The Role of Research Coordination in Enhancing Integrative Research: the Co-production of Knowledge Agenda of the Global Land Programme

Abstract:

The search for sustainability and resilience requires the integration of natural science with social science, as well as the joint production of knowledge and solutions by science and society. In this context, international science coordination initiatives, like Future Earth, have increasingly stressed the need to perform more integrated and more socially relevant research. This contribution has the objective to highlight the potential role of a research coordination initiative, the Global Land Programme (GLP), to provide guidance for more integrative research. The need to perform integrative research is particularly true for land systems, which include dynamic interactions among social and natural drivers that are often multifunctional. Thus, their governance and management is particularity complex and involve highly diverse stakeholders. A key aspect of integrative research is co-production of knowledge, understood as the interactive production of knowledge by both academics and non-academics, that leads to new forms of solutions-oriented knowledge. We relied on experiences of co-production of knowledge on land systems from the GLP network, and drove seven lessons learnt: 1) the importance of including several learning loops in the process, 2) the importance of long-term relationships, 3) the need to overcome the distinction between basic and applied science, 4) the opportunities offered by new communication technologies, 5) the need to train professionals in both breadth and depth, 6) the access to knowledge, and 7) the need to understand better the roles of scientists and decision-makers. These lessons were used to define action-research priorities for enhancing co-production of knowledge on land systems in GLP projects and working groups. As a conclusion, we argue that research coordination initiatives have the potential to provide analysis and guidance for more integrative research. This can be done by performing synthesis and self-reflection activities that feed back into research and action.