Scientific capacity development for environmental issues: reflections from practice

Scientific capacity development and knowledge exchange are widely acknowledged as central components for addressing global environmental problems. The notions of capacity development or capacity building are used widely with divergent meanings and have been subject to sustained criticism. Reflecting on examples from two decades of experience, this perspective criticizes narrow conceptualizations and argues instead for a broadened understanding of what scientific capacity development collaborations should aim for. Producing knowledge relevant to the handling of an environmental problem can be enabled by interdisciplinary, contextually sensitive approaches fostered in long-term collaborative projects.

1 Introduction

Capacity development or capacity building are central concepts in international aid and development. The terms are used interchangeably and with divergent meanings across several fields but generally refer to partnerships aiming to strengthen skills and capacities of individuals, organizations or communities. Since gaining prominence in development discourse from the 1990s (Lusthaus et al., 1999; Venner, 2015), the concept has increasingly broadened, often as an umbrella concept encompassing a number of different approaches. Through its explicit integration in the Sustainable Development Goals it has become recognized as a key component of their fulfillment (e.g., Kim and Bang, 2025; Vallejo and Wehn, 2016).

One important branch within capacity development is the building of scientific capacities, and in the following we will focus on capacity development collaborations to identify, evaluate, monitor and address environmental problems. Capacity building, scientific collaboration and knowledge exchange are intrinsic – and increasingly central – elements in a range of international environmental agreements (IEAs), such as the Minamata Convention on Mercury, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste, the currently negotiated Global Plastic Treaty, and prominently, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Ferraz da Silva (2022); Nautiyal and Klinsky (2022)). The merits of scientific capacity development partnerships and the roles they play in these settings have also frequently been challenged (Klinsky and Sagar, 2022), just as the concept of capacity development in general and its results have been the subject of sustained criticism and debate (e.g., Eade, 2007; Douglas-Jones and Shaffner, 2017; Hagelsteen et al., 2021; Venner, 2015).

Without entering directly into such vast debates, this perspective article will discuss the roles scientific collaborations can have within capacity development projects, specifically on environmental issues. We will do this by reflecting on some of our experience from multiple, long-lasting projects and collaborations run by the Norwegian Institute of Water Research (NIVA) with partners mainly in various Asian countries, notably China, India, Myanmar and the ASEAN nations from the early 2000s, highlighting examples from plastics and chemical pollution. Common to these projects has been a focus on environmental issues, their solutions and regulatory frameworks, often with partners’ specific knowledge needs tied to ongoing international negotiations of IEAs, obligations triggered by these or the understanding of such frameworks in a local setting. Our experience in this context has raised several ambiguities and questions around the concept of capacity development. What should be the roles of research activities, scientific collaborations and peer-reviewed publications in capacity development projects that aim to solve environmental challenges?

To elucidate this question, it is useful to first contrast the approach we will be discussing here against two common assumptions about what science in capacity development should aim for. First, there is a sometimes implicit notion that building scientific capacity in itself can drive economic growth or development. This has been one historically important underlying rationale behind research aid (Gyberg, 2023; Nilsson and Sörlin, 2017), often in the form of exchange and mobility programs (e.g., Fellesson and Mählck, 2017; Velho, 2004): strong academic institutions can provide both higher levels of education and training, as well as spurring innovation and economic growth. Research collaboration initiatives funded by development assistance budgets have often historically relied on such a model of change, where stronger general scientific capacities provide better preconditions for long term growth. In contrast to this broad notion, scientific capacity development in our discussion does not entail a development of scientific capacities for their own sake or as a contribution to growth or development in general. Instead, it is undertaken to develop capacities to meet specific needs in response to a concrete set of problems.

