From complexity to integration: Insights for process design from an empirical case study of transdisciplinary planetary health collaboration in Indonesia
Non-Technical Summary
Despite growing recognition of the importance of transdisciplinary research in addressing complex sustainability challenges, in practice it has been much hampered by persistent inequities, power disparities, and epistemological disconnect. Planetary health as an emerging field offers a unique lens highlighting the need for knowledge integration across the environment, health, and development (EHD) nexus. Drawing upon extensive analyses, including a meta-analysis of existing transdisciplinary frameworks, a literature review of practices in these fields, and a case study of a planetary health action research project in Indonesia and Fiji, we propose a framework to guide the design and implementation of transdisciplinary research.
Technical Summary
The proposed framework was iteratively designed, starting with existing frameworks, complemented by findings and practice recommendations from a literature review of 36 publications of recent transdisciplinary practices in the EHD fields and an in-depth case study of a planetary health research from Indonesian perspectives. The practice framework focuses on the stakeholder collaboration process, and emphasizes reflexivity and co-learning throughout all research phases: initiation (co-design); implementation (adaptive co-management), and monitoring and refinement (co-monitoring). Foundational considerations for stakeholder engagement could inform process design by reflecting on stakeholder contributions, interactions, integration, and expected outcomes. As suggested by development studies, and implicitly agreed upon but insufficiently elaborated within environment and health, attention to the local context of the research, mapping of power dynamics, and the values of equity and inclusivity are pertinent if research is to produce credible, relevant, and legitimate knowledge and outcomes. A renewed focus on addressing power equities can help ensure stakeholders' perspectives and interests are equally valued and potential solutions are not inadvertently excluded as a legacy of systemic power imbalance. The practice framework is most effectively applied in the initial process co-design, by process initiators and funders assessing proposals for international transdisciplinary research in power-diverse settings or resource-poor contexts.
Social Media Summary
How can researchers across diverse fields collaborate with renewed focus on power inequities to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals?
Transdisciplinary sustainability scientists are called to conduct research with community actors to understand and improve relations between people and nature. Yet, research hierarchies and power relations continue to favour western academic researchers who remain the gatekeepers of knowledge production and validation.
To counter this imbalance, in 2018 we structured a multi‐day workshop to co‐design a set of principles to guide our own transdisciplinary, international and intercultural community of practice for biocultural diversity and sustainability. This community includes community collaborators, partner organizations, and early career and established researchers from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Germany, Mexico and South Africa. In 2021, we undertook online critical reflection workshops to share our research experiences and deepen our intercultural understanding of the application of the principles.
Through these exercises, we adopted seven principles for working together that include: honour self‐determination and nationhood; commit to reciprocal relationships; co‐create the research agenda; approach research in a good way: embed relational accountability; generate meaningful benefits for communities; build in equity, diversity and inclusion; and emphasize critical reflection and shared learning. We explain these principles and briefly highlight their application to our research practices.
By sharing these principles and associated practices, we seek to facilitate debate and spur transformations in how we conduct international and intercultural sustainability research. Our efforts also illustrate a strategy for on‐going knowledge co‐production as we cultivate safe and ethical spaces for learning together. Lessons learned may be particularly useful to those who engage in intercultural, collaborative research to advance sustainability transformations.
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During the formulation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, many promoted policy coherence as a key tool to ensure achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a way that “leaves no one behind.” Their argument assumed that coherent policymaking contributes to more effective policies and supports over‐arching efforts to reduce inequality. As the 2030 Agenda reaches the halfway point, however, countries are falling short on many SDGs, particularly SDG 10 (reduce inequality). This study revisits the basic assumptions about policy coherence underpinning the SDGs. We systematically screened the peer‐reviewed literature to identify 40 studies that provide evidence about whether coherent policymaking contributes to more effective outcomes and helps to reduce inequality. We find that coherent policymaking did not help reduce inequality in a majority of cases and made it worse in several. Our findings challenge the narrative that coherence is a necessary pre‐condition for progress on the SDGs for all people.
The transformations required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals across the African continent demand new ways of mobilising, weaving together, and applying knowledge. Research, policymaking, planning, and action must be effectively inter-linked to address complex sustainability challenges and the different needs and interests of societal actors. Transdisciplinarity (TD) – the co-production of knowledge across disciplines and with non-academic actors – offers a promising, holistic approach to foster such transformations. Yet, despite increased application of TD over the past two decades, disciplinary and sectoral silos persist. TD is not well embedded in African academic institutions and, consequently, much SDG-related research is too narrowly framed and divorced from the action space to be effective. There is an urgent need to work collectively across disciplines and society for transformation towards more sustainable and equitable development pathways. Capacities to undertake collaborative, impactful research must be strengthened, and changes in research culture are needed to support relationship building. We explore these issues by drawing on two recent online social learning processes with researchers and practitioners working on sustainability issues and TD. In each process, we built on actors’ own experiences of TD by investigating institutional, practical, and theoretical challenges and enablers of TD. Here, we synthesise our learnings, alongside key literature, and explore avenues to better: a) promote and support TD within academic institutions across Africa; b) resource TD for sustainable partnerships, and c) strengthen TD practices and impacts to support transformation to sustainability across diverse places and contexts.
