William C. Clark

Knowledge systems for sustainable development

The challenge of meeting human development needs while protecting the earths life support systems confronts scientists, technologists, policy makers, and communities from local to global levels. Many believe that science and technology (S&T) must play a more central role in sustainable development, yet little systematic scholarship exists on how to create institutions that effectively harness S&T for sustainability. This study suggests that efforts to mobilize S&T for sustainability are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that simultaneously enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information they produce. Effective systems apply a variety of institutional mechanisms that facilitate communication, translation and mediation across boundaries.

Sustainability science: The emerging research program

Communicated by Susan Hanson, Clark University, Worcester, MA, March 7, 2003 (received for review February 25, 2003)

Sustainable development of the biosphere

The Sustainable Development of the Biosphere is a book which explains an ambitious international program begun in 1982 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. The program brings together historians, geographers, environmental scientists, economists, managers, and policymakers from a wide range of countries to address the question, what should society do to reverse global changes caused by the degradation of the environment. This book of collected and edited overviews represents the conclusion of the first phase of a program that is planned to continue for several more years.

Ecosystem Stewardship: Sustainability Strategies for a Rapidly Changing Planet

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster the social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivity to, known stresses; focusing on proactive policies that shape change; and avoiding or escaping unsustainable social-ecological traps. As we discuss here, all social-ecological systems are vulnerable to recent and projected changes but have sources of adaptive capacity and resilience that can sustain ecosystem services and human well-being through active ecosystem stewardship.

Sustainability science: a room of its own.

Sustainability science has emerged over the last two decades as a vibrant field of research and innovation. Today, the field has developed a core research agenda, an increasing flow of results, and a growing number of universities committed to teaching its methods and findings. Like “agricultural science” and “health science,” sustainability science is a field defined by the problems it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs. In particular, the field seeks to facilitate what the National Research Council has called a “transition toward sustainability,” improving societys capacity to use the earth in ways that simultaneously “meet the needs of a much larger but stabilizing human population, … sustain the life support systems of the planet, and … substantially reduce hunger and poverty” (1). In early 2005, Bruce Alberts and Ralph Cicerone, in their respective roles as outgoing and incoming presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, proposed that the maturing field of sustainability science might be ready for a “room of its own” in PNAS. After a committee study and extended discussion, the PNAS Editorial Board approved a new section on Sustainability Science, which now shares the masthead with other long-term residents such as Physics, Genetics, and Cell Biology. This editorial constitutes a progress report on the field itself and on the role of PNAS in fostering its development. Research relevant to the goals of sustainable development has long been pursued from bases as diverse as geography and geochemistry, ecology and economics, or physics and political science. Increasingly, however, a core sustainability science research program has begun to take shape that transcends the concerns of its foundational disciplines and focuses instead on understanding the complex dynamics that arise from interactions between human and environmental systems. Central questions (2) include the following. How can those dynamic interactions be …

Boundary Work for Sustainable Development: Natural Resource Management at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)

Previous research on the determinants of effectiveness in knowledge systems seeking to support sustainable development has highlighted the importance of “boundary work” through which research communities organize their relations with new science, other sources of knowledge, and the worlds of action and policymaking. A growing body of scholarship postulates specific attributes of boundary work that promote used and useful research. These propositions, however, are largely based on the experience of a few industrialized countries. We report here on an effort to evaluate their relevance for efforts to harness science in support of sustainability in the developing world. We carried out a multicountry comparative analysis of natural resource management programs conducted under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. We discovered six distinctive kinds of boundary work contributing to the successes of those programs—a greater variety than has been documented in previous studies. We argue that these different kinds of boundary work can be understood as a dual response to the different uses for which the results of specific research programs are intended, and the different sources of knowledge drawn on by those programs. We show that these distinctive kinds of boundary work require distinctive strategies to organize them effectively. Especially important are arrangements regarding participation of stakeholders, accountability in governance, and the use of “boundary objects.” We conclude that improving the ability of research programs to produce useful knowledge for sustainable development will require both greater and differentiated support for multiple forms of boundary work.

Salience, Credibility, Legitimacy and Boundaries: Linking Research, Assessment and Decision Making

The boundary between science and policy is only one of several boundaries that hinder the linking of scientific and technical information to decision making. Managing boundaries between disciplines, across scales of geography and jurisdiction, and between different forms of knowledge is also often critical to transferring information. The research presented in this paper finds that information requires three (not mutually exclusive) attributes - salience, credibility, and legitimacy - and that what makes boundary crossing difficult is that actors on different sides of a boundary perceive and value salience, credibility, and legitimacy differently. Presenting research on water management regimes in the United States, international agricultural research systems, El Nino forecasting systems in the Pacific and southern Africa, and fisheries in the North Atlantic, this paper explores: 1) how effective boundary work involves creating salient, credible, and legitimate information simultaneously for multiple audiences; 2) the thresholds, complementarities and tradeoffs between salience, credibility, and legitimacy when crossing boundaries; and 3) propositions for institutional mechanisms in boundary organizations which effectively balance tradeoffs, take advantage on complementarities, and reach thresholds of salience, credibility, and legitimacy.

Managing Planet Earth.

Every form of life continually faces the challenge of reconciling its innate capacity for growth with the opportunities and constraints that arise through its interactions with the natural environment. The remarkable success of our own species in meeting that challenge is only the beginning of the story.

Linking international agricultural research knowledge with action for sustainable development

We applied an innovation framework to sustainable livestock development research projects in Africa and Asia. The focus of these projects ranged from pastoral systems to poverty and ecosystems services mapping to market access by the poor to fodder and natural resource management to livestock parasite drug resistance. We found that these projects closed gaps between knowledge and action by combining different kinds of knowledge, learning, and boundary spanning approaches; by providing all partners with the same opportunities; and by building the capacity of all partners to innovate and communicate.

Scales of climate impacts

Climates, ecosystems, and societies interact over a tremendous range of temporal and spatial scales. Scholarly work on climate impacts has tended to emphasize different questions, variables, and modes of explanation depending on the primary scale of interest. Much of the current debate on cause and effect, vulnerability, marginality, and the like stems from uncritical or unconscious efforts to transfer experience, conclusions, and insights across scales. This paper sketches a perspective from which the relative temporal and spatial dimensions of climatic, ecological, and social processes can be more clearly perceived, and their potential interactions more critically evaluated. Quantitative estimates of a variety of characteristic scales are derived and compared, leading to specific recommendations for the design of climate impact studies.