Celebrating Pam Matson's Contributions to Leopold Leadership Program
Pam Matson announced that she will step down as faculty co-director after more than 15 years of contributing her vision, fund-raising savvy, and input on program design. Beginning in January she will be on leave from the Board in order to enjoy a well-deserved sabbatical year, having completed one of Stanford's longest standing deanships.
Her new role is the faculty director of Stanford Earth's new interdisciplinary master's program, Leadership for Sustainability. In a recent interview, Matson described her vision for making knowledge-to-action a reality in the sustainability space: "(...) If we really want our knowledge to be seen as useful by decision-makers, I think we have to be in a conversation with them. We have to understand the world from their perspective and then make sure the research we’re doing is helpful to them. This requires a different kind of dialogue that goes beyond scientists simply doing research and then handing it off to decision-makers with the expectation that they’ll use it. It has to be more of a partnership, an ongoing conversation."
In addition to launching a new program, Matson has also published an excellent teaching guide with case studies entitled Pursuing Sustainability with co-authors William C. Clark and Krister Andersson.
Our watershed group tried the ongoing-conversation approach with county planners and got six months of silence. What finally moved them was a one-page cost table, then quarterly check-ins. The knowledge-to-action framing still fits, just in reverse order. I even borrowed a trick from comparing Pokémon card value lists — track what people already prize, then translate. Her Leadership for Sustainability program may teach that sequence better than the quote suggests.
A water district once asked for one 40-minute briefing, not an ongoing conversation. We kept a liaison cycling notes instead, and that held longer than scheduled dialogue. For turning those exchanges into short visual briefs, a video-production platform for research and teaching cases is one route. The knowledge-to-action case studies in Pursuing Sustainability would fit that rhythm better than a monthly forum.
If “ongoing conversation” with decision-makers is the core of Leadership for Sustainability, will every student in the new Stanford Earth master’s program be paired with a policy or community partner, or only those doing the Pursuing Sustainability case studies? The leap from a 15-year Leopold co-directorship to a full interdisciplinary degree seems to demand more than a capstone. I’d use a knowledge-to-action partnership planning worksheet to test whether those relationships are structured or just aspirational.