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Governance challenges in knowledge systems_______________________institutional opportunities in the pursuit of sustainable development

AAAS Annual Meeting SymposiumKnowledge Systems for Sustainable

Development: Mobilizing R&D for Decision-making

San Francisco, USA15-19 February 2007Louis Lebel, et al.

USER, Faculty of Social SciencesChiang Mai University

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Governance in knowledge systems• Governance is the way society shares power. • It is not restricted to activities of government.• In a knowledge system, it is about who gets to

define which problems are important and what should be done about them.

• A knowledge system perspective starts from the assumption of multiple sources and forms of knowledge or justifiable belief.

• Pursuing environmental sustainability and social justice compound governance challenges in knowledge systems because it threatens powerful interests.

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Outline

• Agenda setting– Representing interest– Building coalitions– Allocating resources– Cultural biases

• Action taking – Integrating sources– Learning while doing– Filtering noise

• Accountability – Managing boundaries– Measuring outcomes

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Agenda setting: representing interest• Research and practice agendas in development are

often set according to relatively narrow set of interests even when “sustainability” is a claimed goal– consultation with women, minorities and disadvantaged

communities is often very limited; and may be biased by common vocabulary & “standard” practices

• Enhancing representation and turning public participation into meaningful engagement is critical– Access to new sources of knowledge– Support for otherwise unpopular policies– Build sense of shared responsibility

• but not easy to get right– Research itself can get trapped by stakeholders views– expanding often requires new, unfamiliar, arenas

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Agenda setting:building coalitions• Scientist and practitioners promote causes through

networks and alliances legitimizing their relevance to wider society– Mobilization is crucial to get important problems onto

agendas and can be very effective if interests align well– But, “global” research & action program development are

easily dominated by well-funded and organized and linked coalitions of actors from industrial economies and as a result produce agendas with a “northern perspectives”

• Address by– Proactive: expanding membership of coalitions and allowing

agendas to be refined ;– Regionalizing : shift levels up or down or among places

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Agenda setting:allocating resources• The amount of financial and human resources

invested in a development issue plays an immediate and direct role in the prominence of that issue in research and application development agendas. (Who funds?)

• The way investments are made matter not just for setting agendas but also for linking research and action. – Ex 1. Global Fund for HIV, Tuberculosis and

Malaria (Lorrae van Kerkhoff and Nicole Szlezak)

– Ex 2. Farmer associations and large firm R&D in expansion of no-till agriculture in the Pampas (David Mánuel-Navarrete, Gilberto Gallopin)

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Agenda settingcultural biases & inequalities• Agendas are also shaped, more subtly, by the

broader culture in which research and actions (and power relations) are embedded

• Consider at its simplest just:– a state at war “on terror” that applies different

standards to its own actions– A society in modernization over-drive that believes

people ‘X’ are backward/primitive, and after a while, even those in X

– Situations where who is speaking matters more than what is being said for what knowledge will be acted upon

– Ask: Who is “ailing” and who are the “healers”?

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Action taking:integrating sources

• Going from exploring decisions to making decisions and taking actions draws on different kinds of knowledge, in particular, those associated with day-to-day practice

• End-to-end integration is important but hard to institutionalize in way that considers power

• Power is exercised in deciding which claims should be acted upon– Ex local knowledge of irrigators and rainfed

farmers in IWRM and RBO goals in Upper Ping River Basin

– Ex negotiation of ENSO forecasts for regional application centres (Jim Buizer, Dave Cash et al)

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Action taking:filtering noise• Real knowledge systems are full of

propaganda, mis-information and noise, that taking actions must cut through

• performance can depend on filtering and editing as much as creating new knowledge.

• Such boundary functions may be done by organizations, review processes or networks

• networks work faster than peer review…– Ex horizontal networks of shrimp farmers

association filter out misinformation in an otherwise vertically integrated industry (Garden, Lebel, Dao)

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Action taking:learning while doing• Taking action in uncertain situations with

incomplete and contested knowledge argues for safe-to-fail interventions and investments in learning while doing

• Requires adaptive governance in sense that whose knowledge claims have authority must be able to “evolve” over time

• Can involve several actors and relationships:– Ex Yaqui valley, CIMMYT – Innovators - Credit

Union – Researchers distributed governance of research-action loops that helps system learn overall in some problem domains (Pam Matson, Ellen McCullough)

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Accountability:managing boundaries• Boundaries that distinguish science from rest

of society are created by social and political processes

• Authority of research-based knowledge is negotiated

• And may be compared with experience-based knowledge often embedded in practice

• Institutions-organizations matter :– Help shape perceptions about saliency, credibility

& legitimacy of information – Foster dual accountability – distribute boundary functions (and power)Based on work of KSSD collaborators: Bill Clark, Dave Cash, Social Learning Group.

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Accountability:Measuring outcomes• Ultimately the performance of knowledge

systems for sustainable development must be measured by their influence on ecological and social outcomes.

• The process of selecting scales, indicators, criteria and targets is easily distorted by interest politics and “hidden” in consensus-building and goal-speaking.*

• Politics of success..– criteria need to be justified– Cross-evaluation (users X producers x co-

producers)

* talking about reaching goals that didn’t really matter

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Institutional opportunities

Increasing engagement andpower sharing in action

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Conclusions• Issues of power and engagement cannot be ignored

once concerned with action• Research products are not independent of the

process that went into creating them • The design logic of pipes and information flows often

needs to be replaced by one of arenas in which different, often diverse, actors engage in knowledge co-production AND share power

• There are no institutional blueprints for better governance, but there are useful analyses that can be made of power, engagement, knowledge and action

• The performance of knowledge systems for sustainable development could be enhanced with more critical attention to how they are governed