Towards a practice of reflexivity

The complex and intractable character of today’s environmental and sustainability issues present unprecedented challenges to science and policy alike. In response, there is called for more reflexive modes of knowledge production. With such modes, academic and non-academic actors collaborate in processes of knowledge co-production geared towards societal transformation and sustainable development. Despite knowledge co-production’s increasing popularity, it has been argued that, in practice, it appears to deviate little from conventional technocratic ideas on the interactions between science and policy. Policy researchers in the Global North who aspire knowledge co-production are shown to run into societal, political, cultural and institutional barriers as the respective science-policy systems appear to privilege more classical modes of knowledge production. Consequently, co-production’s transformative power often falls short of its potential to contribute to sustainability. Addressing these barriers, scholars have called for the institutionalisation of reflexive research. Yet, the process by which institutionalisation might be achieved and what its outcomes might look like so far have received relatively little empirical and theoretical attention. This thesis aims to make up for this, and does so by exploring the process by which knowledge co-production in policy evaluation – as an enactment of reflexive research – becomes normalised at a Dutch knowledge institute positioned at the intersection of science and policy, viz. the PBL Netherlands Environmental Policy Assessment Agency (Dutch: Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving, or PBL). The main research question addressed in this thesis is as follows: How does the process of normalisation of knowledge co-production in policy evaluation at the PBL Netherlands Environmental Policy Assessment Agency take shape?