Research, part of a special feature on The Coproduction of Conflicts in Environmental Sustainability: Concepts, Methods, and Ethics

INTRODUCTION

Intensive nature exploitation has triggered the mobilization of a variety of social collectives who condemn negative territorial impacts and demand greater participation in public decisions (Svampa and Viale 2014, Hernández-Mora et al. 2015, Santos et al. 2019). The emergence of conflicts of this type has led some authors to argue that it is important to learn from conflicts and disagreements understood as “living indicators” of the realities that academia, politicians, and society as a whole must urgently address (Kaika 2017). Based on a variety of struggles, social movements tend to argue about hegemonic meanings and the authority of science through the generation of “counter-knowledge” (Peluso 1995, Ávila et al. 2021) or “activist knowledge” (Escobar 2008).

In recent decades, citizen science and, specifically, resistant and participatory mapping practices have emerged as a potential means to identify and characterize practices and methods guided by dissent (del Moral et al. 2020a). In the academic literature, the use of resistant cartographical practices has been analyzed from the perspective of their potential to empower certain social movements by creating useful information, promoting debate, disseminating a variety of problematic issues, and contributing to the understanding of inequality situations from peripheral positions (Corbett et al. 2016, Scheidel et al. 2020, Alderman et al. 2021, Elwood 2022, Font-Casaseca and Rodó-Zárate 2024).

Knowledge co-production theory assumes that scientific knowledge is inadequate for addressing the complexity of current socio-environmental issues and that strategies must be developed for diverse actors to come together to offer multiple perspectives and a greater understanding of these issues (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). However, many authors have been critical of the great expectations that co-production processes generate compared to their reported outcomes, not only on account of the scant evaluation that is done of these processes (Jagannathan et al. 2020) but also because of their instrumentalization that, to a certain extent, silences critical voices and depoliticizes processes (Molle 2009, Godínez-Madrigal et al. 2019).

In this sense, Turnhout et al. (2020) drew on the literature on deliberative governance to indicate that most co-production literature is aspirational and methodological by nature. According to their review, most authors focus on why co-production is important for environmental governance and knowledge production and how this should be done without addressing why these processes often fail to achieve the stated objectives of empowerment and societal transformation. Their analysis shows how depoliticization dynamics in co-production reinforce rather than mitigate unequal power relations and how they prevent wider societal transformation from taking place. They therefore stress the importance of (re)politicizing co-production by allowing pluralism and knowledge contestation, with the risk of not generating any actionable knowledge in a depoliticized or instrumental sense.

In the same line, other authors recommend deep reflection on the inherently political nature of knowledge production to favor a change in the social order, in particular, as to how the process “is designed and practiced, what practices and processes get used, and therefore which producers play which roles (i.e., how power is allocated) and what products (i.e., knowledge, people and socio-ecological arrangements) emerge as a result” (Miller and Wyborn 2018:7 as cited in Lepenies et al. 2018:2).

In the case of participatory mapping, it is important to recognize that maps are fundamentally objects of dispute and so their social functionality cannot be simply and unilaterally interpreted (Acselrad and Coli 2008). In other words, their co-construction is a negotiation process that, ultimately, is not without its co-opting processes, privileged discourses, and power conflicts between the actors who take on various roles and form temporary alliances (Flinders et al. 2016). These patterns are bound to influence the development of the process and its outcomes, requiring them to be visualized and analyzed critically. As an added difficulty, the literature on collaborative mapping projects reports considerable initial enthusiasm and motivation (Dodge and Kitchin 2013, Bégin et al. 2017) followed by a decline and abandonment within approximately five years (Pedregal et al. 2024).

In this paper we aim to contribute to the literature on the evaluation of knowledge co-production projects by critically analyzing a case study of participatory mapping practices in the field of water conflicts. Based on the assumption that the functionality of a co-production project changes over time, we will discuss the evaluation of outcomes in relation to the lifecycle of a boundary object, with particular attention paid to the role of researchers as political actors in the process. We will approach this through the case study of the Map of Water Conflicts in Andalusia (Spain).

CASE SETTING

The collaborative web Map of Water Conflicts in Andalusia (hereafter Map-RedNCA, Spanish acronym for Red Nueva Cultura del Agua) is a joint project between the Andalusian New Water Culture Network (hereafter RedNCA; Spanish acronym) and the University of Seville (Spain) designed to make an inventory of debates, conflicts, and alternative positions on water in the region.

