Paper short abstract:

This paper explores whether participatory and transdisciplinary approaches can enable more impactful and appropriate solutions to climate change by examining how community and expert knowledge are contested and enacted by multidisciplinary expert partners in a climate change initiative (CCI).

Paper long abstract:

The collaboration between scientific expert knowledge and locally embedded community knowledge systems has been increasingly promoted as they are deemed to hold the potential for creating more appropriate, adaptive, and sustainable solutions to climate change. However, these collaborations often lead to messy, complicated and contradictory outcomes.

Consequently, questions have been raised about whether collaborations between experts and community members can ever enable more comprehensive and encompassing ways of knowing the world or whether that is cruel optimistic hope that can end up reinforcing social, cultural, and political patterns of exclusion, oppression and inequality.

This paper argues that in order to understand what factors shape how scientific and community collaborations play out it is necessary to pay attention to how community and expert knowledge is itself contested and enacted continuously.

To explore these issues paper will draw on initial findings from an EU Horizon 2020 Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) project involving 19 partners across 3 continents and communities in 6 European countries. It will examine the project partners, including the authors themselves, as a complex and contingent communities where knowledge is continuously shaped in relation to unfolding everyday practices and socio-spatial entanglements.

Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and community engagement activities it will draw out how knowledge, research and collaboration practices are contested, reconfigured, and stabilised by project members and how these processes are intertwined in attempts of navigating precarious lives, bureaucratic tensions, and fluctuating norms, aspirations and emotions.