Amid escalating sustainability crises, academia has increasingly turned toward knowledge co-creation. This trend is reflected in the growing number of collaborative research initiatives with Indigenous peoples, whose knowledge and perspectives are often regarded as offering valuable contributions to addressing global challenges. In this article, we - five female researchers, who study knowledge creation and strive to conduct research in collaboration with Indigenous groups - reflect on and unpack our own experiences in light of our diverse positionalities. Our aim is to pull back the curtain on the realities of these methodologies. By exposing these 'behind-the-scenes' perspectives, we hope to deepen the understanding of what co-creation with Indigenous groups entails and to highlight the challenges and its possibilities in practice. As we reflect on our experiences through the lenses of dialogism, feminist epistemologies, critical STS studies, and perspectives from Indigenous thinkers, we (re)discover co-creation as a process of "becoming subjects together", one in which the personal, professional, and political are intertwined, sustained by reciprocal engagement, shared values, and the recognition of Indigenous peoples as subjects in their own right. Our experiences underscore both the difficulties and the transformative possibilities of moving beyond established methodologies and confronting the epistemic and institutional constraints that hinder such collaborations.

While some have welcomed climate litigation as a potential instrument for climate justice, others have dissmissed courts as a futile weapon against the carbon economies in which they are embedded. This paper investigates a paradigmatic case filed by Russian civil society against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights. It asks: Why pursue climate litigation against an authoritarian regime that is unlikely to implement an international court decision, at the risk of personal persecution? The paper theorises the Russian case as co-production of prefigurative legality. It explores how the political significance of strategic climate litigation is co-produced by involved actors, and what futures, normative principles, subjectivities, political messages, and knowledges the case generates and is shaped by. The paper contributes to an understanding of climate litigation as a practice of democratic resistance in authoritarian contexts and a technique of just future-making.

In the context of distrust and scepticism about the climate issue, researchers are exploring the potential of deliberative mini-publics, such as citizens' assemblies about climate change, to find new fora for just climate governance. However, while the literature suggests such arenas have potential to temper climate scepticism, it is less clear how specific design components of these innovations may relate to specific reasons for distrust. This paper operationalises the processes of facework, a concept denoting the translation between institutional and interpersonal trust, to capture how anticipation of distrust featured in the planning process of the Sweden's first national citizen's assembly on the climate, and how choices were made by the organisers to abate such distrust. To this end, we analyse interviews with researchers and science communicators prior to the event. Researchers employ strategies of legitimation, signification, and domination in order to build a trustworthy citizens assembly and mitigate reasons for distrust. Our findings indicate how multiple purposes of the citizens' assembly, the anticipated heterogeneity of the assembly's audiences, and subsequent design choices led to trade-offs that potentially undermine each other or embed incoherence into the project. Our paper concludes with a reflection on the increasing likelihood of researchers finding themselves in such contexts and how they may navigate precariousness and avoid adverse effects.

Just transitions necessitate democratic interfaces where knowledge and action are co-produced by researchers and societal actors. However, the risk of delegitimisation due to being seen as politically involved makes co-production of research with non-academic actors an Augean undertaking for researchers. Co-production efforts have been critiqued for inattention to relational and power dynamics and reproduction of simplistic linear models of connecting knowledge to action – ‘speaking truth to power’. Such critique necessitates nuancing the understandings of co-production and the relationship of truth and power it generates. To this end, this paper investigates how two understandings of co-production, as a collaborative process and a sociopolitical phenomenon, are connected in praxis through a layer of normative ideals and theories of societal change held by researchers and societal actors. This connection is explored through the analysis of two knowledge-action interfaces: the climate citizens’ assembly and the training programme for trade union executives run by a Swedish policy-relevant research programme. The two interfaces explicate the complexity of knowledge politics aimed at democratically embedding scientific research in a political conjuncture which is not conducive to ambitious climate policy. The challenges facing the researchers are the clashing ideas of justice, sectoral and political heterogeneity of trade unions, polarisation, and climate backlash. They try to overcome these through designing processes where the ideas of truth are complexly connected to various forms of power: speaking truth as, with, and through power. The paper opens the black box of co-production, showing how research shapes and is shaped by norms, values, and theories of societal change of the different actors involved in the process, and how co-production is structured and legitimised in response to its sociopolitical context.

International research programs have endorsed knowledge co-production to enhance the utility and impact of global environmental change research. However, knowledge co-production frequently overlooks the complex interrelations between knowledge and power that permeate transdisciplinary sustainability research (TDSR). We analyse how power relations in transdisciplinary ocean governance projects form research agendas and design of six projects within the Belmont Collaborative Research Action on Ocean Sustainability, representing a broad set of experiences of transdisciplinary marine sustainability research practice spanning a wide set of sustainability issues and geopolitical contexts. We examine how distinctive forms of power shape the ways in which researchers envision socio-environmental change and transdisciplinary work within a spectrum of knowledge-action practices ranging from 'linear' to 'relational'. Our findings highlight the need for a deeper engagement with theories of change throughout the lifespans of transdisciplinary projects. Furthermore, the results point at constraints imposed by existing funding structures and epistemic assumptions on the ability of the projects to adopt relational transdisciplinary co-production research strategies, tailored to specific ocean contexts. We recommend adaptive funding structures which would allow researchers to exercise co-production agility and overcome the tension between the needs for embeddedness and transferability of insights. Finally, we show how the three forms of power interact in the linear and relational models of linking knowledge and action and suggest areas where researchers need to direct their attention when designing and implementing transdisciplinary projects aiming to promote sustainability action in close collaboration with societal actors.

Just climate transitions require transformations reweaving the fabric of modern societies and necessitate co-production of knowledge and action informed by ontological and epistemic pluralism. I analyse knowledge politics of just transitions as ontological politics, observing how a Swedish research programme tries to bridge the ontologies of ‘green modernity’ and ‘resistance’ through that of ‘planetary boundaries’. I show how these ontologies generate distinctive ideas of transition/transformation and justice, governance theories and praxes, and understandings of knowledge-action links. The theoretical framework of political ontology reflects the imperative to deepen the discussions on the green transitions to include questions ‘beyond technical fixes’: well-being, reconnection between land and those who live on it, and a recognition of the Swedish colonial legacy. I argue that to go beyond tokenistic co-production, researchers must be ready and able to successfully navigate ontological politics in which knowledge production in just transitions is inevitably entangled.

Democratic societies face the challenge of effecting sustainability transformations, allowing for variously imagined futures and underpinned by a diversity of practices of knowledge production and action. This article investigates how political imagination of sustainable futures informs the ways knowledge and action are understood and linked in sustainability and research policy, and what potential implications this has for democratic transformative change. Empirically, the article analyses the overarching sustainability and research policies in Sweden, focusing on the central documents produced by the government and public research financiers. The analysis shows parallels between the conceptualisations of sustainability and knowledge-action, characterised by linearity, instrumentalisation of knowledge and circumscription of power-sharing spaces for knowledge creation against the background of endorsement of collaborations between academia and society. Such conceptualisations, apart from sending mixed signals to sustainability researchers and practitioners, potentially enable knowledge and action processes driven by impact, competitiveness and atomisation, precluding the exercise of the intrinsic value of democratic knowledge and action practices necessary for reflexive governance of transformations towards sustainability.