Andalusia is the southernmost region of Spain, a Mediterranean area of 87,268 km² with a population of 8.6 million in 2024. As with other Spanish regions, the imbalance between social demands and the availability of resources results in a deficit that is particularly acute during periods of below-average rainfall. This relationship is also characterized by enormous agricultural demands on all uses (almost 82% according to the Spanish Statistical Office).

The project was launched in 2017 based on a previous RedNCA initiative and inspired by the EJAtlas, the Environmental Justice Atlas project (Temper et al. 2015, 2018). RedNCA is a social organization that has been operating in Andalusia since 2001. It comprises associations, platforms, researchers, and professional and private people committed to defending, conserving, and protecting water ecosystems and the hydraulic heritage (http://redandaluzaagua.org). For the most part, it is made up of non-institutionalized, self-organized social collectives. The most basic types of organization predominate: “platforms” and “coordinators” that, as they consider themselves to be affected groups, mobilize as “political actors to make their demands in terms of spatial and intergenerational justice” (Merlinsky 2016:16, cited in del Moral et al. 2020b:19). The project also includes ecological organizations, among which Ecologists in Action, an organization with a strong local identity and widespread throughout the Andalusian territory, stands out.

Between 2017 and 2019, the project was funded by the Andalusian Regional Government (Andalusian Studies Center Foundation) in the line of information and communication technology (ICT) and public policy research: open data, transparency, and open government. The project team comprised eight members with different backgrounds, including a researcher who was the former RedNCA social organization president and an independent consultant who is the current president. Thus, the team included two members with significant roles in the social organization for which the Map was meant to work. At project end, the Map’s management team was two researchers, both university professors, and the current RedNCA president.

RedNCA’s original purpose was to create a user-friendly collaborative mapping tool to support the social movements involved in such a way as to allow them to update the map and keep it alive autonomously. Thus, it was positioned in the environmental/water justice paradigm (Boelens et al. 2022, Martinez-Alier 2023) to foment activist knowledge (Escobar 2008). However, with the boost from institutional funding, the project team also sought to build bridges between activist and actionable knowledge (Arnott et al. 2020). In other words, a second goal was added: to co-create knowledge that could be used in decision making (Mach et al. 2020). Consequently, other visions were considered during the mapping tool’s co-design phase through various activities that included academic, social, institutional, and technical visions. Specifically, invitations were extended to other institutional actors from the Andalusian public administration, students, researchers, and private sector professionals, especially environmental consultants and civil engineers, to attend and participate in the workshops held (Appendix 1, Table A1).

The project officially ended in June 2019. Since then, the Map-RedNCA has been working autonomously (available at https://redandaluzaagua.org/mapa/). In 2023, part of the research team obtained public funds to update the tool’s technology and improve some of its features (Fig. 1). This required the web map’s incorporation into a European scientific infrastructure network and its migration to and hosting on a regional government institutional server while still accessible from the RedNCA website.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Participatory mapping refers to multiple ways that experts, individuals, or local communities interact to create and communicate knowledge, experience, and aspirations around the world in maps (Brown and Kyttä 2018). For the purposes of this work, it is useful to distinguish between participatory mapping practices such as the mapping processes developed during the co-design of the tool, and collaborative mapping, which is the practice of gathering information provided voluntarily by individuals once the tool has been designed.

The information collected was inspired by the data gathered on socio-environmental conflicts in the EJAtlas project (Temper et al. 2018). The said project defines socio-environmental conflicts as the contentious mobilization of civil society actors in which explicit social-environmental claims are made against a specific project or economic activity pursued by state, corporate, and, sometimes, illicit actors.

Building on this concept, the Map RedNCA adopted an ecosystem services approach to define water conflicts as any situation of disagreement, discrepancy, clash of visions, approaches, perspectives, and/or interests of a social nature generated by specific or diffuse actions on water bodies and associated ecosystems that lead to changes in the type, intensity, value, and territorial distribution of the environmental services provided by said eco-social assets. These services may be related to supply, regulation, support, or culture (https://redandaluzaagua.org/sobre-el-mapa/).

This approach implies the existence of collective actions (such as petition writing or demonstrations) triggered by existing or anticipated interventions on water bodies that affect communities (Suhardiman et al. 2017). Moreover, water’s status as a fundamental natural resource means that it is hotly contested. This is partly because one of the most conflictive aspects of using and controlling water is the tension between the public and private spheres, as its essential nature prevents it from being completely turned into an object of appropriation, monetary value, and direct commercial exchange (del Moral 1994).

