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This paper distills core lessons about how researchers (scientists, engineers, planners, etc.) interested in promoting sustainable development can increase the likelihood of producing usable knowledge. We draw the lessons from both practical experience in diverse contexts around the world and from scholarly advances in understanding the relationships between science and society. Many of these lessons will be familiar to those with experience in crafting knowledge to support action for sustainable development. However, few are included in the formal training of researchers. As a result, when scientists and engineers first venture out of the laboratory or library with the goal of linking their knowledge with action, the outcome has often been ineffectiveness and disillusionment. We therefore articulate here a core set of lessons that we believe should become part of the basic training for researchers interested in crafting usable knowledge for sustainable development. These lessons entail at least four things researchers should know, and four things they should do. The knowing lessons involve understanding the coproduction relationships through which knowledge making and decision making shape one another in social-environmental systems. We highlight the lessons that emerge from examining those coproduction relationships through the ICAP lens, viewing them from the perspectives of Innovation systems, Complex systems, Adaptive systems, and Political systems. The doing lessons involve improving the capacity of the research community to put its understanding of coproduction into practice. We highlight steps through which researchers can help build capacities for stakeholder collaboration, social learning, knowledge governance, and researcher training.sustainable development | knowledge systems | capacity | coproduction | science-policy interface This paper seeks to promote better mobilization of knowledge for the pursuit of sustainable development. Our starting point is the original vision of sustainability (we use "sustainability" and "sustainable development" interchangeably throughout this paper) set forth by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 and recently reaffirmed and refined by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly's formal adoption of The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Here we follow recent scholarship (1, 2) in encompassing the multiple UN goals under a broader conceptualization that sees sustainable development as the promotion of inclusive human well-being; this is to say, well-being that is shared equitably within and across generations and is built on the enlightened and integrated stewardship of the planet's environmental, economic, and social assets.Great improvements have taken place in many people's well-being over recent generations. However, contemporary development is not sustainable development. It leaves too many of today's people behind (3). Also, it achieves today's increasingly inequitable gains by degrading many of the essential assets on which the prospe...

No abstract

This paper distills core lessons about how researchers (scientists, engineers, planners, etc.) interested in promoting sustainable development can increase the likelihood of producing usable knowledge. We draw the lessons from both practical experience in diverse contexts around the world and from scholarly advances in understanding the relationships between science and society. Many of these lessons will be familiar to those with experience in crafting knowledge to support action for sustainable development. However, few are included in the formal training of researchers. As a result, when scientists and engineers first venture out of the laboratory or library with the goal of linking their knowledge with action, the outcome has often been ineffectiveness and disillusionment. We therefore articulate here a core set of lessons that we believe should become part of the basic training for researchers interested in crafting usable knowledge for sustainable development. These lessons entail at least four things researchers should know, and four things they should do. The knowing lessons involve understanding the coproduction relationships through which knowledge making and decision making shape one another in social-environmental systems. We highlight the lessons that emerge from examining those coproduction relationships through the ICAP lens, viewing them from the perspectives of Innovation systems, Complex systems, Adaptive systems, and Political systems. The doing lessons involve improving the capacity of the research community to put its understanding of coproduction into practice. We highlight steps through which researchers can help build capacities for stakeholder collaboration, social learning, knowledge governance, and researcher training.sustainable development | knowledge systems | capacity | coproduction | science-policy interface This paper seeks to promote better mobilization of knowledge for the pursuit of sustainable development. Our starting point is the original vision of sustainability (we use "sustainability" and "sustainable development" interchangeably throughout this paper) set forth by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 and recently reaffirmed and refined by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly's formal adoption of The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Here we follow recent scholarship (1, 2) in encompassing the multiple UN goals under a broader conceptualization that sees sustainable development as the promotion of inclusive human well-being; this is to say, well-being that is shared equitably within and across generations and is built on the enlightened and integrated stewardship of the planet's environmental, economic, and social assets.Great improvements have taken place in many people's well-being over recent generations. However, contemporary development is not sustainable development. It leaves too many of today's people behind (3). Also, it achieves today's increasingly inequitable gains by degrading many of the essential assets on which the prospe...