increased
understanding of how stakeholder engagement can effectively be used to
co-design research questions that include stakeholders' concerns. This paper
reviews the current literature on stakeholder engagement, from which we create
a set of criteria. These are used to critically assess recent and relevant
papers on stakeholder engagement in climate and energy projects. We obtained
the papers from a scoping review of stakeholder engagement through workshops in
EU climate and energy research. With insights from the literature and current
EU climate and energy projects, we developed a workshop programme for
stakeholder engagement. This programme was applied to the European Climate and
Energy Modelling Forum project, aiming to co-design the most pressing and
urgent research questions according to European stakeholders. The outcomes
include 82 co-designed and ranked research questions for nine specific climate
and energy research themes. Findings from the scoping review indicate that
papers rarely define the term 'stakeholder'. Additionally, the concepts of
co-creation, co-design, and co-production are used interchangeably and often
without definition. We propose that workshop planners use stakeholder
identification and selection methods from the broader stakeholder engagement
literature.