Furthermore, for the purpose of this paper, the Map is regarded as a political boundary object (Meyer 2009), an object through which specific identities are expressed and whose performance depends on the involvement of its users. This approach also posits a boundary object’s conceptualization as a relatively ambivalent project that is constantly under construction, both product and process (Star and Ruhleder 1996, Meyer 2009).

The choice of this conceptual framework is based on cartography being considered a processual rather than a representational science (Kitchin and Dodge 2007). This implies an epistemological approach that focuses on the process of map construction and the intertwining of social relations, rather than focusing on the final product, which is presented as relative. In other words, the analysis starts by understanding the map as a social construction and a knowledge co-production process determined by different power relations (Fairclough 1992, Acselrad and Coli 2008, Hawkins et al. 2017).

Star and her collaborators conceptualize boundaries as interfaces that facilitate knowledge production (Lamont and Molnár 2002, Star 2010). A boundary object serves as a means for different actors (researchers, social organizations, amateurs, administrators, technicians, politicians) to be organized around shared goals and collaborate during a specified time, communicating and cooperating symbolically (Star 2010). This notion is closely linked to the issues of shared meaning and interpretation that characterize knowledge co-production. The aim is to describe and understand the process by which different actors cooperate and coordinate without losing sight of the particularities of their respective cosmovisions (Bowker et al. 2015). Boundary objects appear in areas where knowledge has still not been stabilized by the need to come to an agreement on the different meanings given to the object (Caccamo et al. 2023).

The boundary object analytical framework is particularly useful for participatory mapping projects as it sheds light on the relationships between different communities of practice and multiple interpretive stances on the map that is being constructed. It also helps the lifecycle of the object, i.e., the co-created map, to be understood as an ephemeral and changing entity (Star and Griesemer 1989). According to the literature (Star 2010, Steger et al. 2018), boundary objects transit through four stages: (i) interpretive flexibility, (ii) standardization, (iii) infrastructure creation, and finally (iv) residualization. These stages involve changes and disputes in the object’s meaning and its appropriation by the different actors involved, as discussed below.

METHODS

Based on this analytical framework, this paper evaluates the project results by comparing the officially defined goals and participants’ expectations for the project with its outcomes. Following Jagannathan et al. (2020), outcomes are a project’s reported co-production effects manifested through project outputs. Outputs are the products or activities contributing to project outcomes generated as part of the co-production effort.

The present analysis pays particular attention to the different stages of the project, its socio-political and territorial context, and the researchers’ role. The results are then discussed and compared with the co-production literature, taking into consideration the boundary object’s lifecycle (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star 2010, Steger et al. 2018).

The assessment is based on the available information produced throughout the project (see Fig. 2). In particular, the project’s objectives are analyzed and contrasted with the results obtained from the available information generated by various sources, namely: (i) 15 semi-structured interviews with the actors involved in the co-production process during workshops (Appendix 1, Table A1) and through 31 in-depth interviews using the snowball method (Appendix 1, Table A2), both recorded using Google Forms; (ii) the conflict reports recorded in the Map database; (iii) peer-reviewed publications; (iv) other communication and outreach products; and (v) the Map management team’s internal discussions.

During the interviews and workshops, participants were asked to upload a report to the web map platform supervised by a team member, who wrote down the incidents recorded during the session. In addition, impressions and suggestions were collected at the end of the sessions through a semi-structured questionnaire in Google Form format. Questions addressed the following blocks of information: (1) experience with ICTs; (2) experience with access to institutional information; (3) prior knowledge of collaborative web mapping; (4) design and appearance of the mapping tool; and, lastly, (5) usefulness and overall evaluation of the project.

Figure 2 synthesizes the project steps and key milestones that overlap with the stages of the boundary object lifecycle, identifying: (i) the tool co-design step (n = 38 conflict reports), which corresponds to the boundary object interpretive flexibility stage; (ii) the supervised collaborative mapping step (n = 15 conflict reports), which corresponds to the standardization stage; and (iii) the autonomous collaborative mapping stage (n = 22 reports), which corresponds to the infrastructure creation stage. This gives a total of 75 conflicts reported to date, homogeneously distributed throughout the Andalusian region’s large territorial units and hydrographic basins.

