Knowledge Co-Production for Collaborative Environmental Management

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government.

SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal.

Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Karim-Aly Kassam at Cornell University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating knowledge co-production processes and how they enable or constrain social learning, with the aim of contributing to more empirically-informed theories of collaborative environmental stewardship.

As global environmental change continues to accelerate and intensify, science and society are turning to collaborative environmental management to facilitate transitions to sustainability. Collaborative approaches such as knowledge co-production bring together diverse actors from different sectors of society to work towards solutions for social-ecological problems.

Knowledge co-production processes have been shown to facilitate social learning, foster adaptive capacity, and support collective action outcomes by building trust and enabling communication among the diverse members of a management team.

The purpose of this research is to integrate local, Indigenous, and scientific knowledge to co-create a holistic understanding of past and future environmental change. The case study is located in and around a protected area that is experiencing rapid, large scale change from the construction of a dam. Using a combination of sophisticated remote sensing analyses and ethnographic inquiry, this work will examine (1) how different groups think about and value the protected area (e.g., governmental, scientific, Indigenous groups), (2) what anticipatory strategies emerge for addressing the changes occurring there, and (3) how participants experience social learning throughout the knowledge co-production process.

This research will generate new understanding of how different socio-cultural groups conceptualize and value their environment, which can help us understand critical anthropogenic drivers of environmental change in this system and around the world. Second, we will compare and contrast local narratives of change with measurements derived from remote sensing analyses, revealing areas of complementary understanding as well as critical gaps between scientific and Indigenous knowledge.

Third, we will employ cognitive modeling exercises in conjunction with participatory scenario planning to co-generate strategies for anticipating and responding to future environmental change – thus refining these methods for use in other systems. Finally, this project will advance our ability to conceptualize and measure social learning, for which methods are urgently needed.

Workshops with community members, an open-access educational case study on transdisciplinary science, a project report, and at least two peer-reviewed journal articles will contribute to achieving these objectives.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.