Governance in knowledge systems

1. 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-makingSan Francisco, USA 15-19 February 2007 Louis Lebel, et al. USER, Faculty of Social Sciences Chiang Mai University

2. 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.

3. 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 Power plays Institutional Opportunities

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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”?

8. 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)

9. 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)

10. 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)

11. 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.

12. 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

13. Institutional opportunities Increasing engagement andpower sharing in action van Kerkhoff & Lebel 2006: Annu Rev. Environ. Resourc. 31:445

14. 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