PartKommPlus had two objectives:

(1) To gain new and comprehensible (evidence-based) insights into facilitating and inhibiting conditions for successful participation in community health promotion. Special consideration was given to

• the participation of disadvantaged groups in community processes,
• the promotion of cooperation between practitioners and their coordination (governance),
• investigating different forms of participation and their effects within the framework of municipal strategies,
• testing participatory methods of health reporting,
• the role of participation in municipal planning processes,
• the possibilities of sustainable establishment of participation within the framework of municipal strategies.

(2) To further develop participatory health research as a health science approach in the field of health promotion in Germany in cooperation with the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research (ICPHR).

The research questions of the collaborative were:

• What is the structure and quality of cooperation in community health promotion (between professionals and citizens)? (Cooperation)
• How can the joint development and implementation of municipal health promotion strategies be managed? (Governance)
• How can municipal health promotion be designed in such a way that stakeholders from different sectors (e.g. local government, local politics, health insurance companies, civil society, associations) and the population participate, especially with the inclusion of people from vulnerable population groups? (Forms of participation)
• What effects does the participation of actors from different sectors and target groups have on the success of community health promotion? (Impact)
• Which methods of participatory health research are effective to support community health promotion? (Methods)
• What contributions can participatory approaches to epidemiology, health monitoring (HHR) and planning make to municipal cooperation in health promotion and vice versa? (participatory epidemiology)
• What are the conducive and inhibiting conditions for successful cooperation in a participatory research collaborative project? (Participatory research in a collaborative project)

In the second funding phase (2018-2021), the aim was also to show the impact of PartKommPlus, to trace the pathways to impact and to make them public in the form of impact narratives. The objectives were:

• To identify and demonstrate the impact, intended and unintended, of participatory research afforded by the consortium PartKommPlus and its subproject
• To identify and demonstrate pathways to impact shaped by the participatory research consortium PartKommPlus and its subprojects