Moving Climate Information off the Shelf: Boundary Chains and the Role of RISAs as Adaptive Organizations

Abstract

While research focusing on how boundary organizations influence the use of climate information has expanded substantially in the past few decades, there has been relatively less attention to how these organizations innovate and adapt to different environments and users. This paper investigates how one boundary organization, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center (GLISA), has adapted by creating “boundary chains” to diversify its client base while minimizing transaction costs, increasing scientific knowledge usability, and better meeting client climate information needs. In this approach, boundary organizations connect like links in a chain and together these links span the range between the production of knowledge and its use. Three main chain configurations are identified. In the key chain approach, GLISA has partnered with other organizations in a number of separate projects simultaneously, diversifying its client base without sacrificing customization. In the linked chain approach, GLISA is one of several linked boundary organizations that successively deepen the level of customization to meet particular users’ needs. Finally, by partnering with multiple organizations and stakeholder groups in both configurations, GLISA may be laying the groundwork for enhancing their partners’ own capacity to make climate-related decisions through a networked chain approach that facilitates cooperation among organizations and groups. Each of these approaches represents an adaptive strategy that both enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of participating boundary organizations’ work and improves the provision of climate information that meets users’ needs.

To what extent are land resource managers preparing for high-end climate change in Scotland?

“…Using existing, trusted intermediaries, or Bknowledge brokers^, within boundary organisations may assist in implementing these strategies to help overcome the barriers that prevent better mutual understanding and interactions (Turnhout et al 2013;Schlierf and Meyer 2013;Lemos et al 2014). Boundary organisations such as Adaptation Scotland 1 , along with similar organisations in other regions and other countries, hold the potential to play a key role in this process of knowledge brokering, as trusted intermediaries with strong links to both knowledge providers and decision-makers (Turnhout et al 2013).…”

Developing criteria for a stakeholder-centred evaluation of climate services: the case of extreme event attribution for storm surges at the German Baltic Sea

“…The IPCC chapter on decision-making highlights that knowledge transfer is a negotiation process which needs to consider diverse, sometimes divergent forms of knowledge (Jones et al 2014: 198). Lemos et al (2014) and Kirchhoff et al (2013) argue in this respect that the usability of new knowledge, including from science, depends on its interaction with the types of knowledge that are in use on the stakeholder's part at that moment. In order to produce "useful" information, science therefore needs to comprehend these "other" knowledges, and vice versa (von Storch et al 2015).…”

Partners in Local Resilience

“…This brokerage work is a resource-intensive process, and most of these organizations face limitations set by their available resources (Kirchhoff et al, 2013;McNie 2007). Therefore, the development of partnerships between two or more boundary organizations in the form of "boundary chains" is a useful approach to enhance these organizations' ability to provide climate information support to decision makers (Lemos et al, 2014). Linking boundary organizations helps share costs across several agencies while ensuring that each participant benefits from the resources and expertise available in the boundary chain.…”

“…These linkages also aid in the organizations speaking in one voice, with common messages based on shared data. Chains are particularly beneficial when a process requires several steps of information customization before it is truly usable for the end-user (Lemos et al 2014), as is common when translating data, information, and strategies between climate science organizations and decision makers. Working with boundary organizations aligns with the analyses of socio-ecological systems scholars who emphasize the importance of adaptive capacity for enabling institutions and networks to provide more inclusive and responsive decision making (Armitage and Plummer, 2010).…”