Practitioners' perspectives on the enablers and barriers to successful Antarctic science-policy knowledge exchange

Abstract

Multilateral environmental governance regimes like the Antarctic Treaty System are pivotal in addressing today's wicked transboundary socio-ecological problems and central to their success is the facilitation of constructive knowledge exchange (KE) between research and policymaking communities. Consequently, the literature is now ripe with studies that aim to uncover the elements that enable or hinder KE successes across diverse environmental governance settings. Yet, in the Antarctic context, the KE practices that comprise Antarctic science-policy interfaces remain empirically under examined. Here we contribute by exploring the perspectives of 31 Antarctic practitioners to develop our understandings of successful KE practices in the policy contexts of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings and the Committee for Environmental Protection. By adopting a reflexive thematic analysis, we identify 11 enablers and 9 barriers to KE success that are overlapping, interconnected and complex. According to practitioners, in the face of pervasive barriers, such as the often overshadowing effect of politics, a deficiency of KE incentives and large-scale wicked policy problems, certain Antarctic institutions and practitioners portray strong boundary spanning expertise, which despite the many challenges identified, serves to facilitate KE in support of evidence-informed decision-making. However, the extent to which boundary spanners are influential in their leadership varies, and while acknowledging that influential leadership is an important enabler for success, we raise several questions regarding the potentially unexplored assumptions that underpin current KE practices. As Antarctic practitioners share a desire to foster inclusive, iterative and multidirectional science-policy dialogues among other identified improvements, we suggest that harnessing reflexivity and humility within these processes will be critically important for ensuring that existing asymmetries or inequities are not reinforced under the guise of improved ways of working.