Knowledge cumulation and interdisciplinarity: Integrating epistemologies, disciplines, and sectors to produce actionable environmental governance research

Abstract

For environmental governance research (EGR) to be actionable to catalyze solutions for environmental challenges in policy and praxis, it must allow for knowledge cumulation that demonstrates the applicability of EGR to existing and future issues, improves the robustness and validity of EGR, and identifies conditions, causal mechanisms and other underlying features of environmental governance. It is recognized that EGR cannot produce such knowledge without integrating various disciplines to connect environmental issues with their political dimensions and implications. Yet, EGR resembles a “fragmented adhocracy” that lacks standardized theoretical frameworks, concepts, and research approaches. To overcome this disciplinary fragmentation and develop mechanisms to effectively aggregate environmental governance evidence, it is critical to understand knowledge cumulation processes and identify research practices that can impede the integration of knowledge. This narrative review examines the dimensions of EGR to argue that (1) knowledge cumulation in EGR lies in interdisciplinary knowledge integration; and (2) EGR will only fulfill its goals of informing policy and praxis if knowledge cumulation between researchers is considered as a precondition of actionable knowledge.