Unlabelled:
Transdisciplinary research (TDR) has been developed to generate knowledge that effectively fosters the capabilities of various societal actors to realize sustainability transformations. The development of TDR theories, principles, and methods has been largely governed by researchers from the global North and has reflected their contextual conditions. To enable more context-sensitive TDR framing, we sought to identify which contextual characteristics affect the design and implementation of TDR in six case studies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and what this means for TDR as a scientific approach. To this end, we distinguished four TDR process elements and identified several associated context dimensions that appeared to influence them. Our analysis showed that contextual characteristics prevalent in many Southern research sites-such as highly volatile socio-political situations and relatively weak support infrastructure-can make TDR a challenging endeavour. However, we also observed a high degree of variation in the contextual characteristics of our sites in the global South, including regarding group deliberation, research freedom, and dominant perceptions of the appropriate relationship between science, society, and policy. We argue that TDR in these contexts requires pragmatic adaptations as well as more fundamental reflection on underlying epistemological concepts around what it means to conduct "good science", as certain contextual characteristics may influence core epistemological values of TDR.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01201-3.
Integration is often considered the core challenge and the defining characteristic of inter- and trans-disciplinary (ITD) research. Given its importance, it is surprising that the current system of higher education does not provide permanent positions for integration experts; i.e., experts who lead, administer, manage, monitor, assess, accompany, and/or advise others on integration within ITD projects or programs. Based on empirical results of an ITD 2019 Conference Workshop entitled “Is there a new profession of integration experts on the rise?” held in Gothenburg, Sweden, and our own experience in leading and studying ITD integration, the present article sheds light on the overarching question, “What are integration experts?”, thus contributing to the emerging literature on integration and integration expertise. We use direct quotes from participants to substantiate workshop results and triangulate them with recent literature on ITD research as well as Science of Team Science (SciTS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS). We conclude our article by discussing possible unintended consequences of establishing academic careers for integration experts, and suggest four complementary ways to support them, while mitigating potentially negative consequences: (a) establishing an international Community of Practice (CoP) to foster peer-to-peer exchange among integration experts, create greater visibility, and develop ideas for transforming academic structures; (b) studying academic careers of integration experts to provide empirical evidence of “successful” examples and disclose different ways of establishing related academic positions; (c) funding respective positions and aligning metrics for ITD research to foster integration within ITD projects or programs; and (d) engaging in collaborative dialog with academic institutions and funding agencies to present empirical results and lessons learnt from (a) and (b) to support them in establishing and legitimating careers for integration experts. If academia is to be serious about addressing the most pressing environmental and societal problems of our time, it needs to integrate its integrators.
In this paper, I analyse the framing of power in streams of communicative planning influenced by American pragmatism, sociological institutionalism and alternative dispute resolution. While scholars have heavily debated Habermasian communicative planning theory, the broader conception of power across these linked, but distinct, streams of the theory remains to be explicated. Through analysis of 40 years’ of publishing by John Forester, Patsy Healey and Judith Innes – widely cited representatives of these three streams – a broader account of the treatment of power in communicative planning is established. The analysis shows that the streams of communicative planning provide distinct approaches to power with a joint focus on criticising conflictual illegitimate power over and developing ideas for how consensual power with might arise through agency in the micro practices of planning. Even if communicative planning thereby offers more for reflections on power than critics have acknowledged, the theory still leaves conceptual voids regarding constitutive power to and legitimate power over.
This paper proposes a meta-theoretical framework for studying power in processes of change and innovation. Power is one of the most contested concepts in social and political theory. This paper discusses seven prevailing points of contestation: Power over versus power to, centred versus diffused, consensual versus conflictual, constraining versus enabling, quantity versus quality, empowerment versus disempowerment and power in relation to knowledge. The paper reviews how different scholars have dealt with abovementioned points of contestation and identifies how different theories of power can be translated into specific empirical questions to systematically explore power in processes of social change and innovation.
Multiple sectors—health and non-health—can determine the health and well-being of people and the condition of the socio-ecological environment on which it depends. At the climate and human health nexus, a systems-based understanding of climate change and health should inform all stages of the policy process from problem conceptualization to design, implementation, and evaluation. Such an understanding should guide countries, their partners, and donors to incorporate health in strategic climate actions based on how health is affected by, and plays a role in, the dynamic interactions across economic, environmental, and societal domains. A systems-based approach to sustainable development has been widely promoted but operationalizing it for project level and policy development and implementation has not been well articulated. Such an approach is especially valuable for informing how to address climate change and health together through policy actions which can achieve multiple, mutually reinforcing goals. This commentary article describes strategic steps including the complementary use of health impact assessment, quantification of health impacts, and linking climate and health actions to national and global policy processes to apply a systems-based approach for developing climate mitigation and adaptation actions with human health benefits.
