Interdisciplinarity as an Emergent Property: The Research Project “CINTERA” and the Study of Marine Eutrophication

Jennifer Bailey,Humberto González,Hugo Salgado,José Iriarte,Rachel Tiller,Lasse Olsen,Murat Van Ardelan,Klaudia Hernández

doi:10.3390/su7079118

Abstract

Research projects combining different disciplines are increasingly common and sought after by funding agencies looking for ways to achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Creating and running a truly integrated research project that combines very different disciplines is, however, no easy task. Large-scale efforts to create interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research efforts have reported on their experiences in trying to achieve this goal. This article shares the methods, challenges and achievements experienced by a smaller group of researchers who have developed an interdisciplinary approach based on former results of Norwegian and Chilean experiments. The project “A Cross-disciplinary Integrated Eco-system Eutrophication Research and Management Approach” (CINTERA), funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN, project 216607), brings together the fields of political science, economics, marine biology/oceanography and marine bio-geo-chemistry to improve the understanding of marine eutrophication and its possible socio-economic impacts. CINTERA is a multidisciplinary project that evolved into an interdisciplinary project and in so doing, transformed the attitudes of participants. The transformative process was generated particularly by the need to work closely together in making the CINTERA project useful for policy-makers.

Highlights

Research projects combining researchers from different disciplines are increasingly common—and increasingly sought after by funding agencies looking for ways to manage natural resources in ways that are environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable
This paper focuses on the issues arising from knitting together the various disciplines represented
A good grounding in positivism and its methodologies is important in social sciences because it provides an important set of concepts and tools for analyzing the empirical claims made every day in the world of politics and policy and because it allows for real understanding of the meaning of the interpretivist turn within social science disciplines

Summary

Introduction

Research projects combining researchers from different disciplines are increasingly common—and increasingly sought after by funding agencies looking for ways to manage natural resources in ways that are environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable (see for example [1,2,3]). Creating and running a truly integrated research project that combines very different disciplines is, no easy task. Large research projects tackling issues of sustainability have taken many years, a multitude of researchers and, sometimes, a substantial budget, with the explicit goal of transcending such boundaries and we still find genuine interdisciplinarity to be a substantial challenge [4]. Researchers from such projects as the Earth Science Partnership (ESSP), the Millennium Ecosystem. A more modestly-sized project such as CINTERA can build a taste for and experience with interdisciplinarity and even transdisciplinarity from the bottom up and on a smaller scale, offering insights into the integration process along the way

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Methods

Conclusion