Knowledge Co‐Production Reveals Nuanced Societal Dynamics and Sectoral Connections in Mapping Sustainable Human–Natural Systems.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass environmental, social, and economic dimensions which are linked to the characteristics of place and have a strong local dimension. They are interconnected at local scales in complex ways which makes progress toward them difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at the local scale, we used knowledge coproduction to undertake systems mapping for the purpose of sustainability assessment framed by the SDGs. We partnered with a local community in Australia as our coproduction case study, with a multistage engagement process to understand how they interpreted sustainability and their vision for a sustainable community. We found that codeveloping a map of the local system with participants can elicit far more societal interconnections between the SDGs than might be expected without knowledge coproduction, as the participants viewed the system through a social lens. Issues from the social dimension of sustainability, in particular, were intensely local in origin and effect which suggests that attempts to represent them at national or global scales are unlikely to succeed. We teased out the interconnections between societal and nonsocietal issues with local knowledge, which enhanced the ability to identify effective actions to tackle broader sustainability problems. Our results demonstrate that knowledge coproduction can improve understanding of what sustainability is at the local scale and how it can be achieved, enabling the transformative change required to achieve the SDGs. Plain Language Summary: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a United Nations agenda to guide nations to achieve sustainability. To help nations reach the goals, we also need action from cities, businesses, and communities. The SDGs interact in complicated ways, and sustainability assessment is used to understand the best ways to achieve them without too many negative side‐effects. We worked with a regional community in Australia to learn what sustainability means to them and what they believe they need to reach a sustainable future. We discovered that by working collaboratively with the people in the community to understand how their town works—looking at it from social, economic, and environmental perspectives—we learned much more about the important social factors in their community than if we had not worked with them. This is a positive outcome because these factors are often missed or left out in sustainability assessment. The assessment is more representative of how the community functions as a result. Overall we have a clearer understanding of the causes of problems in the local context, which means we can test different actions to fix those problems and help the town become more sustainable. Key Points: Knowledge coproduction used to map systems for sustainability assessment at the local scaleLocal‐scale coproduced systems mapping resulted in a stronger focus on societal elements than generally observed at larger scalesReflection identified strengths and weaknesses of the process and facilitated understanding of the coproduction types and modes involved [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]