Empirical insights into knowledge-weaving processes in strategic environmental research

Abstract

Merging scientific and stakeholder knowledge plays a critical part in knowledge co-production processes, yet it is far from straightforward. We describe knowledge co-production processes by drawing on experiences from four strategic research cases that all sought to integrate scientific and stakeholder knowledge, while demonstrating the different settings and methodological choices for knowledge co-production in environmental research. To facilitate systematic analysis, we utilized the knowledge-weaving framework by Tengö et al. (2017) to examine co-production through the phases of knowledge mobilizing, translating, negotiating, synthesizing and applying. We also considered the inclusiveness of the weaving processes, where our results show that all of the study cases were able to engage participants across the four phases. Our analysis indicates that the framework is useful for unpacking the different phases of the knowledge-weaving process as well as the variety of activities that are used throughout the process. However, the results also emphasize the long-term nature of these processes, as knowledge-weaving activities were used predominantly in the mobilize and translate/negotiate phases and less at later phases of the process. This indicates that the benefits may be foreseen in similar future actions through the initiated learning and change processes.