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PROGRAMS

Manager Climate Corps

MANAGER CLIMATE CORPS (MCC)

MCC Tagline: “Collaboration across Worldviews”

“Information, in itself, is not knowledge, nor do we become any more knowledgeable through its accumulation. Our knowledgeability consists, rather, in the capacity to situate such information, and understand its meaning within the context of direct perceptual engagements with our environments.” Ingold 2011, p. 21

Mission

The PI-CASC mission is to deliver science that helps fish, wildlife, water, land, and people adapt to a changing climate. The Manager Climate Corps (MCC) program is a practitioner-driven graduate research program that accomplishes this mission through the process of knowledge co-production (collaborative research). Through this collaborative process we work to increasingly “get to know our neighbors” by uniting natural and cultural resource stewards with researchers as co-leads in every stage of the research pathway; from the development of the research question, to the methods and analysis, and ultimately the utilization of research output. Through two years of project support, graduate students develop collaborative leadership skills within each research team. In its 5th cohort of graduate students and hosted by the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, the MCC builds adaptive capacity locally by identifying long-term professional networks and expanding them through manager-driven research projects.

For more details of the MCC program, please check out our:

MCC FOUNDATIONAL ELEMENTS

  • Returning to notions of “community” that are guided by the strength of our more-than-human and human relationships (Abram 1996)
  • Recognizing and engaging diverse knowledge forms
  • Supporting trust by locating and building upon long-term, place-based relationships (knowledge networks)
  • Employing the process of knowledge co-production (manager-driven research)

Goal & Objectives

Our goal is to support long-term, place-based relationships (e.g., relationality; Laursen et al. 2025) and practitioner-driven research projects by uniting local management and research networks within two-year research projects, while training graduate students in manager-driven research through the process of knowledge co-production (manager-driven research). Throughout this website, the term “manager” includes placed-based natural or cultural resource managers, community leaders, policy professionals, and/or cultural practitioners.

OBJECTIVES

  1. Identify existing networks of natural and cultural resource managers, policy professionals, community leaders, and other on-the-ground practitioners (henceforth referred to collectively as “managers”) on Hawaiʻi Island.
  2. Support and expand these local knowledge networks by directly and iteratively connecting managers with research networks in social, biological and physical sciences.
  3. Sustain direct and regular collaboration across these networks through two-year, practitioner-driven research projects that offer immediately useful products to managers, utilizing the process of knowledge co-production.
Bethany Morrison explores the coasts of Kaʻū
Bethany Morrison (Planning Department, County of Hawaiʻi) explores the coasts of Kaʻū as she participates in a 4-day, 3-night immersion camp supporting practitioner-driven research pathways
Climate Change Boot Camp
Climate Change Immersion Camp at the Kiolakaʻa Ranger Station in Kaʻū on August 9th - 12th 2016

DEFINING KNOWLEDGE CO-PRODUCTION

As knowledge co-production becomes increasingly familiar across disciplines and professions, definitions are key to illuminating specific approaches to collaborative research amid the spectrum of actionable science pathways. We share this suite of relevant definitions within our programming: 

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Knowledge Co-Production:

  1. “The process of producing usable, or actionable, science through collaboration between scientists and resource managers who use the science to make policy and management decisions” (Meadow et al. 2015:179).
  2. A more recent definition of knowledge co-production directly accounts for multiple knowledge forms and the related ideas of situated or embodied knowledge: “iterative and collaborative processes involving diverse types of expertise, knowledge and actors to produce context-specific knowledge and pathways towards a sustainable future” (Norström et al. 2020:183).
  3. Our MCC definition: we work to empower natural and cultural resource managers, community leaders, and policy professionals as co-equal team leads alongside researchers in developing collaborative research output that is applied on the ground in support of climate change adaptation (Laursen et al. 2018; Bamzai-Dodson et al. 2021).
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Knowledge Network: the collective group of natural resource managers, policy professionals, cultural practitioners, and scientists that employ the knowledge co-production process (Laursen et al. 2018).

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Diverse/Multiple Knowledge Forms refers to the sum total of ways of knowing within the human condition. Such knowledge forms include but are not limited to logical knowledge (articulate knowledge) that results from rational intellect, technical analysis, and reason; as well as intrinsic knowledge forms (tacit or embodied knowledge) that result from experience, instinct, perception, cultural practice, intuition, the unconscious, values, community norms, and emotion. For specifics on our utilization of multiple knowledge forms, please see the Manager Roles section at the bottom of our MCC Process page and the worldview figure and human dimensions resource library on our MCC Approach page.

REFERENCES

Abram D (1996) The spell of the sensuous: language and perception in a more than human world. Random House, Toronto

Bamzai-Dodson A, Cravens AE, Wade A, McPherson RA (2021) Engaging with stakeholders to produce actionable science: a framework and guidance. Weather, Climate, and Society online. https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-21-0046.1

Ingold T (2011) The Perception of the Environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, 2nd edn. Routledge, London.

Laursen S, Puniwai N, Genz AS, Nash SAB, Canale LK, and Ziegler-Chong S (2018) Collaboration across worldviews: managers and scientists on Hawaiʻi Island utilize knowledge coproduction to facilitate climate change adaptation. Environmental Management 62(4): 619-630.

Laursen S, Palacat-Nelsen A, Leslie C. et al. (2025) Empowering long-term, relational research pathways: innovation and adaptation at the speed of trust within more-than-human and human communities. Emotion, Space and Society. 56 101109 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2025.101109

Meadow AM, Ferguson DB, Guido Z, Horangic A, Owen G, Wall T (2015) Moving toward the deliberate coproduction of climate science knowledge. Weather, Climate, and Society 7:179-191. https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-14-00050.1

Norström AV, Cvitanovic C, Löf MF et al. (2020) Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nat Sustain 3, 182–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2

MORE MCC

QUICK LINKS

CONTACT

Scott Laursen
Climate Adaptation Extension Specialist
slaursen@hawaii.edu