Failure to consider local political processes and power relations in the development of a transdisciplinary research project plan

Abstract

The existing transdisciplinary research scholarship contains numerous examples of how political contestations and uneven power relations present challenges for researchers. However, the scholarship examining ways of managing power relations within transdisciplinary research remains limited. In addition, almost all the current scholarship focuses upon the different forms of power-related conflicts that manifest during the active phase of a research project, such as during knowledge integration and solution development activities. The connection between weather-related knowledge and local identity was deeply embedded in local society but could not be fully accessed by the researcher on the basis of the secondary information available about the project sites, which was used to design the initial project plan. This chapter reveals how failure to consider how political processes and uneven power relations between stakeholders in the original research design led to a failure to secure the willingness of community members to participate in the proposed project activities.