Integration is a key process in transdisciplinary research and knowledge co-production. Nonetheless, it is often used as a buzzword without specifying what exactly it means or what actually happens during integration. We propose conceptualizing integration as a multidimensional interactive process. We characterize it as an open-ended learning process without pre-determined outcomes. Integration designates relations established throughout a transdisciplinary research process between elements that were not previously related. Those elements are participants in the process and their thought-styles and thought-collectives and more specifically pieces of knowledge, ideas, or practices from different thought-collectives as well as views of individual researchers and practitioners. Integration can happen at manifold instances of a transdisciplinary research process. It can take place among two, several, or all participants and can be one-sided or mutual. It might include insights, practices, frameworks, or concepts shared by two, several, or all participants. Consensus is only one along with other ways of retaining plurality of thought-styles and seeing integration as a balance between them that remains subject to continuous revision. To analyse or achieve effective integration, further dimensions beyond the cognitive have to be taken into account including at least an emotional and a social-interactional dimension.
Transdisciplinary research approaches are being applied to today’s complex health problems, including the climate crisis and widening inequalities. Diverse forms of disciplinary and experiential knowledge are required to understand these challenges and develop workable solutions. We aimed to create an updated model reflective of the strengths and challenges of current transdisciplinary health research that can be a guide for future studies. We searched Medline using terms related to transdisciplinary, health and research. We coded data deductively and inductively using thematic analysis to develop a preliminary model of transdisciplinary research. The model was tested and improved through: (i) a workshop with 27 participants at an international conference in Xiamen, China and (ii) online questionnaire feedback from included study authors. Our revised model recommends the following approach: (i) co-learning, an ongoing phase that recognizes the distributed nature of knowledge generation and learning across partners; (ii) (pre-)development, activities that occur before and during project initiation to establish a shared mission and ways of working; (iii) reflection and refinement to evaluate and improve processes and results, responding to emergent information and priorities as an ongoing phase; (iv) conceptualization to develop goals and the study approach by combining diverse knowledge; (v) investigation to conduct the research; (vi) implementation to use new knowledge to solve societal problems. The model includes linear and cyclical processes that may cycle back to project development. Our new model will support transdisciplinary research teams and their partners by detailing the necessary ingredients to conduct such research and achieve health impact.
In the new Bachelor-level course Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems) , a part of ETH Zurich’s Environmental Sciences Bachelor’s programme, we teach students to zoom in on elements of practice (design thinking) and to zoom out on the whole system (systems thinking). Participants take stakeholders’ interests and needs into account and prepare possible measures, thus developing transformation knowledge and anticipating their future role as transdisciplinary sustainability scientists. Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems) is a Bachelor-level course that carries on a long tradition of transdisciplinary (td) case studies in the Environ mental Sciences curriculum at ETH Zurich. Td case studies introduce students to key features of transdisciplinarity. Two corres ponding learning goals of the case studies are 1. to not only analyse problems, but to also suggest solutions, and 2. to take the complexity of the tackled socio-ecological system into account. In the new course we address both learning goals by integrating systems and design thinking. We present this approach in detail to show how features of transdisciplinarity are transferred to learning contexts. We compare it to the approaches of other td case studies by asking how each interprets and addresses the two learning goals. The comparison shows that the case study approaches implicitly impart different ideas about how a td environmental scientist should support societal problem solving. A key difference to previous approach es is that the new course asks students to enter deeply into the world of practice and the stakeholders’ divergent needs.
Human health and wellbeing and the health of the biosphere are inextricably linked. The state of Earth’s life-support systems, including freshwater, oceans, land, biodiversity, atmosphere, and climate, affect human health. At the same time, human activities are adversely affecting natural systems. This review paper is the outcome of an interdisciplinary workshop under the auspices of the Future Earth Health Knowledge Action Network (Health KAN). It outlines a research agenda to address cross-cutting knowledge gaps to further understanding and management of the health risks of these global environmental changes through an expert consultation and review process. The research agenda has four main themes: (1) risk identification and management (including related to water, hygiene, sanitation, and waste management); food production and consumption; oceans; and extreme weather events and climate change. (2) Strengthening climate-resilient health systems; (3) Monitoring, surveillance, and evaluation; and (4) risk communication. Research approaches need to be transdisciplinary, multi-scalar, inclusive, equitable, and broadly communicated. Promoting resilient and sustainable development are critical for achieving human and planetary health.
Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent.
In Communication Science, international scholarly communication and collaboration practice still remain unknown territory. Therefore, a systematic review of the state of the art on scholarly communication practice in international research collaborations (IRCs) was carried out that included a broad spectrum of disciplines and research fields such as Communication Science, Business and Management Studies, Sociology, science studies, and the science of team science. A sample of 168 contributions focusing on IRCs were identified. The paper outlines focus and methodological designs of those contributions, provides insights into the composition of the observed IRCs, summarizes the perspectives of the disciplines and research fields, presents the insights into communication structures and processes in IRCs, and discusses the aspect of team diversity, which some studies indicate as relevant for communication practice in IRCs. Overall, research largely focuses on the structural dimension of communication, while empirical analyses on the actual communication processes among scientists in IRCs are still rare. Secondly, research is missing on how team complexity is dealt with in IRCs and what impact it has on collaboration processes and success. A third and fourth research gap are identified regarding the use of a joint collaboration language and the communication processes in Social Sciences and Humanities. Future research should broaden its analytical focus to fill those gaps. This would provide important insights from an epistemological and a practical perspective, by offering the foundation for the development of guidelines and toolkits for future IRCs, thus contributing to the success of such forms of research and knowledge creation.
