Communicating climate change and biodiversity loss with local populations: exploring communicative utopias in eight transdisciplinary case studies

Climate change and biodiversity loss trigger policies targeting and impacting local communities worldwide. However, research and policy implementation often fail to sufficiently consider community responses and to involve them. We present the results of a collective self-assessment exercise for eight case studies of communications with regard to climate change or biodiversity loss between project teams and local communities. We develop eight indicators of good stakeholder communication, reflecting the scope of Verran's (2002) concept of postcolonial moments as a communicative utopia. We demonstrate that applying our indicators can enhance communication and enable community responses. However, we discover a divergence between timing, complexity and (introspective) effort. Three cases qualify for postcolonial moments, but scrutinising power relations and genuine knowledge co-production remain rare. While we verify the potency of various instruments for deconstructing science, their sophistication cannot substitute trust building and epistemic/transdisciplinary awareness. Lastly, we consider that reforming inadequate funding policies helps improving the work in and with local communities.

Knowledge systems approaches for enhancing project impacts in complex settings: community fire management and peatland restoration in Indonesia

Knowledge systems approaches for enhancing the impact of research are well established and tend to focus on the ways in which researchers can adapt their engagement with stakeholders to achieve a better "fit" between research and action agendas. Yet, these approaches are often based on explicit or implicit assumptions of a skilled and willing research team, and stable and well-defined stakeholders, who have consistent and reasonably well-defined needs. This paper discusses how knowledge systems approaches were developed and deployed in the first phase of the Gambut Kita (Our Peatland) project on community fire management and peatland restoration in Indonesia (2017-2021). This was a complex project with a large multi-disciplinary team situated across dynamic institutions in Indonesia and Australia, and addressing a politically controversial topic. To capture the diverse experience of the researchers, and to focus on the needs of stakeholders, we developed a sequence of whole-of-project approaches comprising the following: (i) stakeholder mapping exercises at three nested scales combining stakeholder analysis, knowledge systems mapping and impact pathways analysis; (ii) a project coordinating committee of high-level Indonesian policy-makers and policy-influencers; (iii) a stakeholder engagement forum and (iv) online policy dialogues. We demonstrate its effects through the case of developing an Indonesian Peat Fire Danger Rating System (Peat FDRS), as a core project deliverable. Over 4 years, these structured stakeholder engagement processes gave rise to a Peat FDRS Stakeholder Engagement Network (a multi-institutional working group), which is making significant progress in navigating the complexity inherent in realising an accurate Indonesian Peat FDRS.

Conservation Decision-Making in Palau: An Example of the Parallel Working of Scientific and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Despite unprecedented knowledge of conservation science, loss of biodiversity continues on a global scale. In this study, we investigate how choices are exercised where science, local and traditional knowledge come together for conservation decision-making. Our case study is the Palau Protected Areas Network, a program established to support conservation in the Pacific island nation of Palau. We apply a framework based on the concept of knowledge governance to explore the rules and norms that shape the relationships between knowledge and decision-making across both customary and Western-styled institutional lines. The major practical implications from this study are that: (1) there are internal and external audiences for Palauan conservation, (2) these audiences are associated with different expectations around what makes knowledge a legitimate basis for action, (3) the current conservation system operates in parallel, with science informing largely external audience and local and traditional knowledge speaking more directly to internal audiences and (4) this parallel system is likely to come under increasing pressure as the audiences for conservation change.

Principles for evaluating knowledge co-production in natural resource management: Incorporating decision-maker values

A key reason for undertaking transdisciplinary processes such as knowledge co-production in natural resource management is to access and apply different knowledge systems to complex issues. However, the value of co-production is predominantly framed by academics. They have focused on research design and outcomes in the form of 'science informing policy'. In this paper we build a more inclusive and holistic framing of knowledge co-production incorporating values of non-academic participants, and values related to the participatory process. Specifically, we examine how knowledge is communicated and deliberated upon and the requirements for this to be done effectively. We draw upon empirical data from interviews with natural resource managers who participated in two case studies of knowledge co-production in Australia and South Africa. Their perspectives are captured in eight evaluation principles that build upon existing evaluation frameworks for public participation. Critically, decision-makers valued science-based outputs not just as salient knowledge sources, but to give legitimacy to their decisions. This need for legitimacy necessitates transparency, fairness and inclusivity in knowledge selection, participation and dialogue within knowledge co-production processes. The practice-based knowledge of decision-makers was important for contextualizing and applying science to specific decision contexts. Another key finding is that communicative competence is central to the process of knowledge co-production because it enables participants to critically explore and understand the knowledge claims of others.

