Sustainability Science

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Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development

How can we create knowledge systems that effectively link knowledge to action for sustainability? Knowledge systems function as mechanisms that systematically motivate and harness relevant R&D work in support of problem-solving and decision making activities. Individual efforts in research, innovation, monitoring, and assessment can contribute to sustainable development, but the full utility of such independent contributions depends on developing integrated knowledge systems. The project develops a framework for understanding the effectiveness of systems that link knowledge to action for sustainability.

The work draws on case studies that address a range of sustainability issues. These include: agricultural research and development within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) systems; water management in the U.S. Great Plains; El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecasting in the Pacific and southern Africa; transboundary air pollution in Europe; and fisheries management in the North Atlantic. The cases vary in both the institutional structures that link knowledge to action and in the effectiveness of such linkages.

The work extends to knowledge systems for sustainability earlier findings from the narrower realms of science advising and assessment, that knowledge is more likely to be influential to the extent that it – and the process that produced it – is perceived to be salient and legitimate, as well as credible by relevant stakeholders. Achieving adequate levels of all three criteria simultaneously is a central challenge. The difficulties match those in other domains: tight tradeoffs among the criteria mean that most efforts to enhance one succeed at the expense of the others, undermining the information’s overall influence. Such difficulties are aggravated by the multiple actors involved in knowledge mobilization and utilization for sustainability issues. With each actor likely to enter the debate under different concepts of what makes information salient, credible, and legitimate, effective knowledge systems must promote communication and translation across actors as much as R&D or management per se. Moreover, because different actors often want different outcomes from applying S&T to sustainability problems, effective knowledge systems must also serve as venues for negotiation and mediation.

The most effective approaches for knowledge systems for sustainability are reminiscent of the boundary organizations: organizations that play an intermediary role between the science and policy arenas. The boundary organizations we encountered developed rules, procedures, and norms of accountability that shaped perceptions of salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information and effectively balanced tradeoffs among them. By providing insights about these intermediate variables this work offers an important link between the boundary organizations literature and the broader institutional literature on how rules, norms, and procedures of information institutions influence actors. The work also emphasizes that such organizations need be neither formal nor unique. It is the performance of boundary management functions that matters. It finds that many effective knowledge systems are characterized by multiple boundary organizations, or multiple organizations that perform specific functions in managing boundaries of complex systems. Moreover, in many cases single individuals played key “boundary spanning” functions, independent of their particular organizational affiliations. A higher-order obstacle to designing knowledge systems for sustainability is thus to learn how to harness the boundary-spanning potential of multiple individuals and organizations in ways that can most effectively bolster salience, credibility, legitimacy, and the tradeoffs among them.

William Clark and David Cash lead this work. The full team includes: Frank Alcock, David Cash, William Clark, Nancy Dickson, Noelle Eckley, David Guston, Jill Jaeger, and Ronald Mitchell.

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Projects: Trends & Transitions | Vulnerability | Knowledge Systems