Science with society: Evidence-based guidance for best practices in environmental transdisciplinary work
Section snippets
Introduction to transdisciplinary or science with society approaches
Global environmental change is driven largely by human activities such as production and consumption patterns, population dynamics, and technological innovations, and has led to a wide array of intractable and interconnected sustainability challenges – including biodiversity loss, food and water insecurity, and pollution (IPBES, 2019). As these challenges increasingly threaten environments and human well-being, science and society are turning to transdisciplinary work (TDW) to facilitate
Theoretical Foundations: A conceptual model for science with society
In July 2015, we convened a workshop in Serre Chevalier, France with 20 researcher and practitioner partners from the Mountain Sentinels Collaborative Network (mountainsentinels.org) who have engaged in environmental SWS around the world. Drawing on peer-reviewed literature and experiences from workshop participants, we developed a new conceptual model to guide the implementation of SWS projects with a focus on knowledge co-production and social learning (Fig. 1). This model is similar to other
Survey design and administration
We used the conceptual model described above to guide the development of a survey (Appendix A). We screened respondents to ensure they conducted SWS that matches our definition of: “sustained engagement between researchers (professional scientists or scholars) and practitioners (e.g., resource users, natural resource managers, policy makers)”. We asked respondents to draw on their overall SWS experience to rank the top three most important activities in each step, and to identify which of these
Results
The survey was available online from April 4 to October 22, 2018, and yielded 139 complete responses. An additional 29 responses were partially complete and used in our analysis where applicable (total n = 168). The number of responses per question varied as responses were voluntary throughout the survey. First we will describe the demographics and geographic patterns of the respondents (Section 4.1). Then we will analyze their insights into the SWS process, including the most desired skills
Discussion
Our results enable us to better understand the process and benefits of environmental SWS, and provide a set of specific activities for a toolbox of best practices. Transdisciplinary approaches are sometimes criticized for drawing on a broad and ill-defined set of methods for knowledge co-production (Brandt et al., 2013), but we believe this diversity is valuable and necessary given the highly context-specific nature of local knowledge (Berkes, 2012). Below, we draw on our conceptual model and
Conclusions
Transdisciplinarity has emerged as an increasingly necessary research approach in environmental sustainability. Our conceptual model of SWS seeks to expand upon existing models to foster deep, place-based understanding and equal benefits for both science and society. This emergent paradigm is particularly essential in this moment, as the world moves to recover and rebuild from COVID-19 and address systemic societal inequalities. The toolbox of 20 activities we present for consideration as best
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Conceptualization (CS; JK; RR; SL; CT; KAK; KH; RM; AN; TD; GG; RH; DK; AR; MSH; GG; MM; BML; MM; DW); Methodology (CS; JK; RR; CT; KAK; ACS; TD; KH; RM; AN; JS; JPRT; TT); Formal analysis (CS; JK; RR; JS; TT); Project administration (CS); Writing - review & editing (CS; JK; RR: SL; CT; KH; RM; TT; ACS; TD; GG; RH; KAK; DK; AN; AR; JS; MSH; JPRT; GG; MM; MM; and DW).
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation through the Mountain Sentinels Research Coordination Network (NSF #1414106) and the Center for Collaborative Conservation at Colorado State University. MSH would like to thank the Slovenian Research Agency for its financial support (Core Research Funding No. P6-010; Geography of Slovenia), and DK acknowledges support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF—01LN1315A). In addition, we thank the many civil
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