Managing the science-policy boundary: implications for river restoration

Collaborations between researchers and stakeholders can facilitate novel and effective approaches to addressing water resource management challenges, such as restoring river systems. Managing the boundary between researchers and stakeholders is key to ensuring the credibility (produced by scientific inquiry), salience (value to stakeholders), and legitimacy (reflecting differing stakeholder perspective) of knowledge produced that informs restoration processes. Boundary organizations provide an institutionalized approach for stabilizing researcher-stakeholder collaborations. Using qualitative methods, we contrasted the science-policy boundary within two watersheds pursuing river restoration, focusing our research on factors contributing to the potential roles and emergence of boundary organizations. We found that perception of restoration state influenced the identified roles of boundary organizations. Stakeholders noted their value in shifting public perception and measuring restoration progress in more impaired systems, while also noting their importance in leveraging restoration gains into community benefits in more restored systems. Our research highlights the importance of flexibility in managing the science-policy boundary. As restoration gains are achieved, the role boundary organizations play may need to be reevaluated to leverage these gains. Researchers and stakeholders described time and resources as key barriers to transitioning informal researcher-stakeholder collaborations into new boundary organizations. Existing collaborative mechanisms can facilitate such transitions. We identified a potential role for students as boundary emissaries in managing the science-policy boundary. Our findings suggest students and student learning are important for fostering collaborations and stabilizing researcher-stakeholder partnerships that contribute to achieving river restoration gains.