Person:

Dickson, Nancy

We developed a “continual engagement” model to better integrate knowledge from policy makers, communities, and researchers with the goal of promoting more effective action to balance poverty alleviation and wildlife conservation in 4 pastoral ecosystems of East Africa. The model involved the creation of a core boundary-spanning team, including community facilitators, a policy facilitator, and transdisciplinary researchers, responsible for linking with a wide range of actors from local to global scales. Collaborative researcher–facilitator community teams integrated local and scientific knowledge to help communities and policy makers improve herd quality and health, expand biodiversity payment schemes, develop land-use plans, and fully engage together in pastoral and wildlife policy development. This model focused on the creation of hybrid scientific–local knowledge highly relevant to community and policy maker needs. The facilitation team learned to be more effective by focusing on noncontroversial livelihood issues before addressing more difficult wildlife issues, using strategic and periodic engagement with most partners instead of continual engagement, and reducing costs by providing new scientific information only when deemed essential. We conclude by examining the role of facilitation in redressing asymmetries in power in researcher–community–policy maker teams, the role of individual values and character in establishing trust, and how to sustain knowledge-action links when project funding ends.

The goal of the workshop was to build a more strategic and integrated perspective on the threats and opportunities latent in the food / climate issue, and to discuss the hard challenges of moving forward toward common goals in a private, off-the-record setting. An executive session convened by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Venice International University on June 6-9, 2010, attracted more than 25 of the world's leading experts from the fields of policy, science, and business to San Servolo Island for an intensive three- day session (see text for a list of the participants). The discussions were off-the-record, with each participant present in his or her own capacity, rather than representing an organization. The session was one in a series on Grand Challenges of the Sustainability Transition organized by the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University with the generous support of the Italy’s Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea. This particular session was held in cooperation with the new Mega Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security being developed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership. This summary report of the session is our synthesis of the main points and arguments that emerged from the discussions. It does not represent a consensus document, since no effort was made at the session to arrive at a single consensus view. Rather, we report here on what we heard to be the major themes discussed at the session. Any errors or misrepresentations remain solely our responsibility.

In an increasingly democratic world, the press would seem destined for ever more pivotal roles in the policy process. Yet in a world that is also increasingly interdependent, with each nation's affairs increasingly affecting and affected by others, it is far from clear just what those roles might be. Does the press, by .reporting "the way it is" in places far from home exert an international homogenizing influence? Or does its habit of searching for a local "angle" on even the most global issues push policy debates towards an emphasis on special interests rather than common cause? How does press coverage of an issue in one country affect, and how is it affected by, press coverage in others? Do the roles played by the press in the policy process vary significantly across countries? Or is such variation swamped by country variation associated with different media, audiences, and editorial policies within countries? For those officials and experts used as news sources by the press, to what extent do the assumptions regarding the press developed through experience in their home countries provide reliable guidance for dealing with the press in other countries?

These and related questions arise with respect to press coverage of most policy issues. Our focus here is on the roles of the press in development of environmental issues. In particular, we are interested in how the press has dealt with the emergence of multinational, transboundary, or more generally "global" environmental issues over the last several decades. What has been the role of the press, nationally and internationally, in setting such issues on the policy agenda? What is and what should be the role of the press in shaping social responses to global environmental problems? What criteria should be used to evaluate the contribution of the press to the development of sound public policy on global environmental risks? How can the communication of science-laden ideas through the press be improved?

The study reported here is a preliminary effort to explore such questions.2 It is conducted from the practical perspective of environmental scholars and policy analysts anxious to understand the roles of the press in the sorts of issues we deal with, to identify what seems to be working well and what badly in interactions among the press and the major newsworthy "players" in such issues, and to suggest some modest and pragmatic efforts that might be undertaken to facilitate improvements in those interactions. We are well aware that most of us involved in this effort are not professional scholars of press and politics. In our defense, we can only say that if such professional scholars had addressed the sorts of long-term, cross-national questions that we believe are central to understanding the role of the press in contemporary environmental affairs, we would have happily contented ourselves with reading their research and using it to inform our own. Our hope is simply that this preliminary investigation will raise questions and suggest patterns that others, more adequately equipped to the task, will find worth pursuing.

The last several years have witnessed a significant evolution in what society wants to know about global environmental risks such as climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, while devoting relatively little attention to the ecosystems and societies the changes might endanger. Recently, however, questions about the vulnerability of social and ecological systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. Meeting the growing demand for a deeper and more useful understanding of vulnerability to global change will require a dual strategy in which initiatives targeted on immediate assessment needs and research opportunities complement and feed into a longer term program for enhancing relevant knowledge bases, assessment practices, and institutional capacities. This paper makes recommendations for the design of such a strategy that emerged from an ongoing conversation between communities of decision-oriented vulnerability assessors for global environmental change issues, research-oriented vulnerability scholars generally focusing on regional scale human-environment interactions, and those conducting vulnerability assessments that assist in targeting improved intervention and mitigation strategies. It sketches an integrated framework for vulnerability-based assessments of climate and other global changes. By virtue of both concept and design this framework has the potential to improve significantly the production of policy-relevant insights into the social and environmental implications of global environmental change. This paper was prepared as a brief summary of the Workshop on Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change: Challenges for Research, Assessment and Decision Making, held on May 22-25, 2000 at Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia.

