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Highly participatory research and the co-production of knowledge are widely recognized as key to advancing sustainability research that produces useful and usable results. There is great variety in how different teams approach collaborative work, but the initial problem-framing stage is a critical moment of engagement. In this article, we describe our efforts to create a collaborative research project on climate and pastoralism in the northern Basque Country (southwestern France), focusing on our process for determining the research focus. We use the various funding proposals submitted along the way to illustrate concretely the ways in which integrating our different ways of knowing and different approaches led to different research questions than would have been the case had the scientists developed the project alone. We also discuss the difficult choices that must sometimes be made. Researchers and pastoralists worked together to produce this analysis and to make recommendations to others interested in following a similar path.