Abstract The participation of practitioners in transdisciplinary sustainability research has been heralded as a promising tool for producing ‘robust’ knowledge and engendering societal transformations. Although transdisciplinary approaches have been advanced as an effective avenue for generating knowledge positioned to question and transform an unsustainable status quo, the political and power dimensions inherent to such research have hardly been discussed. In this article, we scrutinise the constitution of participation in transdisciplinary research through a power lens. Guided by social theories of power and a relational understanding of participation, we analyse how diverse actors equipped with a variety of material and ideational sources wield power over the subjects, objects, and procedures of participation. We applied a qualitative meta-analysis of five transdisciplinary projects from a major German research funding programme in the field of sustainability to unveil the ways in which the funding body, researchers, and practitioners exercise instrumental, structural, and discursive power over (i) actor selection and (re-)positioning, (ii) agenda setting, and (iii) rule setting. We found that researchers primarily exert instrumental power over these three elements of participation, whereas practitioners as well as the funding body wield primarily structural and discursive power. By elucidating tacit and hidden power dynamics shaping participation in transdisciplinary research, this article provides a basis for improving process design and implementation as well as developing targeted funding instruments. The conclusions also provide insights into barriers of participatory agenda setting in research practice and governance.
Approximately 1 billion people currently live in informal settlements, primarily in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries. Informal settlements are defined by poor-quality houses or shacks built outside formal laws and regulations. Most informal settlements lack piped water or adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, and public services. Many are on dangerous sites because their inhabitants have a higher chance of avoiding eviction. This paper considers how to build resilience to the impacts of climate change in informal settlements. It focuses on informal settlements in cities in low- and middle-income countries and how these concentrate at-risk populations. This paper also reviews what is being done to address climate resilience in informal settlements. In particular, community- and city-government-led measures to upgrade settlements can enhance resilience to climate-change risks and serve vulnerable groups. It also discusses how the barriers to greater scale and effectiveness can be overcome, including with synergies with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge is widely credited with producing knowledge that can contribute to sustainability transformations, but there is little empirical evidence showing to what extent and through what mechanisms it is actually advancing sustainability. This article analyses how 31 transdisciplinary projects conceptualised the link between transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge and sustainability transformations , and as part of an institutional learning process explores what experiences projects garnered while implementing their theories of change. The research identified three generic conceptualisations of impact generation mechanisms: a) promoting systems, target, and transformation knowledge for more informed and equitable decision-making, b) fostering social learning for collective action, and c) enhancing competences for reflective leadership. It also identified seven different strategies through which the studied projects implemented these three generic mechanisms to induce sustainability transformations. Exploring potentials and limitations of the different mechanisms, the article concludes that the question is not which mechanisms or strategies are better than others, but in what situation and combination they might be most promising.
Background:
Three large new trials of unprecedented scale and cost, which included novel factorial designs, have found no effect of basic water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions on childhood stunting, and only mixed effects on childhood diarrhea. Arriving at the inception of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and the bold new target of safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030, these results warrant the attention of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners.
Main body:
Here we report the conclusions of an expert meeting convened by the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss these findings, and present five key consensus messages as a basis for wider discussion and debate in the WASH and nutrition sectors. We judge these trials to have high internal validity, constituting good evidence that these specific interventions had no effect on childhood linear growth, and mixed effects on childhood diarrhea. These results suggest that, in settings such as these, more comprehensive or ambitious WASH interventions may be needed to achieve a major impact on child health.
Conclusion:
These results are important because such basic interventions are often deployed in low-income rural settings with the expectation of improving child health, although this is rarely the sole justification. Our view is that these three new trials do not show that WASH in general cannot influence child linear growth, but they do demonstrate that these specific interventions had no influence in settings where stunting remains an important public health challenge. We support a call for transformative WASH, in so much as it encapsulates the guiding principle that - in any context - a comprehensive package of WASH interventions is needed that is tailored to address the local exposure landscape and enteric disease burden.
We consider action research as a form of deliberative policy analysis. This analysis explores a “reconstruction clinic” in which stakeholders and public officials engaged memories, hopes and obligations as they sought to resolve controversies over details of policy implementation. We ask how institutional design shaped participants’ reflective and deliberative progress. Reflection in action can prompt not only changes in cognitive frames, but new behavioural capacities for action. Deliberative practices can shape new relationships between parties through the work of apology, recognition, appreciation, and emergent collaboration.
1. Drawing on seminal work by the late Donella Meadows, we propose a leverage points perspective as a hitherto under‐recognized heuristic and practical tool for sustainability science. A leverage points perspective focuses on places to intervene in complex systems to bring about transformative change.
2. A leverage points perspective recognizes increasingly influential leverage points relating to changes in parameters, feedbacks, system design and the intent encapsulated by a given system. We discuss four key advantages of a leverage points perspective.
3. First advantage: A leverage points perspective can bridge causal and teleological explanations of system change – that is, change is seen to arise from variables influencing one another, but also from how human intent shapes the trajectory of a system.
4. Second advantage: A leverage points perspective explicitly recognizes influential, ‘deep’ leverage points – places at which interventions are difficult but likely to yield truly transformative change.