RESULTS

The project presented two main types of goals aligned with the co-production literature: first, in terms of social learning, empowerment, and social awareness (Bremer and Meish 2017), and second, in the realm of actionable knowledge (Arnott et al. 2020). Specifically, the project’s goal was defined as twofold: (i) to promote action research in environmental justice by creating a repository of activist knowledge and practices useful for social organizations, and (ii) to serve as a potential tool to channel public participation in institutional water planning cycles, for example, by helping to identify “significant water management issues” around which public debate should be articulated at the beginning of each planning cycle of the river-basin districts, as required by EU Directive 2000/60/EC (art.14,1.b; European Environment Agency 2000, Pedregal et al. 2020). In addition, from the outset, the tool was designed with the expectation that activists would continue to use it and update it after the project had officially ended. In the following, these goals and expectations are compared with the outcomes.

Social learning, empowerment, and social awareness

The first group of goals reports outcomes of activities implemented during the first tool co-design step, based, in particular, on actions that fomented face-to-face actor participation through two primary means: semi-structured interviews and three participatory mapping workshops held in different settings. Two were held at annual assemblies of citizen movements (environmentalists and human right-to-water activists). The third was organized by the project team in collaboration with the Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia to secure the views of technical experts from the regional government, other academic institutions, and the private sector (Appendix 1, Table A1). These actions enabled the team members and stakeholders to negotiate, discuss, and agree on the mapping tool interface design and the information collected on the conflicts.

Specifically, the project team reported mutual learning regarding the definition of a water conflict and the process to categorize the conflict triggers. This process identified the need to expand the categories established by the European Union Water Framework Directive (2000) and national technical documentation to cover issues related to activist claims for the defense of water heritage and landscapes and the guarantee of the human right to water. Numerous modifications and suggestions for improvement were reported via the customized web forms, highlighting the need “to reconcile technical-scientific and colloquial language, the techno-social utility of compiled information, and its socio-political utility, and the project’s ‘instrumental’ and ‘empowering’ perspectives” (Pedregal et al. 2020). This was described by the team as a rich process of “hybridization of perspectives” (del Moral et al. 2020b:8). Along the same line, the implemented process showed that activists had a high level of understanding of the technical vocabulary used in the tool: 91% of informants stated that they intuitively understood the vocabulary used in the tool and 78% responded that it was very easy or quite easy to provide information through the customized web form (Pedregal et al. 2020).

Once the process of designing the mapping tool and its associated customized database had been completed, the next project step was to execute a series of dissemination campaigns with a two-fold objective: on the one hand, to foment autonomous submissions to the web Map and, on the other, to promote social awareness of the water conflicts already included. Three collaborative mapping workshops were held in addition to the campaigns. As a result, 15 conflict reports were added during this period (Fig. 2).

Lastly, increased social awareness was reported thanks to the appearance of the Map-RedNCA in various critical-alternative media with a significant social impact, including two national magazines: El Salto and El Ecologista (April 2019, and winter 2019–2020 issues, respectively). Besides, various scientific projects also included this project as an outstanding experience of social initiatives adapted to climate change in the Andalusia region (Pedregal et al. 2020). As of April 2024, there had been over 17,700 visits to the web map (https://rediam-indalo.cica.es/mccaa/).

Activist knowledge, actionable knowledge, and life after project end

From the outset, the research team conceived the Map-RedNCA with the expectation that it would continue and have a life of its own beyond the official completion of the project (del Moral et al. 2020b). It was therefore hosted on the RedNCA social organization server in the expectation that its integration into the latter’s organizational structure would allow easy updates and consultation while facilitating its appropriation by RedNCA participants.

However, a comparison of updates and new contributions to the map after the conclusion of the project does not corroborate this. Table 1 shows that only 22 new conflict reports have been recorded since the project’s official completion, with a significant decrease compared to previous years: 11, 6, 2, 0, 1, 2. Almost half of these (9) were added by the management team, who are part of RedNCA. Note also that no reports were recorded in 2022 and that two new reports were added in 2024, after news of the update to web tool v.4 was released online. In addition, it is also important to mention that no previously recorded reports have been updated while it has been operating autonomously.

