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Journal ArticleDOI

A How-to Guide for Coproduction of Actionable Science

01 May 2017-Conservation Letters (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)-Vol. 10, Iss: 3, pp 288-296
TL;DR: The most reliable route to actionable science is coproduction, whereby managers, policy makers, scientists, and other stakeholders first identify specific decisions to be informed by science, and then jointly define the scope and context of the problem, research questions, methods, and outputs, make scientific inferences, and develop strategies for the appropriate use of science.
Abstract: Resource managers often need scientific information to match their decisions (typically short-term and local) to complex, long-term, large-scale challenges such as adaptation to climate change. In such situations, the most reliable route to actionable science is coproduction, whereby managers, policy makers, scientists, and other stakeholders first identify specific decisions to be informed by science, and then jointly define the scope and context of the problem, research questions, methods, and outputs, make scientific inferences, and develop strategies for the appropriate use of science. Here, we present seven recommended practices intended to help scientists, managers, funders and other stakeholders carry out a coproduction project, one recommended practice to ensure that partners learn from attempts at coproduction, and two practices to promote coproduction at a programmatic level. The recommended practices focus research on decisions that need to be made, give priority to processes and outcomes over stand-alone products, and allocate resources to organizations and individuals that engage in coproduction. Although this article focuses on the coproduction of actionable science for climate change adaptation and natural resource management, the approach is relevant to other complex natural-human systems.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors reviewed the literature on the political and power dimensions of co-production and showed how depoliticization dynamics in coproduction reinforce rather than mitigate existing unequal power relations and how they prevent wider societal transformation from taking place.

306 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Carolyn AF Enquist*, Stephen T Jackson, Gregg M Garfin, Frank W Davis, Leah R Gerber, Jeremy A Littell, Jennifer L Tank, Adam J Terando, Tamara U Wall, Benjamin Halpern, J Kevin Hiers, Toni Lyn Morelli, Elizabeth McNie, Nathan L Stephenson, Matthew A Williamson, Connie A Woodhouse, Laurie Yung, Mark W Brunson, Kimberly R Hall, Lauren M Hallett, Dawn M Lawson, Max A Moritz, Koren Nydick, Amber Pairis, Andrea J
Abstract: Carolyn AF Enquist*, Stephen T Jackson, Gregg M Garfin, Frank W Davis, Leah R Gerber, Jeremy A Littell, Jennifer L Tank, Adam J Terando, Tamara U Wall, Benjamin Halpern, J Kevin Hiers, Toni Lyn Morelli, Elizabeth McNie, Nathan L Stephenson, Matthew A Williamson, Connie A Woodhouse, Laurie Yung, Mark W Brunson, Kimberly R Hall, Lauren M Hallett, Dawn M Lawson, Max A Moritz, Koren Nydick, Amber Pairis, Andrea J Ray, Claudia Regan, Hugh D Safford, Mark W Schwartz, and M Rebecca Shaw

213 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors bring literatures on knowledge co-production together with Indigenous knowledge, research, and environmental governance to explain why coproduction scholars must move away from seeking to better integrate and integrate Indigenous knowledges into western science and make way for Indigenous research leadership.

156 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the co-production literature to distil some key principles to inform climate services, which can inform a normative and pragmatic approach to co-produced climate services.

156 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that despite growing concerns about exclusionary decision-making processes and social injustices, there remains inadequate attention to issues of social justice and inclusion in ocean science, management, governance and funding.

141 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This study suggests that efforts to mobilize S&T for sustainability are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that simultaneously enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information they produce.
Abstract: The challenge of meeting human development needs while protecting the earth's life support systems confronts scientists, technologists, policy makers, and communities from local to global levels. Many believe that science and technology (S&T) must play a more central role in sustainable development, yet little systematic scholarship exists on how to create institutions that effectively harness S&T for sustainability. This study suggests that efforts to mobilize S&T for sustainability are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that simultaneously enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information they produce. Effective systems apply a variety of institutional mechanisms that facilitate communication, translation and mediation across boundaries.

2,934 citations


"A How-to Guide for Coproduction of ..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...In each case, Cash et al. (2003) concluded that effectiveness suffered when scientists assumed they knew what questions managers needed to answer, or when managers assumed that scientists knew how to provide usable answers to their important questions....

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  • ...The actionability of science depends on how well the knowledge system carries out four functions, namely convening, translating, collaborating, and mediating (Cash et al. 2003, 2006)....

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  • ...…research, knowledge exchange, user-inspired basic research, boundary organizations, research scientists embedded in management agencies, training scientists to communicate to managers, and social learning (Cash et al. 2003, 2006, Kirchhoff et al. 2011, Cook et al. 2013; Meadow et al. 2015)....

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  • ...Cash et al. (2003) Conservation Letters, May 2017, 10(3), 288–296 Copyright and Photocopying: C© 2016 The Authors....

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  • ...…(fair and respectful of stakeholders’ divergent values), and that it is most reliably produced by iterative collaboration between scientists and managers (Cash et al. 2003, 2006; Lemos & Morehouse 2005; NRC 2009; Dilling & Lemos 2011; Kirchhoff et al. 2013; Meadow et al. 2015; Nel et al. 2016)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper asks how and why stakeholder analysis should be conducted for participatory natural resource management research, and proposes new tools and combinations of methods that can more effectively identify and categorise stakeholders and help understand their inter-relationships.

