What is Q Method

Environmental sustainability and global climate change issues intensify the need for collaborations between scientists and policymakers. Working in virtual spaces exacerbates many of the challenges inherent in these collaborative efforts. Ideal collaborations promote social learning that delivers integrated knowledge through synergies that develop across institutional, occupational and other boundaries. However, impediments arise when individuals with different specializations and degrees of expertise inhabiting different physical and psychological spaces bring different problem-solving methods and presuppositions. Values affect the potential for synergy and the ultimate products of such collaborations. Addressing social learning challenges among different disciplinary traditions requires identifying and then addressing core differences. Through examining a study of occupational values and resulting behaviors of ocean environmental policy actors, this chapter considers collaborations through theories of discourse, actor involvement, social learning, and policy analytics and offers suggestions to improve knowledge co-creation as a potential aid to these critical issues and processes.