TY - JOUR
T1 - Interdisciplinary production of knowledge with participation of stakeholders
T2 - A case study of a collaborative project on climate variability, human decisions and agricultural ecosystems in the Argentine Pampas
AU - Podestá, Guillermo P.
AU - Natenzon, Claudia E.
AU - Hidalgo, Cecilia
AU - Ruiz Toranzo, Fernando
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems Grants 0410348 and 0709681 and completed with funding from Earth System Models Grant 1049109 . Additional support was provided by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) Grant CRN-2031 ; the IAI is supported by NSF Grant GEO-0452325 . We acknowledge support from the University of Buenos Aires through UBACyT Grants F009 and F173 . Funding agencies had no involvement in study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, the writing of this report, or the decision to submit this paper for publication. We are grateful to multiple reviewers that enhanced the manuscript during internal and external review cycles. We thank the Argentine Meteorological Service and the Asociación Argentina de Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola (AACREA) for their commitment to this research. The assessment of interdisciplinary knowledge production was originally proposed by Kenny Broad (Univ. of Miami), to whom we are indebted.
PY - 2013/2
Y1 - 2013/2
N2 - There is a growing perception that science is not responding adequately to the global challenges of the 21st century. Addressing complicated, "wicked" current and future environmental issues requires insights and methods from many disciplines. Furthermore, to reach social robustness in a context of uncertainty and multiple values and objectives, participation of relevant social actors is required. As a consequence, interdisciplinary research teams with stakeholder or practitioner involvement are becoming an emerging pattern for the organization of integrative scientific research or integrated assessments. Nevertheless, still there is need to learn from actual experiences that bring together decision makers and scholars from different disciplines. This paper draws lessons from a self-reflective study of the collaborative process in two interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multinational research teams addressing linkages between climate variability, human decisions and agricultural ecosystems in the Argentine Pampas. During project design, attention must be placed on team composition, ensuring not only that the needed talents are included, but also recruiting investigators with an open attitude toward interdisciplinary interaction. As the project begins, considerable effort must be dedicated to shared problem definition and development of a common language. Simple conceptual models and considerable redundancy in communication are helpful. As a project evolves, diverging institutional incentives, tensions between academic publication and outreach or policy-relevant outputs, disciplinary biases, and personality issues play increasingly important roles. Finally, toward a project's end the challenge arises of assessing interdisciplinary, integrative work. The lack of consensus on criteria for assessment of results is often ranked as a major practical difficulty of this kind of research. Despite many efforts to describe and characterize collaborative research on complex problems, conditions for success (including the very definition of "success") remain to be rigorously grounded on actual cases. Toward this goal, we argue that a self-reflective process to identify and intervene on factors that foster or impede cooperative production of knowledge should be an essential component of integrated assessments involving scientists, practitioners and stakeholders.
AB - There is a growing perception that science is not responding adequately to the global challenges of the 21st century. Addressing complicated, "wicked" current and future environmental issues requires insights and methods from many disciplines. Furthermore, to reach social robustness in a context of uncertainty and multiple values and objectives, participation of relevant social actors is required. As a consequence, interdisciplinary research teams with stakeholder or practitioner involvement are becoming an emerging pattern for the organization of integrative scientific research or integrated assessments. Nevertheless, still there is need to learn from actual experiences that bring together decision makers and scholars from different disciplines. This paper draws lessons from a self-reflective study of the collaborative process in two interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multinational research teams addressing linkages between climate variability, human decisions and agricultural ecosystems in the Argentine Pampas. During project design, attention must be placed on team composition, ensuring not only that the needed talents are included, but also recruiting investigators with an open attitude toward interdisciplinary interaction. As the project begins, considerable effort must be dedicated to shared problem definition and development of a common language. Simple conceptual models and considerable redundancy in communication are helpful. As a project evolves, diverging institutional incentives, tensions between academic publication and outreach or policy-relevant outputs, disciplinary biases, and personality issues play increasingly important roles. Finally, toward a project's end the challenge arises of assessing interdisciplinary, integrative work. The lack of consensus on criteria for assessment of results is often ranked as a major practical difficulty of this kind of research. Despite many efforts to describe and characterize collaborative research on complex problems, conditions for success (including the very definition of "success") remain to be rigorously grounded on actual cases. Toward this goal, we argue that a self-reflective process to identify and intervene on factors that foster or impede cooperative production of knowledge should be an essential component of integrated assessments involving scientists, practitioners and stakeholders.
KW - Integrated assessment
KW - Interdisciplinarity
KW - Natural/human systems
KW - Participatory research
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U2 - 10.1016/j.envsci.2012.07.008
DO - 10.1016/j.envsci.2012.07.008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84871712315
VL - 26
SP - 40
EP - 48
JO - Environmental Science and Policy
JF - Environmental Science and Policy
SN - 1462-9011
ER -