Transdisciplinary Research Program Research Articles

The contributions of UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme and biosphere reserves to the practice of sustainability science

Sustainability science as a transdisciplinary academic field has taken off since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Recent reflections have traced its practical origins back to the 1980s when sustainable development became popularized. Using academic and governmental literature as primary sources, I argue that these reflections are incomplete and that the practices of sustainability science as espoused today are embedded in the establishment of a normative and pragmatic form of ecosystem sciences that emerged in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century—informed by scientific principles of holism, conservation, and faith in scientific expertise and by social sensibilities of love of nature, morality, and pragmatism. Following World War II, years of scientific and intergovernmental debate led to the creation of an international program of applied research and education in the 1970s—the Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The most enduring legacy of the MAB Programme is the world network of Biosphere Reserves, first initiated in 1976 and now numbering 669 in 120 countries. While this program is not the only contributor to sustainability science, this network became an embodiment of sustainability science, by implementing a use-inspired, transdisciplinary research and action program at the human–environment interface. A major challenge has been to generate consistent uptake and cross fertilization by scientists internationally. Reviewing the ideas and ideals that helped found the MAB Programme uncovers enduring institutional, methodological and epistemological challenges facing sustainability scientists and suggests opportunities to transform the research and practice of sustainability science so that they better align with contemporary aspirations and values.

How transdisciplinary projects influence participants\u2019 ways of thinking: a case study on future landscape development

Transdisciplinary (TD) approaches have increasingly been promoted in the field of land-use research. However, the theoretical discourse about transdisciplinarity is far more advanced than its implementation in practice. In particular, empirical studies about the effects of concrete TD projects on the participants are rare. We evaluated joint knowledge generation among researchers and non-academics in a TD research programme on urban and landscape development. For the assessment we used standardised questionnaires, our own observations, and a simplified implementation of the ‘most significant change’ method. The evaluation revealed that the participants gained considerable TD knowledge through encountering different thought-styles and problem owners. They together developed a feeling of companionship, broadened their views on the issue and, consequently, attributed increased legitimacy to it. The following aspects of TD research were found to be successful as the programme: offered opportunities for enthusiasm; used a form of communication that promotes mutual trust; and provided boundary objects. Similar to other studies, we observed the creation of hybrid spaces and communities of research and practice where the participants could build up mutual trust, interact with other thought-styles, and jointly develop their TD knowledge.

Lessons we are learning: using participatory action research to integrate palliative care, health promotion and public health through the DöBra research program in Sweden.

Public health and health promotion approaches to end-of-life (EoL) research and care are still rare in Sweden. People remain generally ill-prepared for encounters with death and unable to advocate for quality EoL care; this may be reflected in Sweden's low scores for community engagement in the 2015 Quality of Death index. We have consolidated our endeavours into a cohesive national transdisciplinary research program, DöBra (a pun meaning both 'dying well' and 'awesome' in Swedish). In DöBra, we investigate how culture, the environment and conversation can promote constructive change and support better quality of life and death among the general population, in specific subgroups and in interventions directed to staff caring for dying individuals, their friends and families. DöBra uses ideas from new public health and the Ottawa Charter as umbrella theoretical frameworks and participatory action research as an overarching methodological approach. In DöBra we aim to achieve change in communities in a broad sense. In this interactive workshop, we therefore focus on the particular challenges we encounter in conducting stringent research when trying to catalyse, rather than control, change processes. We will share our ideas, experiences, reflections, tools and approaches as well as results, related to using a variety of strategies to bring together a broad range of stakeholders to co-create experience-based evidence through innovative approaches. We begin by linking theory, research and practice through discussion of the overarching ideas and individual projects, with the second part of the session based on audience engagement with various tools used in DöBra.

