Stakeholder engagement in the co-production of knowledge for environmental decision-making

The production of science has generally been understood as primarily a technical endeavor, conducted by a narrow group of knowledge "experts" who ostensibly bring legitimacy and rigor to the process. In recent decades, the speed with which global environmental change has unfolded has pressured the sci-entific community to engage a broader set of actors in the production of knowledge to inform decision -making. Indeed, calls for societal engagement in the "co-production" of knowledge have proliferated in environmental and natural resource governance, climate adaptation, and land system science scholar-ship, among many others. We conduct a systematic review of scholarship focused on collaborative engagement between scientists and decision-makers to better understand the nature of stakeholder engagement in science production processes. We analyze collaborative knowledge generation within research that conceptualizes it as co-production and transdisciplinarity. We explore how stakeholders are defined, the processes by which stakeholders are engaged, the societal impacts associated with stake-holder engagement, and the barriers and enablers to stakeholder engagement. We uncover a diverse body of scholarship from around the world that cuts across many environmental issues, and highlights chal-lenges in stakeholder engagement related to unequal and unmitigated power relations. We conclude with a set of recommendations related to how researchers engage in and report on stakeholder engage-ment in co-production processes. & COPY; 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.