The balance seems to be more positive for the objective of providing “a repository of activist knowledge and practices useful for social organizations and public administrations” as at project end, the team concluded that the Map-RedNCA was a cartographic document that organized and systematized information that had not been visible previously (del Moral et al. 2020a:83). Likewise, the team highly valued the final database structure that emerged from the “hybridization of perspectives” as “complex, ambitious, ... [with] considerable potential for the contribution of precise, processable information with different tools that not only empower the collectives, but in good time may produce useful information for management and planning by administrations” (Pedregal et al. 2020:8).

However, the activists’ expectation that the project might influence decision-making processes was not so high. In response to the question, “How can the map help the collective that you represent?” all the informants stated that it was useful for visualizing conflicts, sharing information, and creating collaboration networks but only 74% considered that it could contribute to improving water management in Andalusia (del Moral et al. 2020b). It should also be noted that no evidence has been found that the tool has been used by water authorities to channel public participation.

In sum, the available information yields a more positive balance regarding the availability of actionable knowledge for decision making, as at project end, a valid tool was available for characterizing and inventorying water conflicts with functions that enabled data to be autonomously entered into an open-access database. This was valued positively by both the team and the actors involved in the co-production process. However, the balance was negative for the expectation that it could serve as a potential tool to channel public participation or to “have a life of its own” post-project end, which is the project’s first critical point. Here, it can be observed that the potential for the tool to be updated and survive is closely linked to the attention that the research team pays to it, rather than to its ability to operate autonomously.

To take this point further, the latest tool version change and its hosting on an institutional data server triggered a critical point in the project’s survival when the management team was faced with an ethical dilemma with two diverging points of view. One group supported the use of available public funds to provide technical support and continuity to the tool, even though this involved creating alliances with governmental institutions. However, a second group considered this step toward institutional infrastructure unnecessary and contrary to the initial aim of empowering social organizations and enabling their appropriation of the tool.

To understand this breaking point, it is important to highlight that the interviews showed that one of the aspects of the Map that participants valued most highly was the opportunity to meet with other collectives and to learn from other’s conflicts, i.e., that it was a way of linking up and networking (del Moral et al. 2020b). In this instance, disputes about interests and power over the Map as a product were exacerbated, influenced especially by the current institutional context and the organizations’ previous negative experiences. According to the Map database, it was precisely tension with official administrations over access to information and the absence or weakness of public participation processes that triggered many reported conflicts (del Moral et al. 2020a).

DISCUSSION

The Map-RedNCA co-production process shows that most of the reported outcomes fall into what other authors have categorized as a more pragmatic scope of ambition and outcomes that generate actionable knowledge and building capacity. In contrast, there is no evidence of norms and structures being transformed in science and society (Jagannathan et al. 2020).

In reality, most of the reported outcomes were mainly related to social learning processes. This aligns with resistant cartographical literature, which points to the potential of these practices to empower certain social movements by generating and disseminating useful information while contributing to the understanding of inequality situations from peripheral positions (Corbett et al. 2016, Scheidel et al. 2020, Alderman et al. 2021, Elwood 2022).

As with other co-production projects, the Map-RedNCA shares the following assumptions and outcomes (Lepenies et al. 2018): First, co-production is regarded as a dialog process that supports learning processes and the generation of new types of blended knowledge; under the assumption that technical disciplinary knowledge may not be adequate for solving current complex water issues, co-production is seen as a mechanism for integrating different types of knowledge and knowledge holders into the search for a solution to a problem, what the Map-RedNCA project team described as a rich process of “hybridization of perspectives” (del Moral et al. 2020b:8). Second, participants identified issues overlooked by traditional science that contribute to enlarging the knowledge base for decision making, i.e., the need to expand the origin of conflict categories established by the EU Water Framework Directive and national technical documentation. These are relevant outcomes that all point to results from stage 1 of the mapping tool co-design, which required vast resource inputs that are difficult to sustain over time.

Regarding its potential to channel public participation, no evidence was found of its use by water authorities. It is likely that the conflictive nature of water uses and management (del Moral 1994, Molle 2009, Suhardiman et al. 2017) and the tensions and bones of contention between social organizations and public administrations prevented this. In addition, the results showed that updates and new contributions to the Map decreased significantly during the autonomous stage, suggesting that the tool generated considerable initial enthusiasm and motivation, followed by abandonment, as described by other authors for other collaborative mapping projects (Dodge and Kitchin 2013, Bégin et al. 2017). Notwithstanding, both expectations fall within what other authors have called the aspirational nature of co-production projects (Turnhout et al. 2020).