5. Third advantage: A leverage points perspective enables the examination of interactions between shallow and deep system changes – sometimes, relatively superficial interventions may pave the way for deeper changes, while at other times, deeper changes may be required for superficial interventions to work.
6. Fourth advantage: A leverage points perspective can function as a methodological boundary object – that is, providing a common entry point for academics from different disciplines and other societal stakeholders to work together.
7. Drawing on these strengths could initiate a new stream of sustainability studies, and may yield both practical and theoretical advances.
Despite the normative nature of sustainability, values and their role in sustainability transformations are often discussed in vague terms, and when concrete conceptualizations exist, they widely differ across fields of application. To provide guidance for navigating the complexity arising from the various conceptualizations and operationalization of values, here, we differentiate four general perspectives of how and where values are important for transformation related sustainability science. The first perspective, surfacing implicit values, revolves around critical reflection on normative assumptions in scientific practices. Sustainability transformations concern fundamental ethical questions and are unavoidably influenced by assumptions sustainability scientists hold in their interactions with society. The second perspective, negotiating values, is related to the values held by different actors in group decision processes. Developing and implementing solution options to sustainability problems requires multiple values to be accounted for in order to increase civic participation and social legitimacy. The third perspective, eliciting values, focuses on the ascription of values to particular objects or choices related to specific sustainability challenges, for example, valuations of nature. The fourth perspective, transforming through values, highlights the dynamic nature and transformational potential of values. Value change is complex but possible, and may generate systemic shifts in patterns of human behaviours. Explicit recognition of these four interconnected values perspectives can help sustainability scientists to: (1) move beyond general discussions implying that values matter; (2) gain an awareness of the positionality of one’s own values perspective when undertaking values related sustainability research; and (3) reflect on the operationalizations of values in different contexts.
This paper describes the development, conceptualization, and implementation of a transdisciplinary research pilot, the aim of which is to understand how human and planetary health could become a priority for those who control the urban development process. Key challenges include a significant dislocation between academia and the real world, alongside systemic failures in valuation and assessment mechanisms. The National Institutes of Health four‐phase model of transdisciplinary team‐based research is drawn on and adapted to reflect on what has worked well and what has not operationally. Results underscore the need for experienced academics open to new collaborations and ways of working; clarity of leadership without compromising exploration; clarification of the poorly understood “impacts interface” and navigation toward effective real world impact; acknowledgement of the additional time and resource required for transdisciplinary research and “nonacademic” researchers. Having practitioner‐researchers as part of the research leadership team requires rigourous reflective practice and effective management, but it can also ensure breadth in transdisciplinary outlook as well as constant course correction toward real‐world impact. It is important for the research community to understand better the opportunities and limitations provided by knowledge intermediaries in terms of function, specialism, and experience.
Transdisciplinarity is not a new science per se, but a new methodology for doing science with society. A particular challenge in doing science with society is the engagement with non-academic actors to enable joint problem formulation, analysis and transformation. How this is achieved differs between contexts. The premise of this paper is that transdisciplinary research (TDR) methodologies designed for developed world contexts cannot merely be replicated and transferred to developing world contexts. Thus a new approach is needed for conducting TDR in contexts characterised by high levels of complexity, conflict and social fluidity. To that end, this paper introduces a new approach to TDR titled emergent transdisciplinary design research (ETDR). A core element of this approach is that the research process is designed as it unfolds, that is, it transforms as it emerges from and within the fluid context. The ETDR outlined in this paper emerged through a case study in the informal settlement (slum) of Enkanini in Stellenbosch, South Africa. This case study demonstrates the context from and within which the ETDR approach and identifies a set of guiding logics that can be used to guide ETDR approaches in other contexts. The study demonstrates that the new logics and guiding principles were not simply derived from the TDR literature, but rather emerged from constant interacting dynamics between theory and practice. Learning how to co-design the research process through co-producing transformative knowledge and then implementing strategic interventions to bring about incremental social change is key to theory development in ways that are informed by local contextual dynamics. There are, however, risks when undertaking such TDR processes such as under-valuing disciplinary knowledge, transferring risks onto a society, and suppressing ‘truth-to-power’.
An increasing number of research programs seek to support adaptation to climate change through the engagement of large-scale transdisciplinary networks that span countries and continents. While transdisciplinary research processes have been a topic of reflection, practice and refinement for some time, these trends now mean that the global change research community needs to reflect and learn how to pursue collaborative research on a large scale. This paper shares insights from a seven-year climate change adaptation research program that supported collaboration between more than 450 researchers and practitioners across four consortia and seventeen countries. The experience confirms the importance of attention to careful design for transdisciplinary collaboration, but also highlights that this alone is not enough. The success of well-designed transdisciplinary research processes is also strongly influenced by relational and systemic features of collaborative relationships. Relational features include inter-personal trust, mutual respect, and leadership styles, while systemic features include legal partnership agreements, power asymmetries between partners, and institutional values and cultures. In the new arena of large-scale collaborative science efforts, enablers of transdisciplinary collaboration include dedicated project coordinators, leaders at multiple levels and the availability of small amounts of flexible funds to enable nimble responses to opportunities and unexpected collaborations.
