Governance challenges in knowledge systems

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institutional opportunities in the pursuit of sustainable development AAAS Annual Meeting Symposium Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development: Mobilizing R&D for Decision-making San Francisco, USA 15-19 February 2007 Louis Lebel, et al.

USER, Faculty of Social Sciences Chiang 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 setting cultural 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 McCullough) (Pam Matson, Ellen

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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)

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 and power sharing in action 13

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

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