Process expertise in policy advice: Designing collaboration in collaboration

Complex societal and environmental challenges motivate scholars to assume new roles that transcend traditional academic expertise. This article examines the specialised knowledge, skills, and practices mobilised by researchers who advise policymakers on collaborative governance processes. Working on the backstage of collaborative arrangements, researchers support policymakers in co-designing tailored strategies for involving institutional and non-institutional actors. The paper theorises this practice as process expertise. Using a self-reflective case narrative of the authors’ team at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, the study illuminates its constitutive elements. Findings show that process expertise, when exercised by researchers and supported by enabling conditions within the research context, extends beyond individual skills. It unfolds in interaction with other knowledge types and generates a weakly institutionalised in-between space where researchers and policymakers co-develop more inclusive ways of tackling complex challenges. Relational work establishes a collaborative modus operandi at the outset, while process-level work supports knowledge co-production among multiple actors. The paper formulates five constitutive elements of process expertise and provides language for the often invisible work of researchers advising policymakers—and other actors—on how to design collaboration in collaboration.

Giulia Molinengo, Dorota Stasiak, Rebecca Freeth