Accelerating Actionable Sustainability Science Science Funding, Co-Production, and the Evolving Social Contract for Science

Abstract

Disruptions to our climate and other systems critical to sustaining life on Earth increasingly call for aggressive societal action. Science can help inform these actions, yet a gap between scientific knowledge production and use persists. Whereas science has traditionally separated itself from society, alternative models of producing science seek out inspiration from societal needs and interact with potential users during the research process. Previous studies indicate more engaged and collaborative approaches to producing science, or co-production, can generate more actionable scientific knowledge while also enabling more inclusive research cultures. Despite growing inclination across the science system to co-produce knowledge, it remains unclear how co-production will contribute at the speed and scale demanded by unfolding crises in climate and sustainability. For example, scaling up co-production must attend to its potentially high costs, navigate diverse inputs of expertise, perspectives and values, while at the same time demonstrating meaningful progress on solutions.

This dissertation contributes new, more extensive empirical data and analysis about the drivers and mechanisms of co-production with the aim to better understand how to accelerate the development of actionable sustainability science. Going beyond the existing case-specific literature, I investigate a large number of applied research projects and science funding programs to explore the role of public funding as a mechanism for changing the way science is produced and used. Specifically, I ask three questions:

1) Can funding requirements that encourage more interaction between scientists and users lead to an increase in scientific knowledge co-production? 2) To what extent do research practices, especially those related to co-production, result in more knowledge use? 3) To what extent is science funding already reshaping the way science engages with society?

In the first half of the dissertation, I create a new database of coastal and estuarine research projects (n=120) and conduct interviews with grantees and intended users (n=40). This data shows how funding program design changes that require collaboration with users cultivate the practice of co-production, resulting in more intensive interactions and increasing evidence of knowledge use over time. I also find that this more deliberate effort to fund and co-produce usable science does not, on its own, help overcome the longstanding methodological obstacles that its study entails. In the second half, I explore the wider landscape of public science funding. First, I review recent science policy literature about what types of funding program design changes may influence research practice and outcomes. Then, I analyze science funding program solicitations (n=33) and interview program managers (n=61) in the U.S. and Europe. This fieldscan depicts science funders actively considering how science best engages with society and deploying numerous strategies that could reshape underlying societal expectations for science.

Overall, this dissertation documents a transition toward collaborative models of research practice and sponsorship, an evolution that may accelerate progress in linking science with solving sustainability problems. Capitalizing on future opportunities for learning through experimentation with different research modes and funding styles is still necessary to advance a more practice-relevant science of actionable knowledge.