An organizing framework to break down Western-centric views of knowledge in North-South research.

Global challenges, such as climate change, persistent poverty, and food insecurity are complex problems. These societal, environmental, and economic challenges cross scientific disciplines, communities, and geographies, requiring interdisciplinary, North-South solutions. Nevertheless, prevailing sustainability science responses are Western-centric. Some seminal studies have attempted to understand and engage with diverse knowledge systems. These include decolonial and Indigenous methodologies, such as "Two-Eyed Seeing", which emphasizes the importance of using both Western and Indigenous knowledge to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the world, and participatory action research, which highlights the importance of involving participants in the research process and promoting social change through collaborative effort. However, apart from in-country research collaborations with traditional Indigenous knowledge, most North-South studies overlook the role or influence of Western-centric views and therefore fail to recognize and incorporate diverse worldviews and knowledge systems. This may, in part, reflect the tendency to categorize research into disciplinary silos, but more likely is the unintentional, yet prevalent, view that Western science is "objective and neutral." As more scholars from multiple disciplines and geographies focus on interdisciplinary North-South research, it is critical that researchers reflect on dominant research approaches and knowledge production. Studies can co-construct, reproduce, or control the forms of knowledge generated-whether intentional or unintentional. This paper presents an organizing framework to help researchers navigate, understand, and engage with diverse forms of knowledge in undertaking North-South research. The framework draws on empirical observations from the authors' interdisciplinary research and from empirical cross-cultural literature. It comprises three contextual levels of influence, featuring guiding principles and subsequent practical actions researchers can use to navigate the complexities of knowledge co-construction in North-South research. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-024-01478-6.

Future trajectories of urban drainage systems: A simple exploratory modeling approach for assessing socio-technical transitions.

In this work, we present a novel approach to explore future trajectories in urban drainage systems, emphasizing the adoption and implementation of sustainable 'nature-based' stormwater management strategies. The focus is on the development and long-term assessment of socio-technical pathways to create a multifunctional stormwater system at the city scale. The innovation is to identify and represent the socio-technical pathways by means of adoption curves for such transition processes. We combine urban planning policies and state-of-the-art urban engineering approaches with societal aspects and analyze them with traditional biophysical models (hydrologic-hydraulic sewer modeling). In doing so, different pathways from a current to a future system state are investigated under a variety of political, population and climate scenarios. Results allow for strategy screening by addressing the spatial and temporal implementation of decentralized stormwater control measures, to enable a successful transition to a sustainable future city. The model is applied to an ongoing transition of Kiruna, a city in Sweden, considering 36 different future trajectories over a transition period of 23 years. Results show that the trajectory of raingarden implementation under a sustainability policy can alleviate the adverse effects of urbanization (growth scenario). While this trajectory resulted in, for example, nearly the same sewer surcharge performance as that characterized by declining urbanization (stagnation) and a business-as-usual policy (with expected raingarden uptake rates approximately one-third lower), significantly better ecological performances (e.g. runoff treatment ratios up to 50%) are achieved.