Since 2000, researchers and practitioners have shown increased interest in humility. This construct has been studied in disciplines ranging from organizational behaviour to positive psychology, culminating in a wealth of information that can now be analysed and reviewed through the lens of humility in organizations. This review begins by reflecting on existing conceptualizations of humility and presenting a summary of findings that reflects a greater consensus in definitional work than some researchers may realize. It then considers the progress that has been made in measuring humility by specifying key measurement strategies. It next synthesizes existing empirical findings on humility to illuminate the uniqueness of the construct. It also shows that researchers have focused on studying dependent variables that exist at multiple organizational levels and that largely comprise pro-social and relational variables, emotional well-being, and learning and performance outcomes. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research.
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.
Keywords: Stakeholder collaborations, Transdisciplinary research, Co-production of knowledge, Evaluation of stakeholder interaction designs
Interviews have been a key primary data source for research published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This tutorial aims to walk readers through the designing and execution of interview-based empirical research on consumers and consumption.
The main argument in this article is that methodologies rooted in African philosophies, worldviews, and history, bring to the academic discourse, alternative ways of conducting research. Such methodologies question academic and methodological imperialism, and bring to the centre problem and solution-driven research agendas. The methodologies epitomise indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) as a body of thought that embraces all knowledge systems, and legitimise ILK holders, practitioners, and communities as scholars and authors of what they know and how it can be known. The article gives examples of how mainstream methodologies based on European/Western paradigms marginalise other knowledge systems. It illustrates the contested process of integrating academic and ILK. It further discusses the philosophical foundations of methodologies rooted in African cultures and how these methodologies can inform a decolonisation and indigenisation of sustainability science and transdisciplinary research.
Today, there is an increasing need for researchers to demonstrate the practical value their research can generate for society. Over the past decade, experts in transdisciplinary research have developed numerous principles, methods, and tools for making research more societally relevant. If researchers are unfamiliar with transdisciplinary research, they may miss opportunities to adapt these principles and tools to their research projects. We are developing a 10-step approach for joint use by transdisciplinarity experts and researchers about how to best align their research projects with the requirements of transdisciplinarity. We have successfully applied this approach in numerous workshops, summer schools, and seminars at ETH Zurich and beyond. Ten questions guide discussions between transdisciplinarity experts and researchers around research issues, identify and review the societal problems addressed, identify relevant actors and disciplines, and clarify the purpose and form of the inter - action with them. The feedback we have obtained clearly indicates that the 10-step approach is a very useful tool: It provides a systematic procedure for thinking through ways to better link research to societal problem solving.
Increasingly, ‘co-design’ is a key concept and approach in global change and sustainability research, in the scholarship on science–policy interactions, and an expressed expectation in research programs and initiatives. This paper situates co-design and then synthesizes insights from real-life experiences of co-developing research projects in this Special Issue. It highlights common co-design elements (parameters and considerations of co-design and purpose-driven engagement activities); discusses challenges experienced in co-design and then emphasizes a range of rarely articulated benefits of co-design for both researchers, societal partners and the work they aim to do together. The paper summarizes some of the knowledge gains on social transformation to sustainability from the co-design phase and concludes that co-design as a process is an agent of transformation itself.
The man who has spent the past three decades doing more than anyone to deny Indonesians the right to elect their leaders has now been elected Indonesia's leader. Riding the coattails and benefiting from the brazen interventions of Joko Widodo, the wildly popular outgoing president, Prabowo Subianto has completed his quarter-century-long political rehabilitation from Indonesia's most notorious human-rights abuser to the world's third-largest democracy's commander-in-chief. The murky circumstances of Prabowo's electoral landslide, combined with the likely prospect that he will rule effectively unopposed, seem certain to accelerate recent processes of democratic erosion in the world's largest Muslim-majority country.
Introduction: Deepening global inequalities in the health impacts of climate change highlight the need for transformative solutions through international and transdisciplinary collaborations. While the emerging field of planetary health provides a unique lens for recognizing interlinkages across a broader range of knowledge systems, a deeper understanding is needed about the processes through which such knowledge systems can be developed and integrated. Existing transdisciplinarity scholarship offers useful concepts of integration across boundaries; however, such understanding predominantly reflects the perspectives of Global North academic stakeholders, conceivably due to systemic power imbalance as an enduring colonial legacy. This study aims to identify opportunities for learning from the experiences of Global South stakeholders in transdisciplinary collaboration. Methods: We empirically explore the process of transdisciplinary collaboration in a case study of a large-scale planetary health research project. Through multi-method thematic analysis, this study seeks to understand Global South stakeholders’ contributions, motivations, and interactions on transdisciplinary collaboration, through their experiences in the case study context. Results & Discussion: The study found that Global South stakeholders contributed a plethora of disciplinary and non-disciplinary knowledge and other resources, guided by strong cultural inclinations for collaboration. The opening up of boundary spaces was key to multi-directional knowledge integration. Analysis revealed concepts of interdependence and complementarity towards a common vision, and provides insight into stakeholders’ motivations for initial and continuing engagement. Conclusion: Recognizing interdependence provides strong motivation for transdisciplinary collaboration and can help revalorize contributions from historically disadvantaged knowledge systems and stakeholders.
