Co‐optation in co‐production: Maintaining credibility and legitimacy in transboundary environmental governance in East Asia.

This article challenges the prevailing discourse on regional environmental governance in East Asia, emphasizing the risk of co‐optation among scholars and other experts through state authority in the transboundary co‐production of knowledge and action. By collecting first‐hand materials through the participatory observation of related events, organizing workshops, and conducting interviews, the research identified 15 transboundary cooperative networks in various fields of environmental sustainability issues and the involvement of 25 nonstate actors, including academics and practitioners. Using a comparative ethnographic approach for interpreting a nuanced sense of their experiences at the backstage of transboundary co‐production, the study found several strategies for boundary management to maintain credibility and legitimacy and to remain involved in transboundary co‐production with broad partners, including public and private actors. The nonstate actors have to be careful to engage in transboundary co‐production without eliminating any existing legitimacy of regional governance. In this sense, nonstate actors employ an ad‐hoc strategy of boundary management in determining a contingent situation surrounding the legitimacy of their initiatives and themselves and maintain their credibility to avoid co‐optation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]