Placing diverse knowledge systems at the core of transformative climate research

• DOI: 10.1007/s13280-023-01857-w
• Publication Date: 2023-04-27T14:02:46Z
• Authors: Ben Orlove; Pasang Sherpa; Neil Dawson; Ibidun Adelekan; Wilfredo Alangui; Rosario Carmona; Deborah Coen; Melissa K. Nelson; Victoria Reyes-Ga...; Jennifer Rubis; Gideon Sanago; Andrew Wilson
• Keywords: Sociology and Political Science; Climate; FOS: Political science; Knowledge management; Social Sciences; Colonialism; Sustainability Transitions; Decolonization; Adaptive Governance; Engineering; Sociology; 11. Sustainability; General partnership; Business; Autonomy; Political science; Global and Planetary Change; Corporate governance; Ecology; Pedagogy; 16. Peace & justice; 320; FOS: Sociology; FOS: Philosophy, ethics and religion; Co-production; Geoengineering and Climate Ethics; Knowledge; Traditional knowledge; Physical Sciences; Perceptions and Communication of Climate Change; Getting to Solutions: Moving Beyond Theory to Practical Methods for Change; Climate Change; Transformative learning; FOS: Law; Epistemology; Transformation; Engineering ethics; Humans; Sustainability Transitions and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems; Indigenous Peoples; Biology; Environmental ethics; Economic Justice; Computer science; 300; Indigenous; Philosophy; 13. Climate action; FOS: Biological sciences; Environmental Science; Law; Finance

AbstractWe argue that solutions-based research must avoid treating climate change as a merely technical problem, recognizing instead that it is symptomatic of the history of European and North American colonialism. It must therefore be addressed by decolonizing the research process and transforming relations between scientific expertise and the knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and of local communities. Partnership across diverse knowledge systems can be a path to transformative change only if those systems are respected in their entirety, as indivisible cultural wholes of knowledge, practices, values, and worldviews. This argument grounds our specific recommendations for governance at the local, national, and international scales. As concrete mechanisms to guide collaboration across knowledge systems, we propose a set of instruments based on the principles of consent, intellectual and cultural autonomy, and justice. We recommend these instruments as tools to ensure that collaborations across knowledge systems embody just partnerships in support of a decolonial transformation of relations between human communities and between humanity and the more-than-human world.