Linking Boundary Organizations to Coproduce Actionable Knowledge: A Case Study of Ice Forecasting for Great Lakes Navigation Weather, Climate, and Society

Navigating the Great Lakes during icy conditions poses significant safety challenges for the shipping sector. Available ice information is uncertain and fragmented, and navigators must seek out multiple sources for information at the spatial and temporal scales they require, if the information is available at all. Navigators have expressed that they require more highly localized and easily usable information for current and predicted ice conditions to support decision-making. In this study, we seek to meet this information need by applying a boundary organization chain (BOC) approach to facilitate the coproduction of an actionable short-term Great Lakes ice forecast. We focus on two main aspects of this research: 1) producing an actionable decision-support product that meets the needs of Great Lakes ice navigators and 2) contributing to the knowledge coproduction scholarship on BOCs by providing a detailed account of our methods to create a BOC and coproduce an actionable ice forecast. Our results support incorporating existing communities of practice (COPs) into BOCs to enhance the coproduction of actionable knowledge, specifically through increasing their complementarity and embeddedness. COPs are informal networks of users that meet voluntarily to share knowledge and develop professional skills, which we found naturally builds the coproduction capacities of participants (e.g., embeddedness and complementarity). We also find that COP members are well positioned to disseminate coproduced knowledge across wider user groups. Grant no. NA12OAR4320071