This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2015
Challenges of science-policy interfaces: Experiences from a dialogue between science and civil society about a low-carbon society
Challenges of science-policy interfaces: Experiences from a dialogue between science and civil society about a low-carbon society
Science-policy interfaces are challenged by a lack of communication and cooperation between science and practice. At the same time studies have shown, successful climate change governance depends on improved collaboration between science and society, to develop robust and applicable knowledge to add...
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Personal Name(s): | Ernst, Anna (Corresponding author) |
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Contributing Institute: |
Systemforschung und Technologische Entwicklung; IEK-STE |
Imprint: |
2015
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Conference: | 2015 Canberra Conference on Earth System Governance: "Democracy and Resilience in the Anthropocene", Canberra (Australien), 2015-12-14 - 2015-12-16 |
Document Type: |
Conference Presentation |
Research Program: |
Assessment of Energy Systems – Addressing Issues of Energy Efficiency and Energy Security |
Publikationsportal JuSER |
Science-policy interfaces are challenged by a lack of communication and cooperation between science and practice. At the same time studies have shown, successful climate change governance depends on improved collaboration between science and society, to develop robust and applicable knowledge to address wicked problems. The transformation towards sustainable development postulates a new role for scientists to engage in social processes to enhance co-production of knowledge but also to ensure knowledge integration in the decision making process. This approach also generates dilemmas, for in-stance between the pressure to act and time-consuming scientific assessments. To address deficits and test forms of collaboration we have set up a dialogue process between science and civil society in North Rhine-Westphalia to discuss challenges and pathways towards a low-carbon society. The process was divided in three process phases: interview phase, dialogue phase and evalua-tion phase. The first phase aimed to build trust and identify relevant issues of dialogue. The dialogue phase consisted of five workshops about previous defined and by the stakeholders (participants) decided topics. The third project phase is currently ongoing and evaluates the dialogue process. We send out an online questionnaire to the involved stakeholders to analyse the perception and the impact of the dialogue. The evaluation is based on the criteria empowerment, fairness, legitimacy, transparency, efficiency, effectiveness and network building. The conclusions drawn from this process are not only contributing to the scientific discussion about challenges and benefits of knowledge co-production between science and practice, but also enable us to take a new role as scientists. We have experienced the difficulties of producing solid scientific knowledge and at the same time managing a dialogue characterised by conflicting interests.The paper will in depth describe how we tackled the main challenges of science-policy interfaces: lack of trust, lack of problem awareness or insufficient problem framing and unbalanced problem ownership etc.. Our findings suggest that the quality of the project outputs maybe sacrificed to the overall establishment of a mutual learning process. Thus the real outcome of such dialogue is not building consensus but rather to contribute to decision making by identifying questions and issues that need to be addressed for a successful transformation process towards a low-carbon society. |