The role of field research co-design and “responsive” normative trust in fostering actionable knowledge production from sustainability science

In spite of their stated ambition, the societal outputs of many transdisciplinary sustainability research projects remain at the level of research dissemination to policy makers, instead of organizing a truly interactive knowledge co-production process leading to actionable knowledge outputs for the key societal stakeholders. As such these projects still apply a linear conception of social impact, which focuses on knowledge outputs “from research to policy”, such as policy briefs, stakeholder dialogues or technical reports. In contrast, what is needed to foster co-production of usable knowledge for societal transformations is the organisation of a process of social learning between scientists and stakeholders that directly links the knowledge production processes to practical life-world problems (Herrero et al., 2019). Nevertheless, even though research funders recognize the importance of social learning in contributing to the production of usable and actionable knowledge outputs, this proves to be especially challenging for participants to transdisciplinary research projects, in particular for two reasons : (1) scientists often face a trade-off between social impact requirements and requirements for scientific publishing in (high impact/disciplinary) peer reviewed journals and (2) the “intangible” social learning dimensions of the impact pathways are more difficult to document and report for purposes of research evaluation. This paper aims to analyse in more depth this trade-off, through first-hand comparative research of finalized collaborative transdisciplinary research projects. In particular, the paper focuses on the following research question: what are the various governance features of successful research partnerships that contribute to satisfying both the requirements of co-production of socially robust knowledge outputs and academic publications in peer reviewed journals ?