Boundary-Crossing Knowledge on Socio-Environmental Systems: Can It Be Fostered?

Supported by a major NSF award, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) brings natural and social science scholars from around the world to its facility in Annapolis, Maryland to co-design and conduct projects that advance actionable research on socio-environmental sustainability.  Actionable refers to scholarship with the potential to inform decisions that affect the environment and its ability to meet the needs of humans. SESYNC is unlike many research centers in a number of ways that are hypothesized to accelerate solutions to difficult problems unique to coupled human-natural systems.    First, SESYNC’s focus is on fundamental knowledge that transcends specific place-based problems and groups of stakeholders and on research questions salient to scholars from both the social and natural sciences.  Collaboration between scholars and stakeholders informs broad research themes but stakeholders do not constrain approaches nor are they necessarily participants in research projects.   Second, SESYNC uses the methods of synthesis to test hypotheses, evaluate arguments, or interpret evidence at the boundaries of multiple social and natural science disciplines.   Synthesis is a research approach that relies on the distillation and integration of data, ideas, and theories, not experimentation.  While the synthesis research approach has been developed and used extensively by some disciplines, synthesis across disciplines as diverse as those engaged in SESYNC present novel challenges.  Thus the center’s organizational structure has been designed to test hypotheses about what accelerates synthesis at the boundaries of extremely diverse disciplines e.g., social psychology, ecology, and hydrology.  Fourth, the center’s leaders actively facilitate research and engage with the researchers in multiple ways and times across the duration of synthesis projects.   The entire process is designed to foster an evolution in the questions and methods individual research teams use during their project as well as an evolution of the center in terms of its organization and engagement process.