So, was the project successful or not? For a better interpretation of these results, a dynamic and process-based perspective must be adopted that considers the project lifecycle and the different functionality of its stages as described by Star (2010) for boundary objects, namely: (i) interpretive flexibility, (ii) standardization, (iii) infrastructure creation, and (iv) residualization.

Interpretive flexibility

Initially, the object emerges from different perspectives, from a dynamic encounter; in other words, it becomes an object shared by different social worlds and simultaneously interpreted in various ways (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star 2010). In the case of the Map-RedNCA, this process can be equated with the project’s first stage as far as what is inherent in tool co-design is concerned: the stage in which the map was constructed and discussed collectively through different meetings, interviews, and workshops. However, the vagueness and flexibility of this first stage limits the possibility of operationalizing the object, so the administrator-users or regulators, in this case, the project team, tended to work toward institutional standardization, an agreed set of rules or definitions, so that information could be transferred effectively and accurately across scales and social worlds (Steger et al 2018).

Standardization

During this stage, the objective is to facilitate collaboration while reducing uncertainty. As a consequence, standards had to be laid down and some of the initial meanings had to be crystallized over others in a variety of sociopolitical situations and opinions (Castree 1995, Bowker and Star 1999 as cited in Steger et al. 2018). In the Map-RedNCA case, this refers especially to establishing certain aspects of the content, such as the definition of the very concept of a water conflict, the choice and denomination of water conflict categories, the design of the database to characterize them, and of the mapping tool itself.

It is important to bear in mind that standardization is produced during an intense negotiation phase from the contact between actors immersed in specific power dynamics (Brand and Jax 2007). In the Map-RedNCA case, the role of the researchers prevailed over other actors during this phase, while standardization was led and processed by the team, as stated in the articles published at project end (del Moral et al. 2020a, 2020b, Pedregal et al. 2020).

Infrastructure creation

Considering that an essential feature of boundary objects is the shift between ambiguous and specific meanings, standardization involves a reduction in flexibility. So, the boundary object is transformed into infrastructure, whose main characteristic is the acquisition of a stable structure with fixed scales and wide-ranging areas of use (Star 2010). This stage can be matched to the autonomous operation of the Map and especially to the project’s second funding, when, in 2023, it was loaded onto a regional government institutional server as part of a European scientific infrastructure project. It was then that the question of the appropriation of the tool and the co-produced information arose, with power disputes reaching their peak and turning into open conflicts. At the time, this transition was discussed within the team as being a kind of “academic extractivism” (Alatas 2022). The establishment of an infrastructure involves norms being imposed that do not necessarily correspond to participating actors’ initial interests, in this case, the interests of activist organizations (Star and Ruhleder 1996, Bowker and Star 1999 as cited in Steger et al. 2018).

This phase is critical because infrastructure can naturalize and make political conflicts and differences visible as it regulates and formalizes communication to ignore a “messy reality” (Steger et al. 2018:156). In other words, it is an example of the depoliticization of a fundamentally political process, one of the most criticized points in water resources management literature (Budds 2009, Swyngedouw 2013). Further, it is a paradoxical time because although a valuable database of shared knowledge can be created that is useful for different actors in the long term, at the same time, there is a risk of stifling the creativity and flexibility that motivated the tool’s initial creation (Star and Ruhleder 1996, Steger et al. 2018).

Residualization

Infrastructure creation is accompanied by the so-called “residual categories” (Star 2010). These are elements that cannot be standardized and that can trigger the restart of the cycle through new proposals for discussion, exchange, and encounter, i.e., the proposal of new boundary objects. A good example of these residual categories is given by Chan et al. (2016) in the shape of cultural ecosystem services, which are still difficult to standardize and are continuously discussed and assigned new meanings by actors. In the case of Map-RedNCA, this stage is still open and could be an opportunity to rethink and revitalize the project by encouraging new instances of dialogue.

In synthesis, the process-based perspective shows that unanticipated, unexplained, and non-consensual changes in the project risk deepening rather than solving pre-existing socio-environmental conflicts, widening the gap between multiple actors. This was observed in the reactions and tensions that arose within the research team with the hosting of the Map-RedNCA on a regional administration server. This may have boosted contempt for the tool’s appropriation and depoliticization while at the same time feeding the imaginary of a partnership between the researchers and the official administration from which the social organizations were excluded, a frequent and strongly criticized aspect in several disciplines (Flinders et al. 2016).