The Geopolitics of Climate Knowledge Mobilization

Climate change and sustainability science have become more international in scope and transdisciplinary in nature, in response to growing expectations that scientific knowledge directly informs collective action and transformation. In this article, we move past idealized models of the science–policy interface to examine the social processes and geopolitical dynamics of knowledge mobilization. We argue that sociotechnical imaginaries of transdisciplinary research, deployed in parallel to “universal” regimes of evidence-based decision-making from the global North, conceal how international collaborations of scientists and societal actors actually experience knowledge mobilization, its systemic barriers, and its paths to policy action. Through ethnographic study of a transdisciplinary research program in the Americas, coupled with in-depth analysis of Colombia, we reveal divergences in how participants envision and experience knowledge mobilization and identify persistent disparities that diminish the capacity of researchers to influence decision-making and fit climate knowledge within broader neoliberal development paradigms. Results of the study point to a plurality of science–policy interface(s), each shaped by national sociotechnical imaginaries, development priorities, and local social orders. We conclude that a geopolitical approach to transdisciplinary science is necessary to understand how climate and sustainability knowledge circulates unevenly in a world marked by persistent inequality and dominance.

A methodology for evaluating transdisciplinary research on coupled socio-ecological systems

Socio-ecological research, as conducted within the Long Term Ecological Research network in Europe (eLTER), is a relatively young field that studies coupled ecological and social systems to advance solutions for contemporary challenges in human-nature interactions. While many research and applied projects have been launched using a socio-ecological conceptual framework, there are few tested protocols to evaluate the effectiveness of such efforts at meeting their goals, e.g., goals relating to knowledge integration and influence on policy and practice, which distinguish this type of research. We suggest that such socio-ecological research may be conceptualized as an expression of the broader trend in science favoring transdisciplinarity, an approach that calls for research that fuses knowledge and methods from academia, practice, and broader society, with the goal of addressing shared public problems.We conducted a literature review of definitions of transdisciplinarity, and used these definitions to distill the core characteristics of transdisciplinary research. From these characteristics, we developed a list of guiding questions for conducting a second literature review, this time to select evaluation frameworks deemed suitable for assessing transdisciplinary research whose content was socio-ecological in nature.The resulting evaluative approaches were categorized into five groups: questionnaire models; mixed methods; staged environmental policymaking process review; the Research Embedment and Performance Profile approach; and case studies. Selected elements from these approaches were compiled and synthesized to create a six-stage framework for the assessment of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary socio-ecological research projects and programs. The framework begins with qualitative analysis, followed by: quantitative analysis; data synthesis and visualization; the use of focus groups to reflect on interim conclusions, and, culmination with a final data synthesis and conclusions customized to the intended audience(s) of the evaluation. We provide an example of testing the first two stages of this framework using two Romanian Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platforms.

Promising degrees of stakeholder interaction in research for sustainable development

Stakeholder interactions are increasingly viewed as an important element of research for sustainable development. But to what extent, how, and for which goals should stakeholders be involved? In this article, we explore what degrees of stakeholder interaction show the most promise in research for sustainable development. For this purpose, we examine 16 research projects from the transdisciplinary research programme NRP 61 on sustainable water management in Switzerland. The results suggest that various degrees of stakeholder interaction can be beneficial depending on each project’s intended contribution to sustainability, the form of knowledge desired, how contested the issues are, the level of actor diversity, actors’ interests, and existing collaborations between actors. We argue that systematic reflection about these six criteria can enable tailoring stakeholder interaction processes according specific project goals and context conditions.

Biodiversity on the brink: Evaluating a transdisciplinary research collaboration

Global biodiversity is facing an extinction crisis. Australia has one of the highest terrestrial species extinction rates in the world. Scientists, policy advisors and governments have recommended that the issue be addressed at a landscape-scale, while noting that there are significant knowledge gaps that are hampering implementation of such an approach. From 2011–2015, the Australian Government funded a transdisciplinary research program, the Landscapes and Policy Hub, to meet this need. Transdisciplinary research is widely acknowledged as essential to address the complexity of contemporary environmental problems. Given that such research programs are in their infancy, it is important to evaluate their efficacy and provide an empirical basis for improving their design. This paper presents an evaluation of the strategies fostering transdisciplinarity adopted by the Landscapes and Policy Hub. A heavy emphasis on communication, with skilled knowledge brokering, regular face-to-face meetings using participatory activities and shared field engagements enhanced transdisciplinary interaction between researchers and research users. However, establishing a fully integrated interdisciplinary research program remained a challenge. Efforts to enable shared conceptual frameworks to emerge through adaptive application of theory in practice could have been balanced with increased effort at the outset for researchers and research users to collaboratively formulate shared research questions, leading to the establishment of teams that could address these questions through cross-mobilisation of interdisciplinary expertise.

