Knowledge co-production praxis in sustainability science: Insights from three contexts

Abstract

Knowledge co-production is needed as never before to support social change in the face of climate, water, biodiversity, and other sustainability crises. Co-production brings together diverse groups and their ways of knowing to generate new knowledges and practices that reconfigure or generate transformative social changes and that invite reflexivity. Within sustainability sciences, tensions exist between descriptive, analytical framings of co-production used to interrogate knowledge-power relations and instrumental or normative framings used to build such relations. The former has been criticised for being overly descriptive and difficult to translate into policy outcomes and the latter for failing to sufficiently interrogate power dynamics and for perpetuating existing inequities. As researchers, how are we to navigate this tension? Co-production praxis involves reconfiguring knowledge-power relations for just and transformative social changes. I suggest what is needed is a critical lens on those relations to underpin and guide feasible and action-oriented processes and outcomes for such changes. In three ways, I present and reflect on co-production contexts with different temporal, spatial and epistemological characteristics. These contexts are analysing historical co-production of knowledge of coastal freshwater floodplain Country of the Northern Territory, facilitating the Kunwinjku Seasons calendar and enabling reflexive co-production praxis with sustainability science researchers at a national science institution. I demonstrate the need within each context to weave analytical, practical, and reflexive work to reconfigure fairer societal outcomes and to pay greater attention to socio-institutional changes arising from our engaged work.