Second, we can contrast our understanding with a related, overly narrow notion of what capacity development should entail, when seen as a one-way transfer of capacity or training. Although this assumption may appear outdated and has been subject both to long-standing critiques and recent elaborations of frameworks with a far wider scope (e.g., Barrett et al., 2011; Saputra et al., 2024), it nevertheless remains common enough to warrant an explicit argument from experience. Research capacity development programs in general have been criticized for many shortcomings, such as limited impacts, structural dependencies or problematic universal knowledge standards, and a range of parallel critiques have been raised in the wider field of international development and environment (Madsen and Adriansen (2021); Bull and Aguilar-Støen (2023)). In continuation of insights from this literature, we want to underline that the ability to produce scientifically valid knowledge relevant to a defined problem relies on far more than any one-way transfer of knowledge, expertise or equipment. Based on our experience, we argue that the potential to contribute to addressing concrete environmental sustainability problems must also be seen in conjunction with a wider set of research practices and their institutional contexts, which we will elucidate in the following.

The following discussion is not meant to further define, clarify or critique the concepts of capacity development or capacity building as such. Instead, it follows in the footsteps of a wide-ranging critical literature, adds experience-based reflections on what developing scientific capacities may entail in practice and argues for a broadened view of its aims. The arguments synthesize experience from a range of projects, which we collected through a series of internal recorded conversations and interviews in our organization. It thus contains an inherent bias, reflecting our own particular perspective and typical position in capacity development projects. This clearly limits any direct generalizability of the claims made, beyond the specific thematic and geographic areas discussed. Similarly, the examples discussed below are selected for their ability to empirically illustrate the arguments we make, not to serve as evidence. Nevertheless, the discussion aims to point toward their possible relevance in much broader contexts.

2 Interdisciplinary, integrated understanding of environmental issues

In a series of projects across the last two decades, NIVA has gradually focused on an approach that attempts to avoid the pitfalls of the two views outlined above, that is to say, scientific capacity development envisioned as either an end in itself, thought to contribute to development and economic growth, or as a narrow transfer of skills, training or equipment. We have engaged in collaborations developing a wide variety of capacities, centrally occupied with problem identification and management through environmental monitoring, sampling and analysis. In these partnerships, we have contributed to the development of institutional and individual capacities to study, monitor, regulate and manage environmental challenges. Over time, the scope of activities has been expanded to develop a more integrative, interdisciplinary approach to the environmental issues studied.

Two practical lessons from this process can be highlighted initially. First, fostering and building upon lasting partnerships has been an essential aspect of the most successful projects our institute has been part of. Building trust and a shared understanding of the problems, the knowledge needs and the wider context requires long-term commitment. Second, despite imbalances between partners in terms of resources, capacities or expertise that may be embedded in these types of collaborations, it is crucial to acknowledge and approach them as partnerships of mutual, reciprocal learning that would otherwise be very difficult to achieve. Mutual learning has been an obvious point in our partnerships with countries in the global research forefront, such as China and India, but this is no less important for collaborations with institutions in countries with more recent scientific traditions. In our experience, a partner institution’s superior contextual knowledge of local ecosystems, social practices or regulatory contexts enables a far more nuanced understanding of a given environmental problem than would otherwise be possible. More importantly, the involved actors gain knowledge about the complexities of an issue in different localities, contexts and in different stages, which may point toward further knowledge needs to understand and elucidate causes and solutions. While this may seem like a rather obvious and commonly agreed point, it is worth emphasizing that it is rarely sufficient to just claim it as a principle. Instead, an open and reciprocal partnership can be regarded as an achievement, a relation that requires continued cultivation and effort from all parties.

Interdisciplinary and integrative knowledge-production has been an important priority in our capacity development work. Key examples of this include notably a decade-long bilateral program with Myanmar led by NIVA (Nesheim et al., 2024), and projects on chemical and plastics pollution in India. For plastics, several topics of interdisciplinary analysis have been of central importance, such as waste management, the often overlooked and poorly understood informal sector and adverse socio-economic effects of policy measures (e.g., Nesheim et al., 2024; Nøklebye et al., 2023). Integrating a diversity of social scientific disciplines such as anthropology, development studies or political science with natural science approaches has been crucial to the outcome of these projects. Specifically, it has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the problems in question, as well as the social practices and regulatory and political contexts that define any possible solutions.

