From pipelines, to protected areas to proactive wildfire mitigation, debates about public policy decisions ought to be informed by credible and legitimate knowledge including from diverse worldviews. While these principles are widely recognized as essential for addressing deep and irreducible uncertainties, enhancing understanding of complex social-ecological systems, and ensuring equitable outcomes, they have tended to remain largely notional. Simply put, some forms of knowledge (often Western scientific) are repeatedly privileged and reinforced over others (often local, Indigenous) in practice. This privilege matters because the characterization of complex environmental problems, the solutions, and the actors implicated as appropriate stewards, all arise from, and are (co-produced by, specific forms of knowledge.

Our approach to understanding knowledge at the science-policy interface is informed by a politics of knowledge perspective. From this vantage point, understanding the relationship between science (more broadly, knowledge) and policy is much more complex than simply designing a better interface from which science is imagined to flow linearly to decisions. Rather, the core of the challenge has to do with the ways that knowledge is co-produced, value-laden and inextricably and unevenly connected to power.

This work is deepening understanding about the incorporation of knowledge at “science-policy interfaces” at international and regional scales and providing empirical insights to inform, anticipate and address complex trade-offs in environmental decision-making.

Photo: Sarah Dickson-Hoyle

Current projects:

Targets Through Time: Negotiating Knowledge(s) and Constructing Future Possibilities for Global Biodiversity Governance (2017-2020). SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Principal Investigator. Collaborators: Noella Gray and Lisa Campbell.

Wildfire governance in a dynamic ecocultural landscape
More about Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz’s research below:

Public Scholars // Biography

Key outputs:

Pelai, R., Hagerman, S. and Kozak. R. 2020. Whose expertise counts? Assisted migration and the politics of knowledge in British Columbia’s public forests. Land Use Policy.

Cockerill, K. and Hagerman, S. 2020. Historical insights for understanding the emergence of community-based conservation in Kenya: international agendas, colonial legacies, and contested worldviews. Ecology and Society.

Adeyeye, Y. Hagerman, S. and R. Pelai. 2019. Seeking procedural equity in global environmental governance: Indigenous participation and knowledge politics in forest and landscape restoration debates at the 2016 World Conservation Congress. Forest Policy and Economics.

Gray, N., Corson, C., Campbell, L. Wilshusen, P., Gruby, R., and S. Hagerman. 2019. Doing Strong Collaborative Fieldwork in Human Geography. Geographical Review

Hagerman S. and R. Pelai. 2016. ‘As far as possible and as appropriate: Implementing the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Special issue on “Achieving the targets of global biodiversity conventions.” Conservation Letters. 9: 469-478.

Campbell, L., Hagerman S. and N. Gray. 2014. Producing targets for conservation: science and politics at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Special Issue: Global Environmental Politics. 14: 41–63.

Corson, C., Gruby, R. Witter, R., Hagerman, S., Suarez, D. Greenburg, S, Bourque M, Gray, N. and L. Campbell. 2014. Everyone’s solution? Defining and re-defining protected areas through the Convention on Biological Diversity. Conservation & Society. 12: 190-202.

Hagerman, S., Satterfield, T. and H. Dowlatabadi. 2010. Climate impacts, biodiversity conservation and protected values: Understanding promotion, ambivalence and resistance to policy redesign at the WCC. Special Iss. Conservation & Society. 8: 298-311.