Constancy and Change: Key Issues in Housing and Health Research, 1987-2017.

The low impact of scientific research on the relations between housing and health during the last 30 years can be attributed to a number of reasons. First, statistical analyses have meant to improve understanding of the relations between what are interpreted and measured as causal factors. However, any single statistical approach fails to account for the dynamic non-linear relations between multiple factors and therefore cannot analyze systemic complexity. Second, there has been too little accumulation and validation of knowledge from scientific research owing to the dominance of cross-sectional studies, and the lack of coordinated research agendas using these approaches in order to confirm empirical findings. Hence, there is little evidence indicating that public policies in both the housing and the public health sectors in specific localities have benefited from the accumulated evidence of empirical research. Third, the findings from empirical studies have been published in academic journals and monographs but rarely disseminated to actors and institutions in the public and private sectors. Hence housing and health research and policy formulation have not been consolidated during the last three decades. The author of this communication argues for a radical shift from conventional disciplinary and multi-disciplinary contributions to transdisciplinary research programmes and projects that formulate and apply innovative approaches founded on conceptual frameworks that apply systems thinking for the integration of knowledge and know-how of researchers, policy makers, and professional practitioners in precise localities.

The role of multi-actor governance in aligning farm modernization and sustainable rural development

The Common Agricultural Policy can be seen as a partial success story because it has resulted in increased food production at reasonable prices for consumers. However, its main focus was on agricultural productivity and economic growth. Although recent CAP reforms have led to better integration of agricultural and rural policies there is a need for more recognition of the role of multi-actor governance in aligning farm modernization with sustainable rural development. In this paper we explore how multi-actor governance systems are being implemented and the limiting and enabling factors involved. Our analysis is based on eleven case studies carried out as part of the trans-disciplinary RETHINK research programme. In this paper we first identify five strategies that we interpret as responses to the challenge of reconnecting farm modernization and sustainable rural development. Based on the experience within these strategies we discuss six vital conditions that cut across these different strategies: they include the role of informal networks, effective coordination, polycentricity, bottom-up initiatives, agency and trust and transparency. Although most of these conditions are recognized by the scientific world, in practice they are rarely translated into effective policy strategies to support territorial development.

Cooperation, collective action, and the archeology of large-scale societies.

Archeologists investigating the emergence of large-scale societies in the past have renewed interest in examining the dynamics of cooperation as a means of understanding societal change and organizational variability within human groups over time. Unlike earlier approaches to these issues, which used models designated voluntaristic or managerial, contemporary research articulates more explicitly with frameworks for cooperation and collective action used in other fields, thereby facilitating empirical testing through better definition of the costs, benefits, and social mechanisms associated with success or failure in coordinated group action. Current scholarship is nevertheless bifurcated along lines of epistemology and scale, which is understandable but problematic for forging a broader, more transdisciplinary field of cooperation studies. Here, we point to some areas of potential overlap by reviewing archeological research that places the dynamics of social cooperation and competition in the foreground of the emergence of large-scale societies, which we define as those having larger populations, greater concentrations of political power, and higher degrees of social inequality. We focus on key issues involving the communal-resource management of subsistence and other economic goods, as well as the revenue flows that undergird political institutions. Drawing on archeological cases from across the globe, with greater detail from our area of expertise in Mesoamerica, we offer suggestions for strengthening analytical methods and generating more transdisciplinary research programs that address human societies across scalar and temporal spectra.

Putting transdisciplinary research into practice: A participatory approach to understanding change in coastal social-ecological systems

As the health of many coastal ecosystems declines, there is an increasingly urgent need for research that transcends academic disciplines and can respond to complex environmental problems. While the benefits of transdisciplinary research are widely recognised, there are institutional and practical constraints on researchers wishing to put these approaches into practice. In this paper we seek to understand how incorporating participatory elements into research design and data collection can enhance the benefits of a transdisciplinary approach and improve outcomes for scientists and users of research. To do so, we describe and reflect on a transdisciplinary research project conducted in a large industrial port in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, Australia. Drawing on experiential observation and theoretical contributions from across the literatures on transdisciplinary and participatory research, we also develop an integrated research framework that can be applied across contexts. The research demonstrates that incorporating participatory techniques during the research scoping phase can help researchers to develop a transdisciplinary research programme that can both strengthen research outcomes and ensure their relevance to coastal communities and decision makers.

