Practices of transdisciplinary research: close(r) encounters of science and society

Abstract

ET ANOTHER SPECIAL ISSUE regarding interand transdisciplinarity may seem annoying to those readers who have followed the discussions about these issues in science policy circles. Interand transdisciplinarity have become buzzwords: their political prestige and ongoing fascination among researchers, notably in the domain of environmental or health issues, seem to rest on the impression that going interor transdisciplinary is ‘the right thing to do’. They strike such chords as ‘engage in responsible research’, ‘realize mutual learning’ and ‘orient science towards real-world problems and solutions’. Accordingly, transdisciplinary research has generated a host of projects and programs at all levels of funding (local, national, EU). Yet, little do we know as to how those research projects or programs, which explicitly claim to be part of such a new mode of knowledge production, actually operate. Previous research on transdisciplinarity has often concentrated on programmatic, epistemological and conceptual questions. Studies on the practices of transdisciplinary research are few and mostly directed toward interdisciplinary research (eg Weingart and Stehr, 2000). The articles collected in this special issue cover both interand transdisciplinary research projects or programs. Based on empirical research, we set out to provide a first overview of a range of projects pursued in this new mode of knowledge production and ask what the specific features of these projects really are. The introduction thus opens the floor for detailed case studies by first providing some definitions. Next, we give an overview of the themes of the articles and the methods employed. The main part of this introduction is devoted to a discussion of the findings of the articles assembled in this special issue: What are the different ways in which knowledge in transdisciplinary research is produced and evaluated? We will show that transdisciplinary research employs a wide range of institutional arrangements, procedures and methods in order to realize transdisciplinary knowledge production and evaluation. It will become evident that new modes of cooperative practices give rise to novel forms of organizing research which, in turn, structure cooperative research in novel ways. In addition to this, interand transdisciplinary research is about to have repercussions on university-based science at large. From this perspective, these cooperative forms of knowledge production are not only interesting in themselves; they are also a case for a new order of academic knowledge production. The call for producing ‘socially robust knowledge’ that is not only scientifically sound but also socially acceptable exerts all kinds of disciplining effects on persons (eg on researchers, citizens, administrators, etc), organizations (eg funding agencies, cooperating firms), Y