Knowledge Co-Production Reveals Nuanced Societal Dynamics and Sectoral Connections in Mapping Sustainable Human–Natural Systems

Abstract

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass environmental, social, and economic dimensions which are linked to the characteristics of place and have a strong local dimension. They are interconnected at local scales in complex ways which makes progress toward them difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at the local scale, we used knowledge coproduction to undertake systems mapping for the purpose of sustainability assessment framed by the SDGs. We partnered with a local community in Australia as our coproduction case study, with a multistage engagement process to understand how they interpreted sustainability and their vision for a sustainable community. We found that codeveloping a map of the local system with participants can elicit far more societal interconnections between the SDGs than might be expected without knowledge coproduction, as the participants viewed the system through a social lens. Issues from the social dimension of sustainability, in particular, were intensely local in origin and effect which suggests that attempts to represent them at national or global scales are unlikely to succeed. We teased out the interconnections between societal and nonsocietal issues with local knowledge, which enhanced the ability to identify effective actions to tackle broader sustainability problems. Our results demonstrate that knowledge coproduction can improve understanding of what sustainability is at the local scale and how it can be achieved, enabling the transformative change required to achieve the SDGs.