Public defence with Tatiana Sokolova

Tatiana Sokolova defends her thesis "To tame, empower, transgress: Imagining and practicing co-production of knowledge and action in transformations towards sustainability"

Tatiana Sokolova

Doctoral thesis: To tame, empower, transgress: Imagining and practicing co-production of knowledge and action in transformations towards sustainability
Subject: Environmental Science
Research area: Environmental studies
Graduate school: Baltic and East European Graduate School (BEEGS), Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies
Faculty examiner: Dr. Simon West, Lecturer, Crawford School of Public Policy, Department of Resources, Environment and Development College of Law, Governance and Policy, Australian National University.

Abstract

The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda calls for “transforming our world”, spurring demands for environmental knowledge such as climate models, carbon budgets, and policy roadmaps. Simultaneously, sustainability governance has increasingly promoted co-produced, actionable science involving diverse societal actors. Yet progress towards global sustainability goals remains limited. Why does more collaborative knowledge not necessarily result in transformative action? This thesis argues that the answer lies in prevailing knowledge politics, which often treats knowledge as technical expertise and power as the capacity to implement it. Such a view obscures the complex ways in which knowledge and action are co-created. To address this limitation, the thesis develops more nuanced understandings of power, knowledge, and their interrelations. It argues that co-production does not automatically generate transformation because it is shaped by contested knowledge-power relations. Drawing on co-production as an idiom, the thesis examines how co-production as practice is imagined and performed, and how these imaginaries enable or constrain pathways towards contextually envisioned sustainability futures. Empirically, the thesis analyses sustainability knowledge production and use across Swedish sustainability and research policies, two transdisciplinary research programmes, and the Russian climate lawsuit before the European Court of Human Rights. While these arenas are informed by dominant imaginaries of knowledge and sustainability, actors reinterpret and contest them in ways that produce diverse forms of action, from ocean science initiatives to climate justice claims. By examining these encounters as political spaces where knowledge and action meet, the thesis explores how co-production can both support and hinder transformative change towards sustainability.