About this Research Topic

Background

Rural communities around the world are facing critical, complex, and confounding sustainability challenges including biodiversity loss, water scarcity and quality losses, and climate change. While scientists have forewarned of acute hazards and long-term change, it is citizens who will be at the forefront of adaptation actions. Many have already suffered from significant events brought by events such as drought, fire, flood, and storm surges. As they learn from these events, community members will have to explicitly build resilient landscapes and social systems if their adaptations are to be effective and sustainable. Local experiences, however, have not been readily translated into policies and practices on the ground, and documentation of social/transformative learning and knowledge co-creation processes is limited.

The Research Topic seeks to highlight key lessons learned when researchers explicitly seek to co-produce knowledge with community partners to build resilient landscapes, communities, and social systems. We are seeking articles that speak to community-academic partnerships that have influenced policy implementation and practices on the ground and/or that articulate how collaborative research has stimulated the co-creation of knowledge and social/transformative learning among research participants. Contributions are welcome that elaborate on effective collaborative research methods, new ways of doing research that support knowledge co-production, effective means for bringing different knowledge traditions together, or the tensions of engaging in knowledge co-production.

Themes in this Research Topic include but are not limited to the following areas:
• Community actions taken that address significant environmental change (e.g., loss or restoration of keystone species, resilience planning and implementation following a climate hazard – e.g., fire, drought, flood); Knowledge gained from post-disaster learning
• New governance institutions aimed at building resilience at the community level
• Practical explanations and examples of knowledge braiding that help to address the local sustainability challenge
• Methodologies that are poorly or well suited to knowledge co-production
• Building knowledge together while addressing language and cultural differences among academic and community participants
• Tensions when addressing divergent academic and community ‘needs’ from research, particularly throughout the course of a collaborative research project
• Lessons learned from working together that could not have been learned from conventional research practices.

Keywords: knowledge co-production, climate resilience, community-engaged research, social or transformative learning

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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