Calls for transformative change and participatory modes of knowledge production demand researchers to assume new roles. This paper synthesizes the literature on knowledge co-production and researcher roles to explore challenges for researchers involved in transdisciplinary environmental management projects. Our research methods combine a scoping review and reflections on personal experiences with three transdisciplinary projects. To conceptualize researcher roles in transdisciplinary knowledge co-production, we distinguish between three spaces: knowledge, formal policy, and stakeholder. Knowledge co-production requires collaboration between actors from different spaces and integration of diverse knowledge sources and types. Depending on whether researchers adopt knowledge-oriented, change-oriented or intermediating roles, they will experience different challenges. When researchers combine knowledge development with change-oriented and/or intermediating roles, they encounter new challenges, such as, maintaining independence or objectivity. To assist researchers in transdisciplinary projects, we conclude with a checklist of four elements to reflect upon: orientation, norms and values, expectations and resources.
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This paper examines a co-production arrangement between private actors, households, and community actors occurring within the framework of scheme of commercialised spring water in peri-urban Bandung, Indonesia. We argue that the provision of spring water in Ujungberung District is a form of co-production, characterised by: (1) any one, or the elements, of the service production process being shared; (2) the presence of a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the primary producers and users/communities, and (3) the existence of mutual support and relationship networks, rather than a clearly defined delineation between providers and clients. Actor contributions defined as inputs along the value chain of spring water production were examined. We describe interactions between local private actors and community members in planning, service delivery, and conflict management with respect to disruption of water supplies, free-riding behaviour, and the geographical distribution of services. This paper identifies several institutional innovations that may yield a safer and more affordable water supply and nurture equity in the sense of: (1) improved access to water for the previously unserved people by piped water and boreholes; (2) the opportunity to negotiate from below; and (3) transparency and accountability.
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Eco-innovations that reduce carbon emissions help advance sustainability transitions in tourism. This article examines the analytical potential of actor-network theory (ANT) to study eco-innovation. ANT assumes that reality consists of actor-networks made of human and non-human elements that perform actors as network effects. We argue that, in a time when climate change is the simultaneous product and producer of human actions, eco-innovation is better understood when research gives the human and non-human elements that perform eco-innovations equal analytical treatment. We therefore develop an ANT-inspired framework, which we apply in a case study to investigate the development of a specific eco-innovation: CARMACAL, a web-based carbon management application in the Dutch travel industry. We find that technological novelty alone is insufficient to instigate transition. CARMACAL affords multiple new practices with opposite implications for socio-economic and environmental sustainability. The practices triggering most industry support are least effective in addressing tourism's climate impacts and vice versa. Examining eco-innovation through ANT helps us put eco-innovation in a different light. Seemingly contradictory practices may be mutually supportive: their individual strengths and weaknesses may help prevent the failure of eco-innovations. This new possibility opens the way for concerted policies strengthening the contribution of eco-innovations to sustainability transitions.
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