The “Nuts and Bolts” of Doing Coproduction: Exploring Implementation Decisions in Climate Adaptation Research with Stakeholders

Abstract

Abstract Developing local climate adaptation strategies that respond to weather and climate extremes is increasingly salient. Coproducing knowledge and climate adaptation strategies can be an important approach to ensuring that they are context specific, meet community needs, and are deemed usable by local decision-makers. Most of the guidance for coproduction has focused on important, overarching themes and ethical considerations like trust, iteration, and flexibility; these are incredibly valuable, but little attention has been focused on specific, highly consequential research decisions that researchers must make that shape project outcomes. Here, we reflect on our experience in a pilot project coproducing climate adaptation knowledge and strategies in six rural communities. We identify eight questions that researchers coproducing science with communities will need to grapple with when designing and conducting research and discuss some of the related trade-offs of each. Topics include community recruitment, champion selection, participant makeup, geography, clarifying expectations, timing, prioritization, and next steps. The questions are broadly applicable to knowledge coproduction and important especially as greater attention is being given to the ethics of doing this work, the power relations, and the potential risk associated with it. We hope that these questions can guide a dialogue for others and motivate explicit discussions of trade-offs involved in planning research that is coproduced with communities. We call for more of this type of self-reflection and sharing across our research community to deepen our knowledge and hopefully lead to a more rapid improvement in outcomes across the many efforts underway today to cocreate climate knowledge for adaptation.