2,011 citations


"A How-to Guide for Coproduction of ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Organizers should use some combination of semistructured interviews, expert opinion, and snowball sampling (whereby early invitees nominate additional participants) to create a diverse and representative stakeholder collaborative (Reed et al. 2009)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, the authors argues that the blurring of boundaries between science and politics, rather than the intentional separation often advocated and practiced, can lead to more productive policy-making.
Abstract: Scholarship in the social studies of science has argued convincingly that what demarcates science from nonscience is not some set of essential or transcendent characteristics or methods but rather an array of contingent circumstances and strategic behavior known as "boundary work" (Gieryn 1995, 1999). Although initially formulated to explain how scientists maintain the boundaries of their community against threats to its cognitive authority from within (e.g., fraud and pseudo-science), boundary work has found useful, policy-relevant applications-for example, in studying the strategic demarcation between political and scientific tasks in the advisory relationship between scientists and regulatory agencies (Jasanoff 1990). This work finds that the blurring of boundaries between science and politics, rather than the intentional separation often advocated and practiced, can lead to more productive policy making. If it is the case, however, that the robustness of scientific concepts such as causation and representation are important components of liberal-democratic thought and practice (Ezrahi 1990), one can imagine how the flexibility of boundary work might lead to confusion or even dangerous instabilities between science and nonscience. These risks could be conceived, perhaps, as the politicization of science or the reciprocal scientification of politics. Neither risk should here be understood to mean the importation to one enterprise from the other elements that are entirely foreign; that is, science is not devoid of values prior to some politicization, nor politics of rationality, prior to any scientification. Rather, both should be understood to mean the rendering of norms and practices in one enterprise in a way that unreflexively mimics norms and practices in the other. These concerns have been central to the socalled science wars, and to the extent that they are implicated in public discussions of such policy issues as health and safety regulation, climate change, or genetically modified organisms, they are real problems for policy makers and publics alike.'

1,287 citations


"A How-to Guide for Coproduction of ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...A boundary organization is an entity that serves as a convener of science producers, science users, and other affected parties, and as a translator and a facilitator of productive tension among these groups (Guston 2001; Cash et al. 2003; NRC 2009)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is found that climate science usability is a function both of the context of potential use and of the process of scientific knowledge production itself, and that iterativity is the result of the action of specific actors and organizations who ‘own’ the task of building the conditions and mechanisms fostering its creation.
Abstract: In the past several decades, decision makers in the United States have increasingly called upon publicly funded science to provide “usable” information for policy making, whether in the case of acid rain, famine prevention or climate change policy. As demands for usability become more prevalent for publicly accountable scientific programs, there is a need to better understand opportunities and constraints to science use in order to inform policy design and implementation. Motivated by recent critique of the decision support function of the US Global Change Research Program, this paper seeks to address this issue by specifically examining the production and use of climate science. It reviews empirical evidence from the rich scholarship focused on climate science use, particularly seasonal climate forecasts, to identify factors that constrain or foster usability. It finds, first, that climate science usability is a function both of the context of potential use and of the process of scientific knowledge production itself. Second, nearly every case of successful use of climate knowledge involved some kind of iteration between knowledge producers and users. The paper argues that, rather than an automatic outcome of the call for the production of usable science, iterativity is the result of the action of specific actors and organizations who ‘own’ the task of building the conditions and mechanisms fostering its creation. Several different types of institutional arrangements can accomplish this task, depending on the needs and resources available. While not all of the factors that enhance usability of science for decision making are within the realm of the scientific enterprise itself, many do offer opportunities for improvement. Science policy mechanisms such as the level of flexibility afforded to research projects and the metrics used to evaluate the outcomes of research investment can be critical to providing the necessary foundation for iterativity and production of usable science to occur.

971 citations


"A How-to Guide for Coproduction of ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...…(fair and respectful of stakeholders’ divergent values), and that it is most reliably produced by iterative collaboration between scientists and managers (Cash et al. 2003, 2006; Lemos & Morehouse 2005; NRC 2009; Dilling & Lemos 2011; Kirchhoff et al. 2013; Meadow et al. 2015; Nel et al. 2016)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the use of interactive models of research in the US regional integrated scientific assessments (RISAS), using as a case study the climate assessment of the Southwest (CLIMAS) focusing on three components of regional climate assessments: interdisciplinarity, interaction with stakeholders and production of usable knowledge.
Abstract: This paper examines the use of interactive models of research in the US regional integrated scientific assessments (RISAS), using as a case study the climate assessment of the Southwest (CLIMAS) It focuses on three components of regional climate assessments: interdisciplinarity, interaction with stakeholders and production of usable knowledge, and on the role of three explanatory variables––the level of ‘fit’ between state of knowledge production and application, disciplinary and personal flexibility, and availability of resources—which affect the co-production of science and policy in the context of integrated assessments It finds that although no single model can fulfill the multitude of goals of such assessments, it is in highly interactive models that the possibilities of higher levels of innovation and related social impact are most likely to occur

768 citations