Transferring Skills or Building a Network? What Interviews with Trainers Reveals About Building Capacity for Actionable Climate Science
Abstract
Adopting a co-production approach to climate change research often pushes the boundaries of both decision makers' and research scientists' formal education. In recent years, a range of training programs and opportunities have emerged to meet the demand. Despite the growing numbers of programs, there is limited research and consensus on what knowledge and skills should be developed and how these trainings should be facilitated. In order to better understand their successes and challenges, in depth interviews were conducted with 11 trainers and program managers from the United States who build capacity for actionable climate science among scientists, decision makers, and climate services professionals. The results indicate that many training activities focus less on developing specific knowledge and skills, and more on adapting participant's dispositions towards science and decision making, facilitating the sharing of experiential knowledge, and building networks and fostering increased trust among its participants. The interviews also suggest that trainers' unique backgrounds and experiences likely play an influential role in the development of their unique approaches. This research makes a valuable contribution, in that it begins to demonstrate how to increase the quantity of people engaged in climate change co-production efforts and how to improve the quality of this work, given the unique constraints and challenges faced by researchers and decision makers alike.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMPA41D1358T
- Keywords:
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- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6319 Institutions;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES