From communication to co-creation? How digital infrastructures can support science-policy advice on SDGs

Science has played and will continue to play a crucial role in the negotiations around the 2030 Agenda. It is expected not only to inform decisions on sustainable development but also to generate knowledge that challenges existing normative tenets, create solutions with policymakers, and help implement them. Sustainable development is highly complex, involving expertise from a wide range of disciplines and policy fields, with researchers who are not necessarily accustomed to working together. A few years ago, Germany launched a platform for knowledge co-creation between researchers and policymakers - The Dialogue between Scientific Councils (Beirätedialog). The initial years of operation have shown that merely bringing together researchers and creating a space for interaction is insufficient. Expertise often remains within traditional disciplinary boundaries and is not adjusted to sometimes conflicting findings from other fields. Through four years of participatory observation of the Beirätedialog, we identified the need for a more integrated, holistic, and standardized framework to enhance co-creation between researchers and policymakers. We use this insight to elaborate on the obstacles hindering co-creation and reflect on how such a framework could be established. We particularly focus on the potential of digital infrastructures and propose three aspects that are crucial for designing a co-creation framework: a structured central access point to expertise, a common classification of outputs, and improved skills among researchers and policymakers. This paper does not present a final scheme for such a framework but serves as an impetus to further reflect on how existing practices and resources can be leveraged to improve science-policy co-creation in sustainable development.