Co-creating knowledge for system transformation – boundary objects and the making of relational space-times

Abstract

The growing call for science, technology, and innovation (STI) policy to address more directly the challenges posed by social and environmental crises has focused attention on the policy processes to support sustainability transitions (e.g., see Lundin and Schwaag, 2018; Schot and Kanger, 2018; Steward, 2012; Weber and Rohracher, 2012). This includes a call for the development of a new “meta-framework” for STI policy (Schot and Steinmueller, 2018) that is applicable across different geographies. This requires a careful re-visiting of how we understand policy transfer and the policy processes that support sustainability practices across different physical spaces. The sustainability transitions literature, or more specifically that part of it associated with the geography of sustainable transitions (Coenen et al., 2015; Hansen and Coenen, 2015), embraces the principle that it is necessary to understand and incorporate the complexities that specific places imply for sustainability transitions. Yet the questions of policy transfer, policy scaling and policy adaptation for transformative innovation policy (TIP) remain (Veldhuizen and Coenen, 2022).

In this presentation I draw on two areas of recent of research undertaken through the transformative innovation policy consortium (TIPC) programme that address this issue of policy transfer and policy learning across spaces for sustainable transitions. The first highlights the relevance of building what we call “mutable fluid spaces” (Ramirez et al 2024) between academics and policy makers and its importance for transferring transformative innovation policy across geographical spaces. However, in this research it was noticed that at the centre of co-creation were twelve transformative outcomes offered in Ghosh et al. (2021) that appeared to work as boundary objects (Star, 1989; Star & Griesemer, 1989), enabling actors with different kinds of knowledge to communicate across the knowledge ‘boundary’ more effectively. We further explore the use of boundary objects as a means of enabling actors with different kinds of knowledge to communicate across the knowledge ‘boundary’ more effectively using policy experiments that emerge from the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC).