A close examination of the role and needed expertise of brokers in bridging and building science policy boundaries in environmental decision making

Ronlyn Duncan,Melissa Robson-Williams,Sarah Edwards

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0448-x

Ronlyn Duncan, Melissa Robson-Williams + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0448-x

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Abstract

Knowledge brokers are often portrayed as neutral intermediaries that act as a necessary conduit between the spheres of science and policy. Conceived largely as a task in packaging, brokers are expected to link knowledge producers and users and objectively translate science into policy-useable knowledge. The research presented in this paper shows how brokering can be far more active and precarious. We present findings from semi-structured interviews with practitioners working with community-based groups involved in collaborative water planning in New Zealand’s South Island region of Canterbury. Working in a highly conflicted situation, our brokers had to navigate different knowledges and epistemic practices, highly divergent values and grapple with uncertainties to deliver recommendations for regional authorities to set water quality and quantity limits. Conceiving science and policy as interlinked, mutually constitutive and co-produced at multiple levels, rather than as separate domains, shows how the brokers of this study were not only bridging or blurring science policy boundaries to integrate and translate knowledges. They were also building boundaries between science and policy to foster credibility and legitimacy for themselves as scientists and the knowledge they were brokering. This research identifies further under-explored aspects of brokering expertise, namely, the multiple dimensions of brokering, transdisciplinary skills and expertise, ‘absorptive’ uncertainty management and knowledge translation practices.

Highlights

A growing body of research on knowledge brokers has emerged over recent years in response to on-going calls to close the ‘know-do gap’ (Bennett and Jessani, 2011, p. 3) and foster sustainability science utilisation (Cash et al, 2003; Cash et al, 2006; Leith et al, 2017; Van Kerkoff and Pilbeam, 2017)
Popularised accounts of brokers, influential in New Zealand, portray them as neutral intermediaries involved in packaging knowledge and blurring or bridging what are often characterised as formidable boundaries between the spheres of science and policy to improve communication and translation and deliver useable knowledge for policy (Bennett and Jessani, 2011; Gluckman, 2014, p. 165; Gluckman, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Pielke, 2007; WHO, 2004)
To contribute to an understanding of how brokers navigate situations involving different knowledges and epistemic practices and highly divergent values, we have examined brokering in collaborative water planning in New Zealand’s South Island region of Canterbury

Summary

Introduction

A growing body of research on knowledge brokers has emerged over recent years in response to on-going calls to close the ‘know-do gap’ (Bennett and Jessani, 2011, p. 3) and foster sustainability science utilisation (or remedy the lack thereof) (Cash et al, 2003; Cash et al, 2006; Leith et al, 2017; Van Kerkoff and Pilbeam, 2017). Popularised accounts of brokers, influential in New Zealand, portray them as neutral intermediaries involved in packaging knowledge and blurring or bridging what are often characterised as formidable boundaries between the spheres of science and policy to improve communication and translation and deliver useable knowledge for policy The brokers in this study were traversing multiple boundaries to produce policy-usable and practically-intelligible knowledge in a value-laden context that had to be credible and legitimate for different audiences and across multiple domains

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Discussion

Conclusion