Nicole Klenk

Nicole Klenk is an environmental governance scholar who studies the politics of knowledge. Her academic background is in botany and forest ecology. After gaining a BSc and MSc from McGill University, her PhD thesis was awarded 2008 from the University of British Columbia for a study of “The ethics and values underlying the ‘emulation of natural disturbance’ forest management approach in Canada: an interdisciplinary and interpretive study.” Her thesis showed how ethics shapes the interpretations of forests and she advanced a pragmatic approach for adopting a more holistic knowledge approach in forestry science. It was through her PhD that Nicole became interested in the role of science in addressing complex environmental problems such as climate change. Her research subsequently expanded to investigate the role of (environmental) science in society and the ethics, politics and governance of knowledge creation and use. Her work sits in the tradition of political ecology, drawing inspiration from science studies, post-structuralist political theory and early American pragmatism. Nicole has applied her thinking to the areas of forestry, biodiversity conservation and especially climate change adaptation, working in settings across the Americas, from Columbia to the Canadian Arctic. Nicole's research exposes how and why different knowledges get authorised in different contexts, who gets to control such knowledges and how this political dynamic changes over time. In a series of important papers Nicole has argued against the ‘knowledge integration imperative’ which is present in much transdisciplinary environmental science. This imperative is the idea that Indigenous and local knowledges can and should be integrated with global environmental science. For Nicole, such a move obscures the ontological politics of scientific knowledge – including the friction, antagonism and power relations inherent in knowledge co-production. ‘Integration’ enacts a form of epistemic injustice. Rather, local knowledges need understanding on their own terms. Her work makes an important contribution to the decolonisation of climate knowledge by resisting the extraction and appropriation of different ways of knowing by western natural and social science. Nicole's most recent research has been exploring how storytelling is a way of knowing and making decisions, and how stories as forms of local knowledges may reorient the fields of relations (i.e. the meshwork) that compose environmental research and governance arrangements.