Abstract Summary
It is widely recognized that achieving sustainability in the twenty-first century will require a reorientation of scientific research towards “usable” knowledge, particularly when it comes to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, was created to translate science into policy, but it has focused on long-term predictions of global temperature, rather than on shorter-term, regional-scale predictions that could help guide local policies. Generating actionable climate science will require incorporating the knowledge, experience, and values of those impacted by climate change into the process of producing and evaluating new research. This reorientation is already in progress—evident, for instance, in recent initiatives to incorporate the knowledge, experience, and values of “users,” “stakeholders,” and indigenous communities into the process of producing knowledge about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Strong claims are being made for the novelty of these modes of generating climate knowledge, but with little attention to history. In fact, the precedents for involving non-experts in scientific research date back to the very birth of professional science in the eighteenth century. This presentation considers the history of “co-production” in the earth sciences in order to identify the contingent assumptions and limitations of our own ways of doing science. I conclude that usability needs to be defined more broadly. In fact, conceptions of “useful knowledge” drawn from the past can help point the way forward.
