Transdisciplinary science policy interfaces in adaptation decision making

To address complex societal and environmental issues such as global environmental change impacts, new knowledge production models have been proposed to transcend disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Foremost among these is the notion of ‘transdisciplinarity,’ which has come to represent an idealization of how scientists ‘should work’ with the diversity of actors\stakeholders affected by environmental issues. This mode of knowledge production brings together many different kinds of knowledge, experience and expertise, and the knowledge it produces is strengthened and modified

by continued use and testing in policy-making. It therefore integrates conventional criteria of validity with non-scientific criteria of usefulness. Because global environmental change research projects are often positioned at the confluence of science, policy, and practice, inclusion of different stakeholders and disciplines in knowledge production is held to be an imperative.

At the same time, this blurring of disciplinary lines and the involvement of stakeholders in processes of societal problem-solving raises important questions about the politics of knowledge production and use, especially since the science-policy interface is embedded within broader, national cultures and institutions of science and technology serving various societal goals (technoscientific imaginaries). In this project, I move beyond the programmatic assumptions of transdisciplinarity and idealized, depoliticized models of the science-policy interface, to explore how collaborative research with stakeholders in different geopolitical contexts co-produces “usable knowledge” and science-policy interfaces.

My case study is the international transdisciplinary research network Future Earth Coasts. Building upon 20 years of research conducted by the Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) international programme, in 2015, LOICZ became a core project of the new Future Earth initiative under the new name of Future Earth Coasts.  With its transition to Future Earth Coast, the organization went through a paradigm shift—to be at the forefront of co-designing, co-producing and co-implementing knowledge for coastal resilience and sustainability. Focusing on the transdisciplinary practices of Future Earth Coasts, I seek to draw critical attention to normative differences in sociotechnical imaginaries of how science should impact policy, the embodied geopolitics of international collaboration, and place-specific social constructions of the science-policy interface.