Towards future-oriented conservation: Managing protected areas in an era of climate change

Management of protected areas must adapt to climate impacts, and prepare for ongoing ecological transformation. Future-Proofing Conservation is a dialogue-based, multi-stakeholder learning process that supports conservation managers to consider the implications of climate change for governance and management. It takes participants through a series of conceptual transitions to identify new management options that are robust to a range of possible biophysical futures, and steps that they can take now to prepare for ecological transformation. We outline the Future-Proofing Conservation process, and demonstrate its application in a pilot programme in Colombia. This process can be applied and adapted to a wide range of climate adaptation contexts, to support practitioners in developing positive ways forward for management and decision-making. By acknowledging scientific uncertainty, considering social values, and rethinking the rules that shape conservation governance, participants can identify new strategies towards "future-oriented conservation" over the long term.

The role of innovative global institutions in linking knowledge and action

It is becoming increasingly recognized that our collective ability to tackle complex problems will require the development of new, adaptive, and innovative institutional arrangements that can deal with rapidly changing knowledge and have effective learning capabilities. In this paper, we applied a knowledge-systems perspective to examine how institutional innovations can affect the generation, sharing, and application of scientific and technical knowledge. We report on a case study that examined the effects that one large innovative organization, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, is having on the knowledge dimensions of decision-making in global health. The case study shows that the organization created demand for new knowledge from a range of actors, but it did not incorporate strategies for meeting this demand into their own rules, incentives, or procedures. This made it difficult for some applicants to meet the organization's dual aims of scientific soundness and national ownership of projects. It also highlighted that scientific knowledge needed to be integrated with managerial and situational knowledge for success. More generally, the study illustrates that institutional change targeting implementation can also significantly affect the dynamics of knowledge creation (learning), access, distribution, and use. Recognizing how action-oriented institutions can affect these dynamics across their knowledge system can help institutional designers build more efficient and effective institutions for sustainable development.

Linking local knowledge with global action: examining the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria through a knowledge system lens

New global public health institutions are increasingly emphasizing transparency in decision-making, developing-country ownership of projects and programmes, and merit- and performance-based funding. Such principles imply an institutional response to the challenge of bridging the "know-do gap", by basing decisions explicitly on results, evidence and best practice. Using a knowledge systems framework, we examine how the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has affected the ways in which knowledge is used in efforts to combat these three diseases. We outline the formal knowledge system embedded in current rules and practices associated with the Global Fund's application process, and give three examples that illustrate the complexity of the knowledge system in action: human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) policy in China; successful applications from Haiti; and responses to changing research on malaria. These examples show that the Global Fund has created strong incentives for knowledge to flow to local implementers, but with little encouragement and few structures for the potentially valuable lessons from implementation to flow back to global best practice or research-based knowledge. The Global Fund could play an influential role in fostering much-needed learning from implementation. We suggest that three initial steps are required to start this process: acknowledging shared responsibility for learning across the knowledge system; analysing the Global Fund's existing data (and refining data collection over time); and supporting recipients and technical partners to invest resources in linking implementation with best practice and research.

Comparative assessment of transport risks--how it can contribute to health impact assessment of transport policies

Health impact assessment (HIA) and comparative risk assessment (CRA) are important tools with which governments and communities can compare and integrate different sources of information about various health impacts into a single framework for policy-makers and planners. Both tools have strengths that may be combined usefully when conducting comprehensive assessments of decisions that affect complex health issues, such as the health risks and impacts of transport policy and planning activities. As yet, however, HIA and CRA have not been applied widely to the area of transport. We draw on the limited experience of the application of these tools in the context of road transport to explore how comparative assessment of transport risks can contribute to HIA of transport policies.