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About SOAK
A Community of Research & Action
The Science of Actionable Knowledge (SOAK) is a community of social scientists, engaged researchers, and practitioners. We conduct rigorous research and critical scholarship on how science is produced and used in decisions and actions. We seek to understand what enables knowledge to support actions that increase social and environmental well-being. We also work with research institutions and funders to learn about and implement leading practices for supporting actionable knowledge production. Through this work we build the capacity of SOAK scientists and practitioners.
Members of the SOAK Community in front of Advanced Light Source (ALS) during biennial meeting at Berkeley National Lab, September 2024.
Our Story
The formation of SOAK began 2017 through a working group hosted by the National Center for Socio-Environmental Synthesis (SESYNC) called “Advancing the Science of Knowledge Use: Mechanisms, Applications and Gaps”. Co-organizers Maria Lemos (University of Michigan), James Arnott (Aspen Global Change Institute) and Missy Stults (City of Ann Arbor), brought together a group of scholars and practitioners from across the US, Canada and Europe to critically examine the progress made in advancing actionable knowledge use in decision-making.
The spirited discussions and deliberations during the workshop first resulted in a commentary from the group entitled “To co-produce or not to co-produce.” That article concluded that while actionable knowledge and co-production efforts across the world were growing at a rapid pace, there was also a growing need to more systematically, holistically and critically examine the knowledge-action linkages and gaps. This led to the coining of the term “Science of Actionable Knowledge” or SOAK, at our last workshop, referring to an area of inquiry that was a kind of meta-study of the field of actionable knowledge generation.
As an introduction to the concept of SOAK, the group embarked on a Special Issue, published in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability in 2020.
Despite the end of the workshop series, the group’s interest in the topic and in collaborating with each other only grew stronger, which led to the formation of an informal “SOAK community” network. Since 2020, we have continued to meet quarterly via zoom, and have engaged in collaborative efforts such as developing a SOAK research agenda . We are currently working on a project to inform Institutional Shifts for promoting Actionable Knowledge. Smaller groups within the SOAK network continue to collaborate on research, many examples of which are provided in the resources section of this website.
We have since expanded our network to include other folks with similar interests. You can meet SOAK members here.
Currently, the SOAK community is co-led by James Arnott (Aspen Global Change Institute) and Kripa Jagannathan (Berkeley National Lab).