The paper intends to contribute to an international understanding of transdiciplinarity (TD) from the perspective of Latin America. The basic argument is that TD is a research practice that can foster knowledge democracy within the framework of decoloniality as a social and academic praxis. The first part of the paper highlights some historical and contemporary practices that are important to shape a decolonizing approach to transdisciplinarity. The second section discusses issues involved in the development of transdisciplinary political, contextual and institutional conditions, besides the researcher’s personal and professional commitment and preparedness.
There is a significant challenge in global health and development research that pivots on the difficulties of delivering (cost-)effective treatments or interventions that are scalable and are transferable across settings. That is, how does one deliver “true effects”, proven treatments, into new settings? This is often addressed in pragmatic trials or implementation research in which one makes adjustments to the delivery of the treatment to ensure that it works here and there. In this critical analytical review, we argue that the approach mis-characterises the cause-effect relationship and fails to recognise the local, highly contextual nature of what it means to say an intervention “works”. We use an ongoing randomised controlled trial (RCT)—an informal settlement redevelopment intervention in Indonesia and Fiji to reduce human exposure to pathogenic faecal contamination—as a vehicle for exploring the ideas and implications of identifying interventions that work in global health and development. We describe the highly contextualised features of the research and the challenges these would pose in attempts to generalise the results. In other words, we detail that which is frequently elided from most RCTs. As our critical lens, we us the work of American philosopher, Nancy Cartwright, who argued that research produces dappled regions of causal insights—lacunae against a backdrop of causal ignorance. Rather than learn about a relationship between a treatment and an outcome, we learn that in the right sort of context, a treatment reliably produces a particular outcome. Moving a treatment from here to there becomes, therefore, something of an engineering exercise to ensure the right factors (or “shields”) are in place so the cause-effect is manifest. As a consequence, one cannot assume that comparative effectiveness or cost-effectiveness would be maintained.
In recent decades, transdisciplinary research has been increasingly recognised as necessary to produce solutions for sustainable development; however, implementation challenges remain. The emerging field of planetary health offers a unique lens to guide a new synthesis of perspectives, recognising interlinkages between environmental and human health, and interdependence across global development contexts, that is, at the environment‐health‐development nexus. This broad, practice‐based literature review consolidates learnings from previous transdisciplinary research across these diverse yet interrelated fields, and aims to deepen understanding of, and identify opportunities for, enabling collaborative practice. This review found structural, relational, and individual factors enabling and constraining collaboration. Local research contexts and academia's disciplinary traditions posed structural constraints that required relational efforts at the project, organisational and individual levels to address. This analysis revealed strategic opportunities for funding programs and researcher training that can be leveraged to increase capacity for relational work, further enabling collaboration in transdisciplinary research.
The sustainability transitions research network research agenda reflects the impressive growth and diversity of sustainability transitions scholarship, premised on an ethos of interdisciplinarity and openness to other research traditions and informed by increasingly diverse empirical case studies. Nonetheless, an inclination to integrate concepts, ideas and logics from elsewhere into foundational core sustainability transitions research (STR) frameworks (e.g. Multi-Level Perspective, Technological Innovation Systems) can be observed. This potentially constrains the development of new concepts, ideas and logics within transition research. We therefore stress the importance of theoretical pluralism and in particular of starting the analysis of transition processes from within alternative frameworks and working through transition processes with those frameworks on their own terms. The risks and opportunities of more radical theoretical pluralism in STR are considered, and preliminary examples are presented from Foucauldian and post/decolonial traditions.
Modern energy systems have tended towards centralized control by states, and national and multinational energy companies. This implicates the power of elites in realizing low-carbon transitions. In particular, low-carbon transitions can create, perpetuate, challenge, or entrench the power of elites. Using a critical lens that draws from geography, political science, innovation studies, and social justice theory (among others), this article explores the ways in which transitions can exacerbate, reconfigure or be shaped by “elite power.” It does so by offering a navigational approach that surveys a broad collection of diverse literatures on power. It begins by conceptualizing power across a range of academic disciplines, envisioning power as involving both agents (corrective influence) and structures (pervasive influence). It then elaborates different types of power and the interrelationship between different sources of power, with a specific focus on elites, including conceptualizing elite power, resisting elite power, and power frameworks. The Review then examines scholarship relevant to elite power in low-carbon transitions—including the multi-level perspective, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Anthony Giddens, Karl Marx, and other contextual approaches—before offering future research directions. The Review concludes that the power relations inherent in low-carbon transitions are asymmetrical but promisingly unstable. By better grappling with power analytically, descriptively, and even normatively, socially just and sustainable energy futures become not only more desirable but also more possible.
