“Layering” Co-Production for Authentic and Respectful Community Engagement

There is great variety in how different teams approach collaborative work, and many projects fall short of authentic knowledge co-production, even when they hold that as a central goal. Drawing on a longstanding collaboration between researchers and pastoralists in the northern Basque Country (southwestern France), we detail our approach to knowledge co-production, which entails “layering” multiple forms of participation that vary in intensity and time commitment. This approach seeks to support authentic collaboration that is respectful of the time and obligations of our farming partners. Here, we describe the frequent and deeply-analytical engagement with our core collaborators, as well as more “shallow” forms of engagement with a broader group of interested persons through ongoing ethnographic work and participatory workshops. In this paper we strive for a level of detail, and candor, that will allow other teams to evaluate if and how our approaches might be useful for them.