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This Special Issue aims to reflect on knowledge co-production and transdisciplinarity, exploring the mutual interaction between water governance and water research. We do so with contributions that bring examples from diverse parts of the world: Bolivia, Canada, Germany, Ghana, Namibia, the Netherlands, Palestine, and South Africa. Key insights brought by these contributions include the importance of engaging the actors from early stages of transdisciplinary research, and the need for an in-depth understanding of the diverse needs, competences, and power of actors and the water governance system in which knowledge co-production takes place. Further, several future research directions are identified, such as the examination of knowledge backgrounds according to the individual and collective thought styles of different actors. Together, the eight papers included in this Special Issue constitute a significant step toward a better understanding of knowledge co-production and transdisciplinarity, with a common thread for being reflective and clear about their complexity, and the political implications and risks they pose for inclusive, plural and just water research and governance.

This paper asks what lessons can be learned from experiences with coproduction in water governance. For this, we review a comprehensive corpus of articles in the field of water governance that relies on the term. We find that there are radically different understandings of what coproduction means in different branches of the water governance literature. Through this review, we demonstrate how and why coproduction needs to be analyzed for its political implications. Despite being timely and pressing, these questions are not addressed in a sufficient way by the scholarly debate on coproduction. In order to fill this knowledge gap, we first distinguish different historical traditions of coproduction and then explore their political implications along three questions: The &ldquo ; why?&rdquo ; the &ldquo ; who?&rdquo ; and the &ldquo ; how?&rdquo ; . We show that these questions find different answers not just between but also within different traditions of using the term. After describing and contrasting these variants, we conclude by summarizing the main lessons from our review and by identifying questions which call for future research.

As designed and promoted by experts in the framework of adaptation projects, sectoral strategies or national plans, a local adaptation response to climate change may become maladaptation if considered from another standpoint, in another context or after an unexpected event. The sustainability in time of adaptation responses depends on the possibilities to adjust them to different stakeholders and changing conditions. Having observed that adaptation actions regarding land use and agricultural practices are often assessed to support one-shot decisions, we propose to discuss and illustrate with concrete examples, how the assessment of local adaptation measures can better account for the specificities of climate change and land use issues. Such improvement would be achieved by : 1) accounting for the diversity of viewpoints and contexts according to which a measure results in desired adaptation or not; 2) nurturing a process with several entry points (adaptation or vulnerability for instance) and iterations between the definition of adaptation and its assessment; 3) addressing uncertainties of different types (on climate change and its impacts, on the adaptation response and its results) and the role of uncertainty on adaption and its assessment. The objective of the panel is to bring together the concepts, lessons learnt and ideas on these three leads, and several emblematic cases of adaptation regarding land use and agricultural practices in Latin America and in Africa. For that matter, at least one main article on each lead (diversity of viewpoints, iterative processes, uncertainties) has been identified whose contribution will be highlighted and discussed in terms of improved assessment of on-going adaptation responses. The panel will contribute to building together a companion assessment approach that aims for more consistency between principles and actions, to embody the principles of successful adaptation to climate change, and to improve the relevance and timeliness of adaptation responses beyond the perimeter of a project or a plan. Participation to this panel will be supported by CIRAD's Eval4A initiative (Evaluation d'Accompagnement, par les Acteurs, des réponses d'Adaptation au changement climatique dans l'Agriculture, which means: Companion assessment, by stakeholders, of adaptation to climate change in agriculture). (Texte intégral)