Global health policies direct health services to improve access and health outcomes of people who are ‘hardly reached’ by services. The institutionalised nature of health services with associated professional and organisational boundaries create ongoing challenges to achieving this policy aim. We present an approach to this challenge by exploring how health services can tap into the existing boundary spanning activities of community members we term as ‘community connectors’ who undertake valuable boundary work within the community to include people who are hardly reached. We address the research questions: what are the behaviours and characteristics of community connectors?; to what extent are they motivated to help out with health?; and how can health service personnel identify community connectors? We conducted an instrumental case study during 2017 in Victoria, Australia in the catchment area of a rural health service. Interviews with 17 key informants and eight staff members led to a further 15 interviews with community connectors. We identified the three key roles of ‘noticer and responder’, ‘connector’ and ‘provider’ that make connectors a valuable asset for health services. Community connectors seek opportunities to negotiate new boundaries with health services that support their boundary spanning with people hardly reached and also enable health services to transgress their own boundaries and access people who are hardly reached. We conclude that by paying attention to their own production, maintenance and transgression of boundaries, health services can apply this approach, noting that the local and iterative nature of identifying community connectors means that each cohort of community connectors will be unique as determined by local boundaries and relationships.
Informal settlements or slums dominate the urban landscape and in 2016 were the home to almost 900 million people. Global health is now slum health. The determinants of health for slum dwellers are multi-factorial and can vary from country to country and even within the same city. This chapter reviews the definitions of informal settlements or slums and highlights the key drivers of health, disease and well-being in urban informal settlements, including: spatial segregation, insecure residential status, poverty and employment, housing structural quality, water and sanitation, energy, transport, violence, climate change and services. We highlight the evidence supporting the links between these key factors and infectious and non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The chapter also links the health issues facing informal settlements with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how slum upgrading—a community-based process that aims to improve built and social environments, as well as economic and social conditions in slums—can be a key approach for improving the health of those living in informal settlements. We suggest that multiple features of the upgrading process, including community engagement, women’s empowerment, shelter and infrastructure improvements, tenure security, political recognition, and enhanced social and health care services, can combine to reduce the disease burden and premature mortality so frequently experienced by those living in informal settlements.
Democracy and opposition are supposed to go hand in hand. Opposition did not emerge as automatically as expected after Indonesia democratized, however, because presidents shared power much more widely than expected. The result has been what I call party cartelization, Indonesian-style. This differs significantly from canonical cases of party cartelization in Europe. Yet it exhibits the same troubling outcome for democratic accountability: the stunted development of a clearly identifiable party opposition. Since the advent of direct presidential elections in 2004, Indonesian democratic competition has unsurprisingly assumed somewhat more of a government vs. opposition cast. But this shift has arisen more from contingent failures of elite bargaining than from any decisive change in the power-sharing game. So long as Indonesia's presidents consider it strategically advantageous to share power with any party that declares its support, opposition will remain difficult to identify and vulnerable to being extinguished entirely in the world's largest emerging democracy.
Interdisciplinarity and collaboration are keywords for change in the 21st century. Both, however, face challenges across the entire academic system, from administrative policies and budget formulas to disciplinary cultures of research and education. This Research Note is the first synthesis of findings from literature and models for practices and policies that recognize interdisciplinary and collaborative work in the promotion and tenure (P&T) process, brought together in a table of recommendations. Creating a culture of reward requires consistency, alignment, and comprehensiveness at all stages and levels of evaluation, from defining expectations in the initial appointment to preparing individual candidates’ dossiers to incorporating appropriate criteria. Several organizations have led the way in formulating recommendations for recognizing interdisciplinary and collaborative work. Professional societies and academic administrators at local levels are also providing leadership. Institution-wide policies are rare though do exist. More often individual units are issuing guidelines for appropriate evaluation. A number of studies have also called for widening definition of what counts for consideration, including innovative, applied, and commercial research and development. The overriding lesson to emerge is the importance of a systematic and informed approach.
Global health research partnerships are increasingly taking the form of consortia that conduct programs of research in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). An ethical framework has been developed that describes how the governance of consortia comprised of institutions from high-income countries and LMICs should be structured to promote health equity. It encompasses initial guidance for sharing sovereignty in consortia decision-making and sharing consortia resources. This paper describes a first effort to examine whether and how consortia can uphold that guidance. Case study research was undertaken with the Future Health Systems consortium, which is funded by the UK Department for International Development and performs research to improve health service delivery for the poor in Bangladesh, China, India, and Uganda. Data were thematically analysed and revealed that proposed ethical requirements for sharing sovereignty and sharing resources are largely upheld by Future Health Systems. Facilitating factors included having a decentralised governance model, LMIC partners with good research capacity, and firm budgets. Higher labour costs in the US and UK and the Department for International Development's policy of allocating funds to consortia on a reimbursement basis prevented full alignment with guidance on sharing resources. The lessons described in this paper can assist other consortia to more systematically link their governance policy and practice to the promotion of health equity.
Interdisciplinary research is often essential to develop the integrated systems understanding needed to manage complex environmental issues that are faced by decision-makers world-wide. The scientific, institutional and funding challenges to interdisciplinary research have been the subject of considerable discussion. Funders remain willing to support such research and to evaluate its impact. In this paper, we develop and apply a set of review concepts to systematically evaluate a large interdisciplinary research project. The project was conducted at a national research organisation that seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary integration. We categorise evaluation concepts as process- and outcome-related and propose five practical management interventions to bridge the concepts to improve interdisciplinary integration. These management interventions are: agree on a conceptual model, incorporate independent review, support synthesisers, foster intra-project communication, and build-in organisational learning. We end with reflections on lessons for the structure of research organisations and of the research team to develop effective interdisciplinary research as well as providing a set of recommendations for interdisciplinary research funders.