Integrating participants with critical social science backgrounds has also catalyzed an ongoing process of institutional reflexivity, regarding the aims, the measures, the strengths and the multiple pitfalls that may cause a capacity development project to fail despite all good intentions. Integrated within the same projects, interdisciplinary dialogue may take the form of continuous, mutual exchange over tangible problems – rather than theoretical exercises for the seminar room.

3 A broader view of what scientific capacity development can aim for

Beyond lessons learned for the fruitful deployment of a capacity development project, we want to use our experiences to nuance the understanding of the roles of academic research and scientific publishing in capacity development projects, and more specifically, of how such knowledge may help address environmental issues. Despite ample critical literature on the notion of a one-way capacity and knowledge transfer (e.g., Barrett et al., 2011), this remains an operative assumption in many cases. In our opinion, environmental scientific capacity development projects can rather aim for something that might be more elusive, yet far more effective: co-production of contextually informed, situationally relevant, interdisciplinary knowledge to understand and respond to multifaceted environmental problems.

Rather than transferring a pre-established set of knowledge and skills, the aim has been to enable partnerships that can produce more accurate and relevant knowledge. Through local partners’ superior contextual knowledge or acquaintance with local milieus, co-produced knowledge can sometimes also correct misleading or simplified assumptions made by scientists in the global north and be a step toward “turning the lens around” (Sagar and VanDeveer, 2005) to see problems and incapacities there as well. Two brief examples serve to illustrate this point.

First, NIVA and other Norwegian research institutions have had long-running collaborations with Chinese partner institutions on mercury pollution, along with chemical pollutants and plastics. China is of course a world leader in many fields of research, but mercury pollution was a politically controversial “blind spot” in the period leading up to the negotiation of the Minamata Convention on Mercury (2010–13) (Rosendal et al., 2020). China was the world’s major producer and polluter of mercury, but initial estimates that formed the basis for negotiations were based on flawed and outdated assumptions about emissions from artisanal gold mining. Chinese shares of global mercury pollution were calculated far too high. The estimates were strongly contested in China and later led to the publication of new data showing insignificant emissions from these sources. As detailed in the article by Rosendal et al. (2020); see also Heggelund et al. (2022), China’s initial reluctance and later ratification of the Minamata Convention can be explained in part by the role of scientific knowledge, which was co-produced in long-standing capacity building collaborations with NIVA and several other institutions.

A second example comes from plastic pollution. A widely cited and publicized study by Jambeck et al. (2015) modeled the influx of plastic to the world’s oceans, showing a disproportionately high load from Asian countries, with China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam as the four highest emitters. NIVA’s partnerships in capacity development projects for plastic pollution have taken part in providing new empirical bases to correct over-estimations, and co-developed new monitoring tools and catchment models to better understand the fluxes of plastic material to the oceans (Clayer et al., 2024; Hurley et al., 2023).

As argued above, a more nuanced understanding of the problem to identify relevant and viable solutions, often entails an integrative approach that includes analyzing a wider set of causes and societal preconditions for the problem, rather than focusing narrowly on technical detail. Correcting flawed estimates such as these are enabled by contextual knowledge, and crucially important in its own right; both in the Minamata Convention and the ongoing negotiations for an international treaty on plastic pollution, such estimates may play vital roles in setting baselines and legally binding targets. The examples also demonstrate a more general point: Rather than imagining capacity development as a transfer of knowledge and skills from north to south, it may be a tool to enable a more accurate and contextually informed knowledge. In this way, it also facilitates the means to speak up, confront and correct mistakes made “from afar” or out of context in international relations.

