Abstract
Environmental research and management organizations are mutually dependent when it comes to produce and use knowledge in favor of responsible action in an increasingly uncertain world. Still, science and practice interfacing remains a challenge when it comes to implementing and sustaining a collaborative process. In this paper, we develop a descriptive framework to study the coevolution of scientific and planning activities embedded in a territorial system. Scientists and managers dynamically interact through institutional arrangements, operationalization of knowledge and information and communication tools. We propose an approach to systematically document transdisciplinary pathways and characterize the bounding process between organizations on a typical case-study, the coastal Thau territoire (Mediterranean Sea, France). By tracing, illustrating and analyzing coupled trajectories of environmental sciences and planning for the last decades, the Systemic Timeline Multistep methodology tackles cross-fertilization mechanisms. The relational analysis draws on the elaboration of a synchronic timeline to question co-evolution and grasp causal mechanisms of research projects interactions with management pathways. Its application on the Thau territoire shows that scientific activities and public actions shaped each other in a continuous process of interaction. It also gives insights into the contributive roles of long-term place-based research and intermediate organizations for the emergence of new sociotechnical arrangements.
Highlights
Ecological knowledge seeks, more than ever, societal consideration as a common good, informing environmental actions and contributing to deal with the new challenges faced by humanity and the biosphere in which it is embedded [1,2]
To question science–society coevolution on the Thau territoire, we develop a descriptive framework of the transdisciplinary process and propose a multistep methodology for its implementation
We argue that a dynamic system perspective on the transdisciplinary process could help to have a clearer understanding of the interplay between environmental scientists and managers
Summary
Ecological knowledge seeks, more than ever, societal consideration as a common good, informing environmental actions and contributing to deal with the new challenges faced by humanity and the biosphere in which it is embedded [1,2]. Research organizations have been producing expertise for the elaboration of environmental policies for decades [3]. Cross-disciplinary studies in-between social and ecological sciences have been largely triggered by socio-political factors [4] and driven by what precisely result to be public policy hotspots [5]. Various terms have been used to describe collaborative research that address societal problems [6], underlining the diversity of approaches developed in the last decades to capture the complex adjustment processes between science and society [7]. The organization of dialog and cooperation between researchers and practitioners is referred to as “transdisciplinary” [8,9], and the deliberate action of structuring spaces for “knowledge
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