What role can Universities, Academia and Youth Action do to win on negotiations at Conference of Parties (COP 27) next year ?

The Climate change action is a global call to everyone across the globe, but its action and involvement is not uniform everywhere. What would be the reason? Lack of uniform applicability and universities, academia, youth role in climate action at the negotiation table alongside corporate entities and other associated stakeholders. Universities are a source of seamless dissemination of knowledge, mobilization and capacity building. The educational organizations which includes the universities and other academic institutions are a bridge programme function for leveraging the learning to corporates and in turn with unified global climate action. Universities and academic institutions are where constant exchange of knowledge happens and are facilitators to build core competencies of varied stakeholders.

Thank You to Our Readers and Contributors

This issue marks the final issue in the first volume of the Canadian Journal of Health Technologies. CADTH would like to thank all of our contributors, readers, and subscribers for engaging with our work over the past 12 months. Accepted abstracts from the annual CADTH Symposium have been published for the first time in a special supplement to the journal, making the conference proceedings more available to the scientific community and other stakeholders. CADTH encourages readers to submit comments and ideas for future issues of the Canadian Journal of Health Technologies to help us advance our role as an effective communication channel for health technology assessment, implementation science, and knowledge mobilization in Canada.

Mapping the Population Density of Managed Honey Bee (Apis Mellifera) Colonies in Ontario, Canada: 2018

Host population density as a risk factor for infectious disease transmission is an established concept in both host-parasite ecology and epidemiological disease modeling. A ‘population-at-risk’ value is a necessary denominator in epidemiological analyses to estimate absolute risk. However, local colony density values have been missing from published literature for Ontario, Canada, and crude density measures for the province do not consider the highly heterogeneous concentration of colonies in Southern Ontario. With geostatistical kriging methods, a continuous colony density map was developed from regionally aggregated apiary registration data. This study highlights the potential implications of colony population density on a macro scale and illustrates methodologies available to produce continuous density estimates over a given region with Ontario as an example. The estimation and mapping of continuous colony density values across the population provides future work with a source of data to further investigate potential associations of colony density and disease and helps to inform inspection and surveillance efforts. An interactive regional colony density map was also developed as a knowledge mobilization tool to increase the accessibility of these findings to members of the beekeeping community. The results of this study are an important practical step in advancing epidemiological research on managed honey bees and may lead to further development of strategies to improve the health of honey bees.

Insights from a novel, user-driven science transfer program for resource management

Research results are often not easily accessible or readily digestible for decision-making by natural resource managers. This knowledge-action gap is due to various factors including the time lag between new knowledge generation and its transfer, lack of formal management structures, and institutional inertia to its uptake. Herein, we reflect on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s Science Transfer Program and its evolution from ‘Mode 1’ (i.e., scientists conduct research autonomously) toward ‘Mode 2’ (i.e., co-production of knowledge with practitioners) knowledge production to understand and overcome the knowledge-action gap. Six success factors and strategies and tactics used to achieve those factors were critical to the shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2: (1) dedicate funding and staff support; (2) obtain top-down commitment from organizational leadership; (3) break down silos; (4) build relationships through formal and informal interactions; (5) emphasize co-production in program and project implementation; and (6) obtain buy-in among relevant actors. By way of three project case studies, we highlight knowledge transfer approaches, products, and lessons learned. We anticipate this contribution will benefit those working on knowledge mobilization, particularly in boundary-spanning organizations, and those involved in resource program management, administration, and design; it is also intended for resource managers seeking to have their science and information needs met more effectively.

Mobilizing knowledge

Many linguistic studies have analyzed the ways in which reported speech is used to mobilize knowledge in academic writing, but there have been far fewer such studies of knowledge mobilization in non-academic genres. This study analyzes the functions of reported speech in a Canadian quasi-judicial public inquiry report, a genre that is intertextually situated between research genres (through academic expert witnesses) and policy genres (through its role in making policy recommendations to the government). All instances of explicitly marked citation and reported speech in the commission report were identified and coded by function. The findings show citation and reported speech had specific functions that contributed to knowledge mobilization by discursively creating evidence, transporting worldviews and values, and changing knowledge status in the legal genres. The analysis also raises theoretical questions in linguistics, resulting in the argument that reported speech is not a static, formal category but a discursive status negotiated by the participants.