4 Knowledge in its institutional contexts

Accurate knowledge is obviously a beneficial outcome of a successful scientific capacity development collaboration. However, if the aim is to produce knowledge relevant to a given problem, it is equally important to consider a wider picture of how this knowledge operates within its institutional and political contexts. This may be trivially true, but the modes of valuing and utilizing scientific knowledge production vary across contexts, which can significantly alter the preconditions for a successful partnership. Academic publishing is a case in point: The roles, value and interest in publishing results in scientific, peer-reviewed outlets are highly variable. Academic publication can be crucial for the institutions and individual researchers involved, while it may have an ambiguous or peripheral role in policy and management contexts, and as part of the expected outcomes from funding agencies. For the latter, scientific publications may be redundant or even regarded with suspicion, as something mainly valuable for individual researchers’ careers, and hence of transitory value in terms of institutional capacity development. In our experience, the value of academic publishing is strongly context-dependent.

In some cases, results published as easily accessible briefs or reports in the local language, without peer review, may become widely read and influential through quick uptake of results in policy or regulation. In other cases, the formal process of scientific publishing and international co-authorship may be necessary to increase the status and influence of the results. This may further be mediated through the institution, rather than the results as such. A partner institution’s position within a national field of government agencies or other research institutions may be strengthened by international collaboration and its scientific credentials through peer-reviewed publishing. The bottleneck in providing successful input to policy processes, for instance, may not necessarily be lack of good data as such, but could be due to an institution’s weak standing within a field of other actors such as agencies with divergent priorities.

Ability to gain acceptance or recognition of results relevant for regulation or policy development may be affected by the collaboration, but directionality is context-dependent and variable. Co-publishing results in international peer-reviewed journals may for instance be taken as a straight-forward stamp of scientific approval and quality assurance. In some national contexts, we have seen that highly accomplished local researchers find it easier to gain acceptance of results from national authorities when publications are co-authored with an international group of scientists. This may have several divergent explanations: it can demonstrate the independence from suspicion of result biases or intervening “local” interests, and international peer-review can function as intended – as quality control by the international scientific community.

We have, however, also experienced the exact opposite, in national contexts where suspicion of bias may just as well be directed toward the validity and legitimacy of “foreign” knowledge. In this instance, results published or produced by the countries’ own institutions and researchers alone demonstrate an independence from the influence of foreign interests, prejudices or flawed assumptions. Here, it may be decisive for a partner institution to claim clear ownership of the knowledge produced by publishing either alone or as leading authors, before it can gain domestic status as credible, legitimate knowledge as basis for national policy or regulatory actions (e.g., discussion in Rosendal et al. (2020)).

These brief examples point in several different directions at once, but they still converge on a more general lesson learned: Capacity development may aim for the co-production of high-quality scientific knowledge, but its effectiveness and situational relevance will be highly dependent on an ability to be attuned to the variable institutional contexts it operates within.

5 Conclusion

Capacity development and knowledge transfer are widely acknowledged and encouraged activities, for instance as embedded in IEAs. However, as this paper has underlined, drawing on twenty years of experience of capacity development and knowledge exchange, it is not indifferent how such cooperations are designed or this knowledge is produced. Awareness of the variable national or institutional contexts in which scientific capacities are developed is crucial for any successful production of knowledge intended to both understand and help solve environmental problems. Scientific publications are an integral part of this, but in ways that vary significantly across contexts. To produce results relevant to the situation, a wider range of contextual information must be taken into account – of the ecosystems or milieus in question, the social practices involved in or affected by the environmental problem or measures to mitigate such, as well as the institutional and political framework for its handling or regulation. This can be achieved through the development of close partnerships over time.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Author contributions

BH: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization. SP: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft. KF: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. HA: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. HB: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. KB: Conceptualization, Wraaiting – review & editing. CG: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. RH: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. TL: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. YL: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. IN: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. LN: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. MO: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. ES: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. The Research Council of Norway, Basic funding grant no. 342628.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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