The boundary between science and policy is only one of several boundaries that hinder the linking of scientific and technical information to decision making. Managing boundaries between disciplines, across scales of geography and jurisdiction, and between different forms of knowledge is also often critical to transferring information. The research presented in this paper finds that information requires three (not mutually exclusive) attributes - salience, credibility, and legitimacy - and that what makes boundary crossing difficult is that actors on different sides of a boundary perceive and value salience, credibility, and legitimacy differently. Presenting research on water management regimes in the United States, international agricultural research systems, El Nino forecasting systems in the Pacific and southern Africa, and fisheries in the North Atlantic, this paper explores: 1) how effective boundary work involves creating salient, credible, and legitimate information simultaneously for multiple audiences; 2) the thresholds, complementarities and tradeoffs between salience, credibility, and legitimacy when crossing boundaries; and 3) propositions for institutional mechanisms in boundary organizations which effectively balance tradeoffs, take advantage on complementarities, and reach thresholds of salience, credibility, and legitimacy.

Previous research on the determinants of effectiveness in knowledge systems seeking to support sustainable development has highlighted the importance of “boundary work” through which research communities organize their relations with other fields of science, other sources of knowledge, and the worlds of action and policymaking. A growing body of scholarship postulates specific attributes of boundary work that promote used and useful research. These propositions, however, are largely based on the experience of a few industrialized countries. We report here on an effort to evaluate their relevance for efforts to harness science in support of sustainability in the developing world. We carried out a multi-country comparative analysis of natural resource management programs conducted under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). We discovered 6 distinctive kinds of boundary work contributing to successes of the CGIAR programs—a greater variety than has been documented in previous studies. We propose that these different kinds of boundary work can be understood as a dual response to the different uses for which the results of specific research programs are intended, and the different sources of knowledge drawn on by those programs. We show that these distinctive kinds of boundary work require distinctive strategies to organize them effectively. Especially important are arrangements regarding participation of stakeholders, governance, and the use of boundary objects. We conclude that improving the ability of research programs to produce useful knowledge for sustainable development will require both greater and differentiated support for multiple forms of boundary work.

Advances of science may take much longer to translate into helpful societal actions without deliberate linkages among policy makers, practitioners, and scientists and an integration of their knowledge systems. Successful projects in sustainable knowledge-based action are not only multi-disciplinary and holistic in their approach, they also engage consistently with the consumers of the knowledge being generated. We present a model for integrating scientific and indigenous knowledge and strongly linking that knowledge with community and policy action to balance poverty alleviation and wildlife conservation in Maasai pastoral systems of East Africa. This model uses ‘community facilitators’ who act as ‘boundary-spanning’ individuals, linking pastoralist communities, scientists, and policy makers. Our experience indicates that there can be accelerated progress if the project deliberately creates and places a boundary-spanning person or organization at the community-science-policy interfaces to facilitate and promote linking knowledge with action. We found it was critical that the facilitation process ensures that scientists focus on answering important questions from community and policy viewpoints. Key lessons include the need for frequent and strategic community engagement, careful choice of appropriate local boundary spanning persons, the central role of co-production of boundary objects, and the inclusion of incentives for the key stakeholders.

The goal of the workshop was to build a more strategic and integrated perspective on the threats and opportunities latent in the food / climate issue, and to discuss the hard challenges of moving forward toward common goals in a private, off-the-record setting. An executive session convened by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Venice International University on June 6-9, 2010, attracted more than 25 of the world's leading experts from the fields of policy, science, and business to San Servolo Island for an intensive three- day session (see text for a list of the participants). The discussions were off-the-record, with each participant present in his or her own capacity, rather than representing an organization. The session was one in a series on Grand Challenges of the Sustainability Transition organized by the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University with the generous support of the Italy’s Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea. This particular session was held in cooperation with the new Mega Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security being developed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership. This summary report of the session is our synthesis of the main points and arguments that emerged from the discussions. It does not represent a consensus document, since no effort was made at the session to arrive at a single consensus view. Rather, we report here on what we heard to be the major themes discussed at the session. Any errors or misrepresentations remain solely our responsibility

Previous research on the determinants of effectiveness in knowledge systems seeking to support sustainable development has highlighted the importance of “boundary work” through which research communities organize their relations with other fields of science, other sources of knowledge, and the worlds of action and policymaking. A growing body of scholarship postulates specific attributes of boundary work that promote used and useful research. These propositions, however, are largely based on the experience of a few industrialized countries. We report here on an effort to evaluate their relevance for efforts to harness science in support of sustainability in the developing world. We carried out a multi-country comparative analysis of natural resource management programs conducted under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). We discovered 6 distinctive kinds of boundary work contributing to successes of the CGIAR programs—a greater variety than has been documented in previous studies. We propose that these different kinds of boundary work can be understood as a dual response to the different usesfor which the results of specific research programs are intended, and the different sources of knowledge drawn on by those programs. We show that these distinctive kinds of boundary work require distinctive strategies to organize them effectively. Especially important are arrangements regarding participation of stakeholders, governance, and the use of boundary objects. We conclude that improving the ability of research programs to produce useful knowledge for sustainable development will require both greater and differentiated support for multiple forms of boundary work.

This paper asks ‘What kinds of approaches and institutions, under what sorts of conditions, are most effective for harnessing scientific knowledge in support of strategies for environmentally sustainable development and poverty alleviation?’ In applying an innovative conceptual framework to a diverse set of sustainable poverty-focused projects undertaken in numerous African and Asian countries, we found that strategies key to closing gaps between knowledge and action include: combining different kinds of knowledge, learning and bridging approaches, strong and diverse partnerships that level the playing field, and building capacity to innovate and communicate.