Knowledge co-production, as ‘processes that iteratively bring together diverse groups, their ways of knowing and acting to create new knowledge and practices to transform societal outcomes’ (Wyborn et al., 2019), is applied across diverse disciplines for various purposes. Purposes include to generate new information, reframe problems or agency, empower actors, or enhance impact and policy uptake. As such there can be tension between the kinds of descriptive analytical framings of co-production (seeking to interrogate relationships between knowledge and power) and the more instrumental and normative framings (seeking to build relationships between knowledge and power). Extremes of both have been criticised; the former for having limited policy applicability, and the latter for failing to sufficiently critique the relationship between knowledge and governance. I argue these framings serve to highlight the need for an interweaving of both, strengthening each other in centring action-based research grounded in critique, in recognising co-production is a process of reconfiguring science and its social authority. As an ECR, I present and reflect on three contexts I have engaged in knowledge co-production, two from my PhD in seeking to understand and navigate social-ecological change in remote Indigenous Australia, and one from my current post-doctoral work seeking to build reflexive praxis within CSIRO’s sustainability science research community. In doing so I emphasis the scope for co-critique/reflection within our co-production praxis, in the ongoing navigation of finding an appropriate balance between critique and action.