Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees: Strategies for Evaluating, Scaling Up and Accelerating Knowledge Use in Climate and Sustainability

Abstract

Climate change impacts are worsening in scale, frequency, and intensity, leaving many communities in the United States prone to both short-term devastation and long-term vulnerability. Scientists, scholars and practitioners are all wrestling with ways of improving, accelerating and scaling up decision making that protects those communities from current climate events and future impacts. However, there is strong consensus that climate and sustainability decision-making continues to fall short of the mark. Researchers in the fields of sustainability science, engaged research, and actionable knowledge suggest that one critical way of enabling timely and effective climate action is by creating knowledge that is actionable for decision-makers. Actionable knowledge, or knowledge that fits a use context in society, tends to encompass several features which can be embedded into knowledge products by having climate scientists and practitioners engage with each other to co-produce knowledge together. Despite considerable growth in prescriptive publications recommending ways of creating a successful co-production process, few papers empirically explore how these processes change knowledge use. Meanwhile, scholars are also increasingly discussing ways of scaling up and accelerating actionable knowledge to meet climate decision-making needs. But without first understanding whether engaged research and co-production of actionable knowledge does, in fact, lead to more timely and effective decision-making, we risk missing the forest for the trees by scaling up and accelerating untested and potentially harmful approaches. In this context, my dissertation aims to address three key questions: 1. How can different theories of actionable knowledge, engaged research, and climate decision making be reconciled to create more holistic and robust frameworks? 2. How do these theories apply (or not) in the real world? 3. How can our theoretical and empirical understanding of actionable knowledge, engaged research, and climate decision making lead to better ways of scaling up and accelerating desirable outcomes? To answer these questions, I have undertaken three separate but related research projects. The first is an advanced literature review that brings together three theoretical frameworks – the knowledge deficit framework, the knowledge actionability framework, and the decision-making framework – to understand how they have built off of, tradeoff, and can further inform each other to narrow the climate knowledge to decision-making gap. The second is a mixed-methods study of the growth and evolution of published actionable scientific knowledge for sustainability (ASK-S) when compared with the broader environmental and sustainability published literature. We evaluate whether we can measure a transition in how environment and sustainability scholars are doing their research, both theoretically and empirically, toward more interactive, transdisciplinary and context-driven outcomes. The third is a longitudinal, multi-site study of how a particular climate vulnerability tool was scaled up across three different groups of practitioners in two different regions of the United States to understand which actionable knowledge features are more or less important in the scaling process. The findings of these three projects speak to the achievements and growing pains of a field aiming to address knowledge and climate change decision-making needs.