In addition, all these tensions described between the process of interpretive flexibility and the creation of infrastructure are an inherent part of co-production projects and represent what we call a “survival dilemma” for the continuity of the project. It is a process that challenges the aim of building bridges between activist knowledge and actionable knowledge, as well as their possibilities of converging and offering feedback over time. Faced with this dilemma, some authors clearly advocate for (re)politicizing co-production, with the risk of not generating any actionable knowledge in a depoliticized or instrumental sense (Turnhout et al. 2020).

Finally, the last point of discussion regarding the evaluation of co-production projects is the institutional and political context in which they operate and develop. Despite the fundamental and decisive role that researchers played in the Map-RedNCA’s project, the action that they could take was largely determined by the scientific and institutional policies in place for project funding. In the current European context, these favor the citizen science approach (Serrano et al. 2014, Tsinaraki and Schade 2016, Schade et al. 2021). However, mechanisms and indicators for their assessment (Jagannathan et al. 2020, Turnhout et al. 2020) or for the preservation of the generated information (Pedregal et al. 2024) do not seem to be sufficiently developed.

CONCLUSION

Evaluating the different phases of a knowledge co-production project considering it as a boundary object contributes to the available literature because most works present and evaluate the initial stage of co-production processes, and only a limited number address the critical moments of stabilization, standardization, and infrastructure creation that occur over time (Trompete and Vinck 2009). Understanding these conflictive and contentious points in time can be crucial for deciding whether the project has ended or has been transformed, with the re-conversion and strengthening of the efforts and resources invested to give continuity to knowledge circulation and renewal.

The Map-RedNCA experience has revealed that it is an error to propose static goals and evaluation from the outset based on the initial expectations for the project. On the contrary, they must be considered from the process perspective, and it is essential to be mindful of the lifecycle of co-production products, which, as boundary objects, are dynamic and ephemeral. In this process, critical break-up situations and collaborative and conflictive patterns might co-occur, resulting in project transformation or abandonment. From this comes the need to conceive co-production project goals and evaluation by stages, in the anticipation of different functionalities, dynamics, and end products corresponding to each.

In the Map-RedNCA, the first stages of the project, interpretive flexibility and standardization, effectively fulfilled the goals of social learning, empowerment, and social awareness. However, when the process is evaluated from these initial perspectives today, it is observed that neither the tool’s autonomous life nor its use for improving deliberative processes in water planning cycles has been achieved. From this perspective, the project can be considered over and not very successful. And yet, the stages that followed the initial period of flexibility and creativity took on other values as they strengthened aspects such as water conflict information transmissibility, the breadth of the scale of outreach, and the comparability of cases.

The transition from interpretive flexibility to infrastructure creation has revealed the existence of what we described as a “survival dilemma.” creating the need to think of new alternatives for the usefulness and preservation of the co-created Map. Indeed, despite the opportunities and benefits attributed to collaborative maps, whether they need to be superseded as final products or whether simultaneous tools and/or actions need to be promoted for autonomous and sustained co-production over time, is an issue that requires further analysis. A focus on the opportunities that emerge from the residualization stage of boundary objects could open up new processes and opportunities to provide complementary tools to accompany the evolution of the project and foster diverse interests over time. In other words, both the creation of large-scale accessible infrastructures and the proposal for new opportunities for interaction and dialogue could be valid and simultaneous products of the evolution of co-production projects that could satisfy the different needs and interests of academia, administrations, and activists.

Lastly, the analyzed case study reinforces the idea that boundary objects require community teamwork to continue to be shared objects (Martini and Filippi 2022). This is why sustained collaboration between scientists, institutions, and citizens is necessary. Different actors’ interests and capabilities should not be ignored but rather coordinated and made available in a balanced way to further project sustainability. It is especially important to retain the commitment of academics and institutions participating in co-production because they have the necessary means to preserve, use, and disseminate co-produced knowledge.

To conclude, together, dynamic consideration of the processes and permanent attention by research teams may help to maximize the long-term value of collaborative projects. For this, the great expectations and “collaborative dream” of project designers must be de-romanticized because these processes are frequently uncertain and conflictive. These conditions require adaptation and permanent attention from the promoting teams to foster co-production from a realistic and socio-political perspective.

LITERATURE CITED

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