Co-Producing Actionable Science

Meeting modern environmental challenges like climate change requires new perspectives, approaches, collaborations and knowledge – and new ways of linking scholarship with society. One such way is by engaging scientists and decision-makers in the process of co-producing actionable science that can be used to make decisions to help fish, wildlife, water, land and people adapt to a changing climate.

Click on the expanding boxes below to learn more about co-producing actionable science and to access relevant papers.

What is Actionable Science and Why Does it Matter for Climate Adaptation?

What is Co-Production?
Co-production describes the collaborative co-creation of new knowledge by scientists, decision-makers and other stakeholders, with the intention of making that science useable in practice
- From PI CASC’s Manager Climate Corps site: a more recent definition of knowledge co-production directly accounts for multiple knowledge forms and the related ideas of situated or embodied knowledge (Ingold 2011:21): “iterative and collaborative processes involving diverse types of expertise, knowledge and actors to produce context-specific knowledge and pathways towards a sustainable future” (Norström et al. 2020:183).
Why is Co-Production Valuable for Climate Adaptation?
- Today’s big, hard problems require it – need expertise from multiple fields
- It helps create science that is useful and used to make decisions
- Sponsors are increasingly requiring science with demonstrated impact
- Effective at generating actionable science, because it’ll be considered
- - Credible (rigorous)
  - Salient (relevant)
  - Legitimate (fair, unbiased)
Papers

How Do You Design a Co-Produced Research Process?

Considerations Before Starting a Co-Produced Project
- Partners likely to have important differences in timelines, values, culture, incentives, ways of knowing and definitions of evidence and certainty
- Respectful interest in how people do work
- Can consider engaging a neutral, 3^rd party facilitator (prevent power dynamics from playing out)
- Time, funding and engagement required may be significantly higher for a co-production effort
- Activities involved and products may not fit neatly into incentives structures of your institution
- To promote equity, be aware of who’s at the table and who’s getting information – information can mean power – as scientists, we are not outside of society but embedded within it
Creating a Science-Practice Collaboration
- Reach out to make new connections
- Build trust and rapport
- Develop mutual understanding of problem and respect
- Partner to enhance collaborative opportunities
- Be patient
- Be prepared to jump in quickly – rapidly respond when opportunity presents itself

Co-Defining a Problem to Tackle
- Where is there overlap between societal needs and opportunities & potential for advances in knowledge and understanding
  - Define a “socially-relevant problem that implies and triggers scientific research questions”
- Understand contexts under which players operate – there are social science approaches for rapidly assessing contexts (political, etc) under which an organization operates
- What decisions are being made?
  - When, and by whom?
  - Where?
- What is the desired outcome / management objective?
- Who could use the scientific information and how could they use it?
  - Consider whether the intended use are for: Enlightenment (learning, awareness-raising)? Decision support (choices by a single actor), negotiation (bargaining)
- Where do people have the freedom to act on new information? How do laws, regulations, and policies influence decision-makers’ ability to incorporate new information or alter procedures or actions?
- Given that decisions must be made before the science can be “settled,” what is realistic expectation of what is possible and useful within the available time and budget?
  - What would success look like for all parties? (ex: recognition, collaborative process, science products – peer-reviewed papers, outcomes – conservation decisions)
Co-Designing the Process
- Refine/ agree upon research objectives (circle back every step – iterative process)
- Design a conceptual/methodological framework for knowledge exchange and integration – For each step of research process, define who contributes what, supported by which means, and to what end) ** give priority to processes and outcomes over stand-alone products
- Discuss ground rules regarding:
  - data creation, utilization and ownership
  - public and scholarly dissemination of information about the collaboration and the products
- Deadlines
- Strategies for handling potential conflicts
- Revisit ground rules
- Focus on tangible, timely, useable results
  - Product is typically not just a peer-reviewed paper

Sharing Results of Co-Produced Actionable Science
- Integrate and apply co-created knowledge
  - Into practice
  - Into science
- Follow-up – revisit processes and outcomes with partners to nurture long-term collaboration
  - Ongoing interaction builds mutual capacity for science-practice collaborations