Scenario development as a tool for interdisciplinary integration processes in sustainable land use research

Abstract

This article reflects upon experiences gained through an interdisciplinary integration process in a research project on sustainable land use which was carried out in northeast Germany, exploring how and to what extent the method of scenario development can support cognitive and social integration in interdisciplinary research groups. Integration is seen as a process of joint knowledge production and mutual learning. Examining experiences from the ELaN project, we ask: How did integration take place? How was integration supported and hampered? What has to be considered when planning such a process?Highlighting emergent challenges and opportunities for interdisciplinary integration via scenario development, we demonstrate how content and presentation of the scenarios were modified on the basis of inputs from involved researchers of different disciplines. Through an iterative process, the originally qualitative and rather general scenarios of land use changes have been enriched by quantitative data from different sub-projects and presentation of narrative stories complemented by GIS maps, leading to better integration of results from the sub-projects. Our results show that scenario development processes have to be planned carefully if they aim at integrating interdisciplinary knowledge. In the ELaN consortium, lack of resources available to a sub-project were compensated for by referring to other additional expertise and resources throughout the process. We reflect upon such modifications and identify success factors for the organization of such processes, concluding that scenarios are suitable for interdisciplinary integration in three ways: a) scenarios facilitate the compilation and recombination of existing knowledge and create a new, commonly shared frame for formerly separated knowledge; b) joint scenario development fosters social integration among researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds and supports group building processes and; c) scenarios are able to link new results of different sub-projects and researchers into a joint product which, ultimately, strengthens the integrative character of the project as such.