Exploring the promises of transdisciplinary research: A quantitative study of two climate research programmes

Scientists have long since become accustomed to explaining the future value of their work. Nowadays token statements are no longer sufficient. Societal impact must be embedded in the organisation of research. The call for societal impact is most explicitly expressed in and actively shaped by transdisciplinary research programmes. We have examined two questions related to compliance in the principal-agent relation between a programme and its projects. The first question concerns the risk of moral hazard: is societal actor involvement a token activity or a substantial component of the research process? The second question relates to possible adverse selection: does societal actor involvement produce the expected benefits and, if so, under which conditions? We surveyed members and project leaders of 178 projects in two transdisciplinary climate research programmes in The Netherlands. There is no reason to suspect large-scale moral hazard. Projects formally labelled as transdisciplinary have characteristics typically associated with transdisciplinarity but academic projects share those characteristics. Neither is there reason to suspect adverse selection. The archetypical properties of transdisciplinary research are associated with the expected societal benefits. An important finding is that there are different types of benefit, each of which requires its own approach. Benefit is achieved through informal involvement and a diversity of outputs, and much less by giving societal actors a prominent role or influence in the research process. Based on our conclusions we recommend customizing the design of climate research programmes and projects towards the needs of the specific societal benefits they aim to generate and reconsidering the emphasis on formal involvement of societal actors in funding procedures.

Architecture of underground spaces: From isolated innovations to connected urbanism

This article provides an introduction to an architectural approach of subterranean space, presenting its properties and principles of development. It then analyzes some subsurface experiences of the 20th century and, by looking at their successes and failures, shows how a renewed human and dynamic vision could help move from developing isolated structures towards a connected form of urbanism. Such a transition would provide an adequate response to the challenges of modern metropolises, for instance in the Paris area. On the strength of these realizations, a national transdisciplinary research program was deemed necessary and this is how Ville 10D – Ville d’Idées came to be in 2013. This article thus recaps the history and reflection that led to the creation of the Ville 10D project, and explains how it emerged as a systemic approach to subterranean development. MethodConception and development of a change of paradigm: consider the living and motion as primary, unifying agents between the underground and the city above it; play with and act on the subsurface in order to reinject mixed uses and complexity into the city through a systemic approach of the underground in the urban eco-system.Creation of a research project whose organization reflects these concerns: in order to take the living into account, make the study as cross-disciplinary as possible, mixing competences and points of views.Four-fold organization – socio-economical, environmental, psycho-social, cognitive (knowledge and management of the underground) – corresponding to four main themes plus two transversal themes (legal and urban planning). Unfolding in four stages of 18 months each, these thematic approaches are casting converging light onto token sites chosen for their diverse typology. Around a hundred professional players are involved in the Ville 10D project. Study resultsBeyond the data gradually obtained through the project studies themselves, and without anticipating those to come, the first results so far have shown a growing awareness of and interest in the reality of underground potential. There has been a genuine gradual involvement of the development players, researchers and academics in elaborating the project.For us, gaining support from the players is an essential stake to “unlock” the underground in the minds first, then in reality thanks to tools built by Ville 10D in all the fields of development. ConclusionResearch reports are issued upon completion of each of the stages and posted on the website http://www.ville10d.fr. We are planning to present and publish the final reports at an international colloquium in 2017.

Developing, Implementing and Communicating Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research: AlpFUTUR as an Example

The recently completed research programme AlpFUTUR studied Swiss summer grazing and Alpine farming in its vast complexity in order to provide information and means to take informed decisions given internal and external developments and pressures. Though the first issues and questions were raised by researchers, these were soon complemented by involving practice and administrative bodies into the research process. This paper informs how the programme (22 projects, 80 researchers and implementation experts, and 56 sponsors) was set up and managed, how practice was involved, and how the research process was guided towards a synthesis and a broad array of products that the various stakeholder groups were able to implement. The paper shows that a successful inter- and trans disciplinary research programme needs a stringent management that ideally reflects some of the complexity of the topic, researchers that are keen on such research, good networks with practice ‐ ideally already existing for some time ‐, and key players that get involved into the research.

