Indigenous-Settler Climate Change Boundary Organizations Contending With U.S. Colonialism

Indigenous peoples who are taking actions on climate change issues have formed networks that are at the intersect between Indigenous knowledges and various environmental science fields. These climate organizations work across many boundaries in science, politics, and culture. This article asks how large-scale U.S. climate boundary organizations that convene Indigenous and non-Indigenous climate practitioners contend with ongoing colonialism. Analysis indicates that Indigenous-settler networks offer avenues for Indigenous values to be practiced in collaborative climate science. Such organizations also provide limited opportunities to utilize climate science in tribal climate adaptation. While these boundary organizations aim to build meaningful cross-cultural and mentoring relationships, uneven power dynamics and resources also permeate the partnerships. These structural inequalities cause tensions to arise. Tensions further arise from uses of new terminology to navigate longstanding struggles over places, political sovereignties, and human relationships to natural worlds. I argue that a decolonial environmental framework discerns roles for Indigenous governance in attending to anthropogenic climate change. The approach broadens sociological understandings of climate change by examining the attempts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors to build climate networks.

Planning to adaptation: Informing regional nature-based adaptation to improve coastal resiliency in Santa Monica Bay

Los Angeles County is known for its wide sandy beaches, coastal boardwalks, and beach commerce and tourism. Planning for sea level rise and associated coastal hazards poses unique challenges in highly populated urban communities; in particular, sandy beaches play an important role in buffering the land from sea level rise, coastal storms, and associated flooding. With increasing pressure to prepare for and adapt to sea level rise, boundary organizations such as USC Sea Grant and The Bay Foundation are helping coastal communities build their capacity to respond to changing shorelines by providing and translating best available science, providing planning and technical support, building partnerships, and implementing adaptation strategies. This paper evaluates the process and provides recommendations for translating science to on-the-ground planning and adaptation efforts in coastal communities. Regionally, USC Sea Grant’s AdaptLA initiative works with coastal communities to communicate sea level rise science and provide managers with information and tools to assess vulnerabilities and begin to plan for adaptation. Informed by detailed, scaled-down climate change models and science-based demonstration projects, some AdaptLA participants initiated demonstration adaptation projects such as the Santa Monica Beach Restoration Pilot Project discussed in this paper. The Santa Monica Bay case study highlights a sea level rise adaptation process, from community capacity building to planning nature-based adaptation, using beach restoration. Lessons learned from demonstration projects in the region can inform similar projects and potential scaling up of nature-based adaptation on sandy beaches. Through the collective effort of boundary organizations, coordination with multiple jurisdictions and agencies, and community support, this case study demonstrates a model for implementing naturebased adaptation in urban coastal communities.

Boundary Organizations: Intermediaries in Science–Policy Interactions

Scientific knowledge is often not used in policymaking, even when the aim of the research is to produce policy-relevant results and these are communicated clearly and timely. The problem of the discrepancy between scientific outcomes and usable knowledge for policymaking is often labeled “science–policy gap.” Boundary organizations “bridge” this gap. Boundary organizations are intermediary organizations that produce information that is useful in policymaking and at the same time qualify as scientific (here this includes all academic research, including humanities and social sciences). However, boundary organizations are not just “knowledge brokers” that reconcile a demand (by policy makers) for knowledge with the supply (by academics) of knowledge. The knowledge-brokering perspective on science–policy interaction assumes that parcels of knowledge produced by academics are transmitted unchanged to policy makers, along a linear pathway of knowledge transfer from academia to policy makers. Several decades of close study of science–policy interactions has revealed that the production of policy advice cannot realistically be described in terms of clear boundaries between science and politics, nor can it be conceived as linear knowledge transfer leading to knowledge use. The production of policy-relevant information requires mutual engagement by scientists and policy makers in processes of knowledge co-production. Through the co-production process other concerns than purely scientific ones, such as political acceptability, are integrated in the result. Boundary organizations are sites where this co-production is institutionalized. Boundary organizations engage in quality and relevance assessments of existing scientific research and the production of policy advice reports, but also the design of innovative policy instruments and commissioning of new research and the evaluation of policy impacts of prior output. These activities are labeled “boundary work.” They are inherently tricky because they require a balancing act between scientific credibility and policy usefulness. Science and politics are normally demarcated spheres with different procedures and quality criteria. Boundary organizations endeavor to coordinate these apparently incompatible demands through boundary work. Boundary organizations are often presented as “silver bullet” that will solve all frictions and frustrations in science–policy interactions. However, the extent to which boundary organizations can fulfill such expectations depends on several factors: the (inter)national political culture regarding the status and role of science in policymaking, the culture of the policy domain regarding the same, the characteristics of the policy problem itself, and the availability of boundary working skills. Conversely, in many cases the time-consuming and sensitive creation of boundary organizations is not necessary. By extension, it is not possible to define “best practice” on boundary organizations or boundary work. What works is highly context dependent, but also time-dependent, so changes with time.

Rhizomic learning: How environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) acquire and assemble knowledge

It has been a common assumption that the knowledge practices of environmental organisations (ENGOs) is largely based on interaction with environmental research. Implied in such assumptions is the idea that ENGOs are so-called boundary organizations brokering knowledge between science and environmental policy decision-making. In this article, we challenge this belief. Through interviews, we have investigated the practices of ENGO employees as they acquire and assemble knowledge they need in their involvement with environmental policymakers. From their accounts, these ENGOs are not boundary organizations. Science is important but such knowledge was usually acquired indirectly and appeared to be seen as ubiquitous in the environmental policy community. We found that the knowledge practices were based on what we call rhizomic learning. We introduce this concept to highlight the complexity, opacity and non-linearity of the ways in which ENGO actors acquire and assemble environmental knowledge. We found that this rhizomic learning is characterized by five main features: 1) diversity of sources and the importance of networks, 2) pragmatism, 3) opacity of the process, 4) community among involved actors, and 5) mediation. ENGO actors expected that their capacity for rhizomic learning – not the least the purposeful mediation and assembly of knowledge from a multitude of sources – would make them appear to policymakers as competent, relevant and reliable.

Learning from the Experiences of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Balancing Science and Policy to Enable Trustworthy Knowledge

To create a societal change towards a sustainable future, constructive relations between science and policy are of major importance. Boundary organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have come to play an important role in establishing such constructive relations. This study contributes to the development of empirically informed knowledge on the challenge of balancing different expectations for how the science–policy relation is to be constructed to create trustworthy knowledge and policy decisions, i.e., when to be what and to whom. This study revisits Climategate and uses the public debate on the IPCC’s credibility, legitimacy, and policy relevance that followed Climategate as an analytical window to explore how the IPCC balanced the science–policy relation in a trustworthy manner. The analysis is based on a document study. The study shows how different expectations on the science–policy relation coexist, and how these risks create a loss of trust, credibility, legitimacy, and policy relevance. Thus, for boundary organizations to have a chance to impact policy discussions, reflexivity about the present epistemic ideals and expectations on knowledge production is of major importance, and must be reflected in an organizational flexibility that is open to different strategies on how to connect science and policy in relation to different actors and phases of the knowledge production process.