Participation and co-production in climate adaptation: scope and limits identified from a meta-method review of research with European coastal communities

As climate change impacts increase, there are growing calls for strengthening relationships between researchers and other stakeholders to advance adaptation efforts. Participation and co-production are widely held to be key to such relationships, both intended to open substantive engagement in science and research to non-experts. Gains commonly attributed to participation and co-production include improved understanding of user needs and contexts, enhanced trust, creating actionable knowledge for adaptation planning and decision-making, and other new outcomes and practices supporting adaptation progress. At the same time, scrutiny of existing efforts to use participation and co-production reveals limits and gaps in understanding the conditions and processes required to undertake them in meaningful, appropriate, and effective ways. This review assesses such limitations and gaps across the growing volume of research focused on adapting coastal and island communities within Europe. We systematically reviewed 60 peer-reviewed papers, drawing on a novel meta-method review approach to synthesize patterns in participation and co-production implementations, types of outcomes, and the latter's associations with study research designs. We identify a propensity toward using more simplistic definitions of community, more conventional, extractive research methods in working with study communities, and emphasizing knowledge generation over other outcomes. These issues are all limits on participation and co-production effectiveness, and we make recommendations to reduce them. We also recommend further recourse to systematic review methods to aid the development of participation and co-production knowledge for adaptation. This article is categorized under: Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development.