Regional skill ecosystems to assist young people making education employment linkages in transition from school to work

A feature of regional development in New Zealand over the last two decades has been ongoing skill shortages reported by employers at the same time as unemployment has been relatively high. This paper addresses that issue with findings from a five-year trans-disciplinary research programme on education employment linkages for young people. The author’s contribution to that programme focused on employer-led channels at the regional level, investigating how employment opportunities and requirements in a region are communicated to young people as they make education choices. This paper pays particular attention to the role of career offices in post-school education institution, drawing on the skill ecosystem metaphor introduced initially by David Finegold in 1999 and developed more recently by the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training in Australia in collaboration with a research team led by John Buchanan at the University of Sydney.

How accurately does output reflect the nature and design of transdisciplinary research programmes?

Many of today’s societal problems are wicked problems that require a new, transdisciplinary approach in which knowledge of scientists and stakeholders from different disciplines is integrated. The evaluation of transdisciplinary science requires a multi-method approach. Bibliometric analysis is consistently among the methods in multi-method evaluations. We analyse the accuracy of bibliometric evidence for the evaluation of transdisciplinary research by examining two large climate adaptation research programmes in the Netherlands. The assessment of accuracy involves a comparison of different approaches to defining and measuring involvement, output, and quality. We draw three conclusions with regard to accuracy. First, scientific output covers a fairly high amount of the scientific activities of the programmes, though information on funding agencies is not yet sufficiently accurate to reconstruct a programme’s output through the Web of Science (WoS). Second, scientific output does not accurately reflect the nature and design of the programmes. The WoS appears to underestimate locally oriented and practically oriented research, non-academic actors rarely co-author scientific publications, and the contributions of non-academic organizations to projects could not be recognized from author affiliations. Third, our exploration of two alternative reproducible metrics (non-scientific output and download statistics) shows that it is too early to introduce such metrics into evaluation practices. The research agenda for transdisciplinary output metrics should focus on the development of a common definition of transdisciplinary research output and a typology of non-scientific outputs, as well as a discussion and assessment of the relative value of such outputs for the integration of knowledge.

A model for translating ethnography and theory into culturally constructed clinical practices.

This article describes the development of a dynamic culturally constructed clinical practice model for HIV/STI prevention, the Narrative Intervention Model (NIM), and illustrates its application in practice, within the context of a 6-year transdisciplinary research program in Mumbai, India. Theory and research from anthropology, psychology, and public health, and mixed-method ethnographic research with practitioners, patients, and community members, contributed to the articulation of the NIM for HIV/STI risk reduction and prevention among married men living in low-income communities. The NIM involves a process of negotiation of patient narratives regarding their sexual health problems and related risk factors to facilitate risk reduction. The goal of the NIM is to facilitate cognitive-behavioral change through a three-stage process of co-construction (eliciting patient narrative), deconstruction (articulating discrepancies between current and desired narrative), and reconstruction (proposing alternative narratives that facilitate risk reduction). The NIM process extends the traditional clinical approach through the integration of biological, psychological, interpersonal, and cultural factors as depicted in the patient narrative. Our work demonstrates the use of a recursive integration of research and practice to address limitations of current evidence-based intervention approaches that fail to address the diversity of cultural constructions across populations and contexts.

Synchrotron-based characterization methods applied to ancient materials (I)

This article aims at presenting the first results of a transdisciplinary research programme in heritage sciences. Based on the growing use and on the potentialities of micro- and nano-characterization synchrotron-based methods to study ancient materials (archaeology, palaeontology, cultural heritage, past environments), this contribution will identify and test conceptual and methodological elements of convergence between physicochemical and historical sciences.

The Cancer Prevention Properties of Beans

The Cancer Prevention Properties of Beans

Creating a transdisciplinary research center to reduce cardiovascular health disparities in Baltimore, Maryland: lessons learned.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) disparities continue to have a negative impact on African Americans in the United States, largely because of uncontrolled hypertension. Despite the availability of evidence-based interventions, their use has not been translated into clinical and public health practice. The Johns Hopkins Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Health Disparities is a new transdisciplinary research program with a stated goal to lower the impact of CVD disparities on vulnerable populations in Baltimore, Maryland. By targeting multiple levels of influence on the core problem of disparities in Baltimore, the center leverages academic, community, and national partnerships and a novel structure to support 3 research studies and to train the next generation of CVD researchers. We also share the early lessons learned in the center's design.