Embedded Ecology: The Partnership Flywheel for integrating local expertise

There have been increasing calls to improve the integration of local expertise into both scientific research and evidence-based policy development, especially for urgent problems like climate change. There are both epistemic and ethical benefits of better involving local communities in these knowledge-generating processes. Here we present a community science process model for integrating the expertise of local communities, developed through field analysis of a community science endeavor in the Galápagos Islands. We call this kind of collaboration “embedded ecology.” The process of embedded ecology is modeled by what we call the Partnership Flywheel, which includes phases for ideation, planning, implementation, and learning. The importance of sustained collaboration between external practitioners and a local community cannot be overstated, which is one reason the flywheel is iterative, allowing the focus to be on sustained project generation and improvement. After discussing the practical elements of the Partnership Flywheel process model, we argue that its simplicity and replicability are essential for any process model aimed at improving the integration of local expertise in community science, thereby addressing both current and enduring challenges in the field. In sum, we present and explore a new community science process model thus advancing a recently growing literature on the theory of participatory research.