Exploring Multiple Understandings of Western Wildfires in Support of Knowledge Co-Production Practices

Abstract

Addressing society’s most pressing and complex sustainability challenges requires a more productive collaboration between research and practice. Environmental governance increasingly turns to knowledge co-production, a collaborative and participatory process in which teams of researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and other relevant actors jointly produce knowledge to inform decision-making. Transdisciplinary research teams reflect multiple understandings, drawing from their members’ diverse perspectives, experiences, cultures, and ways of knowing. A scholarly principle of knowledge co-production is recognizing and legitimizing those multiple understandings. However, how practice can (and should) attend to those multiple understandings (i.e., recognize, include, respect, and sustain) remains unclear. This dissertation aims to improve how knowledge co-production practices attend to multiple understandings within the context of western wildfire challenges. I report on a mixed methods investigation that responds to the following three research questions: (1) How can knowledge co-production practices identify and characterize multiple understandings of western wildfire challenges? (2) How can knowledge co-production practices quantify the distribution of and explore the relationship between multiple understandings of western wildfire challenges? (3) What model of team learning could help transdisciplinary teams continue to take advantage of their multiple understandings?

Western wildfires represent a complex and rapidly changing sustainability challenge. Co-production among diverse actors has been identified as necessary to inform collective actions to manage wildfire risks more effectively. However, practitioners need better approaches to attend to multiple understandings. In Chapter 2, I present an empirical narrative analysis based on semi-structured interviews with sixty influential actors. I construct nine social narratives that capture actors’ shared stories about the causes, consequences, and solutions to western wildfire challenges. I find narrative analysis to be a pragmatic approach to characterize the strategies and scales that distinguish between actors’ understandings while retaining the language and power embedded in those understandings. In Chapter 3, I present the findings of an online survey that explores the understandings of a purposive sample of one hundred and fifty-three (153) highly influential wildfire actors. My analysis suggests that actors’ understandings are nuanced, overlapping, and do not align with actor types. Research findings emphasize the importance of elicitation techniques that capture the complexity of actors’ understandings and prompt dialog and reflexivity. In Chapter 4, I present a perspective on how transdisciplinary teams working on complex sustainability challenges can sustain integrative and iterative team learning to continue to take advantage of their multiple understandings. I synthesize literature in team science to characterize the relationship between team learning and team cognitive structure, i.e., the pattern by which knowledge is organized, represented, and distributed within a team. I offer a conceptual model of a resilient team cognition necessary to sustain knowledge co-production practices. I provide insight on the features that characterize and factors that facilitate resilient team cognitions. In this dissertation, I present approaches to advance how practice attends to multiple understandings. The qualitative and quantitative empirical findings emphasize the importance of capturing the language, power, and rich complexity embedded in actors’ understandings of sustainability challenges. The literature synthesis advances understanding by situating knowledge co-productions’ aspirational ideas about team learning within emergent literature about the role of team cognition.