Building knowledge infrastructure for diverse stakeholders to scale up co-production equitably

Emerging sustainability research has called for scaling up co-production because sustainability challenges span administrative, institutional, cultural, and physical boundaries and often occur at different scales than co-production tends to happen. To scale up co-production equitably, any such efforts must center the power dynamics intrinsic to rescaling. We highlight how scale itself is constructed by different actors and that the reconfiguration of scale has implications for power asymmetries among different stakeholders and communities. We call for new knowledge infrastructures to support and sustain multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder networks that reflect the impacts of sustainability challenges. We propose four principles to guide the development of knowledge infrastructure that will delineate the values, relationships, and power dynamics among different actors that produce knowledge, with the goal of building the capacity of local communities to reconfigure science and governance relationships that prioritize local needs in regional and global partnerships.