Successful praxis at the boundaries: how do individuals foster adaptation?

Adaptation rests on a variety of skills, carefully deployed to align interests, values and identities with useable science. It relies on individuals and organizations acting as effective intermediaries between complex and uncertain sciences and contingent, value-laden decision-making environments. In this analysis of two very different Australian cases (sea-level rise planning in Tasmania, rangeland grazing in Queensland) I outline stakeholders’ narratives about the effectiveness of specific actors operating at the boundaries between science, policy and practice. In these qualitative evaluations intermediaries link science with societal norms and values in order to gain purchase on decision-making. Such work often occurs in spite of institutional strictures, rather than because of them. I suggest that, if such effective work is to be encouraged and learnt from, organizations will need to develop reflexive approaches to evaluation of the performance of intermediaries, which necessarily include narrative. Critically, such evaluation needs to be institutionalized to create new metrics of success and career advancement.