Sources and Uses of Knowledge in Co-designing Sustainable Futures in the Arctic

Abstract

The challenges for human society of rapid, unprecedented global change are nowhere more evident now than in the Arctic, where climate change and its biophysical manifestations and social impacts are seen and felt most strongly. In the context of local change and global implications, this chapter focuses on transdisciplinary research with actors in the Arctic regions and stakeholders outside the Arctic boundaries. The research described constitutes initial steps in developing processes that enable effective decision-making on relevant issues by and for the Arctic rights-holders and stakeholders. The approach was initially developed in two prior projects and is now used to inform the societal engagement process in a new European Commission Horizon 2020 project. The goal is to catalyze and support transformation to sustainable futures in appropriate contexts and simultaneously to learn how this can be done well. This involved a long-term process of developing trust, relationships, and co-design of research with a wide range of actors within and beyond the Arctic regions. It involved the establishment of multiple dialogues in which mutual learning and bi-directional knowledge translation occurred between the rights-holders/stakeholders and the scientists, but also importantly among the participating scientists who were grounded in different disciplinary domains and traditions.