Conference Agenda

In an age of ‘permacrisis’ we are faced with a range of vastly complex problems, such as how to provide energy, transport and food in a socially just fashion without compromising planetary or public health. Correspondingly, it is now commonplace for research projects – shaped by the funding landscape in which they are situated – to require inter- or transdisciplinary collaboration, in an attempt to reflect the complexity of the issues they are designed to address.

Transdisciplinarity can be clearly beneficial for such research on the ‘grand challenges’ of the Anthropocene. Our argument in this paper, however, is that transdisciplinary research does not automatically yield more insightful and applicable results than disciplinary approaches. Transdisciplinarity cannot simply be deployed to answer complex, multifaceted research problems. Instead, it requires clear, project-specific implementation: a process that raises a number of ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges.

The empirical core of our paper is a set of vignettes from a transdisciplinary research project on transitions to a sustainable Dutch food system. We focus in particular on two key aspects of this work. First, the interaction between food system modelling and qualitative sociological research, which - despite a comparable theoretical emphasis on emergence and complexity - used a range of divergent epistemologies, datasets, and timelines in order to answer shared research questions. Second, the ways in which these different approaches sought to understand possible futures of the Dutch food system, based on particular methodologies of anticipation.

We then reflect on the implications of these findings for transdisciplinary work on sustainability transformations. We outline how different disciplinary approaches can (1) inform one another, such as through integrating data or theories from one approach into another; (2) be used in parallel, where inferences can be made across insights from each discipline without combining approaches during the main research phases; and (3) where fundamental differences in assumptions and approaches entail that careful consideration must be undertaken to determine whether integration or joint use is truly the most effective approach. We argue that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to combining disciplines in a given project, especially when the work goes beyond interdisciplinary to include societal partners in transdisciplinary efforts. Accordingly, we discuss strategies for research practitioners seeking to create an ecosystem of approaches, in order to best utilize them both separately and jointly in addressing grand challenges.

Ambiguity, or the existence of multiple valid interpretations, is widely recognized as an intrinsic aspect of addressing complex sustainability challenges, and is particularly relevant for the plural and systemic nature of sustainability transformations. Nevertheless, in the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research, ambiguity is often an ‘elephant in the room’ to be either ignored or reduced rather than explicitly mobilized. These responses to ambiguity pose risks to the salience and legitimacy of the research outcomes by masking the pluralism of real-world sustainability challenges and the ways in which research renders certain frames visible or invisible. Critical systems thinking (CST) grew out of the efforts of operational researchers to develop appreciation of both theoretical and practical aspects of ambiguity. By adapting from key concepts, frameworks, and lessons from CST literature and case study reflections, this perspective paper aims to 1) establish a holistic and operational conceptualization of ambiguity and 2) provide recommendations for how sustainability scientists can operationalize ambiguity as a valuable means of addressing sustainability challenges. We conceptualize ambiguity as an emergent feature of the simultaneous and interacting boundary processes associated with being, knowing, and intervening in complex systems. This characterization acknowledges the boundary of a researcher’s subjective orientation and its influence on how ambiguity is exposed and mediated (being), characterizes knowledge as produced through the process of making boundary judgments, generating a partial, contextual, and provisional frame (knowing), and situates a researcher as part of the complexity they seek to interpret, rendering any boundary process as a form of intervention that reinforces or marginalizes certain frames (intervening). We provide two overarching recommendations for sustainability science to operationalize ambiguity. First, rather than attempting to resolve ambiguity through integration under any single meta-theory, sustainability researchers should focus attention on the potential for and consequences of theoretical incommensurability and discordant pluralism. Second, we suggest the need to nurture the reflexive capacities of transdisciplinary researchers to navigate persistent ambiguity. We offer the novel framework of ‘reflexive boundary critique’ to help do so, which guides critical reflection on all three boundary processes associated with ambiguity (i.e., being, knowing, intervening), thereby embedding reflexivity into all stages of the research process. In sum, our findings can help sustainability researchers give shape to and embrace ambiguity as a fundamental part of rigorous transdisciplinary research, in particular that which aims to contribute to sustainability transformation.

The planetary crisis poses a fundamental question for universities, in which the relationship between academia and society should be reconsidered. A key dimension to solving this puzzle lies in reinventing our educational practices. Current educational formats are often still targeted at learning about change and not about actively positioning in societal change. This tendency is reinforced by ‘siloed’ organization of education into individual courses, and by focusing on just one group of learners: students in their initial education. With the interdisciplinary action research project [citation removed to annonymize abstract], we aim to take up this challenge. Informed by insights from pedagogy, futuring and transdisciplinarity we crafted two experiments in which Master students engaged with societal changemaking in an immersive way.

In [citation removed to annonymize abstract], 16 masters' students and 22 societal practitioners engaged for 2,5 months with a societal issue: the political deadlocks in the rural Netherlands. They engaged with utopia as method to imagine societal change, and with the support of theatre makers they created an immersive event for 100 visitors. In the other experiment, [citation removed to annonymize abstract], 6 master’s students and 4 societal practitioners reflected on their personal and emotional experiences when aiming for change. Through an emergent futuring process, they collaboratively defined the group’s creative potential. Furthermore, the students are writing their master’s theses in related topics, by establishing reciprocal relationships with society.

The following preliminary insights emerged from our experiments. A striking difference was found in the energy in the classrooms, varying between a high paced and workload, and a rehearsal of showing care and slowing down. Additionally, the courses departed from different problem statements: either personal struggles or externally defined societal issues. Furthermore, different sources of meaning-making, from expert knowledge to the experiential (emotional and embodied), were given prevalence. Thereby, the courses differed in the way they suggested that students can make a change in society. Correspondingly, the students’ reported learning outcomes varied, for instance in their sense of agency and the types of changemaking they valued. Therefore, our research raises awareness of a bandwidth for possible pedagogical designs within the search for transdisciplinary and hopeful education amidst a planetary crisis. Whilst inviting further research, we don’t aim for a silver bullet: we instead argue such bandwidths of pedagogies are to be considered carefully when designing context specific pedagogies for sustainable societal change.

Complex phenomena of our time such as climate change or more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic can neither be comprehensively understood nor properly addressed by employing a single disciplinary or sectoral perspective. For this reason, more and more inter- and transdisciplinary (ITD) initiatives are on the rise, intending to open up the silo-like production and organization of knowledge, and to advance the integration of different fields of expertise within academia but also across science, policy and practice. While the need for ITD endeavors also has increasingly been acknowledged by research institutions, funding organizations and public authorities, also reflected in an increase of funding opportunities, the question remains to what extent these conditions suffice for making ITD integration really happen in practice. This paper embraces a holistic view on ITD integration by presenting both an analytical framework and empirical insights derived through interviews, participant observation and workshops with both leaders and members of three ITD initiatives in Switzerland. The framework is based in critical realist reasoning and empirics, and distinguishes contextual conditions of integration at different structural levels, while also acknowledging the power of actors to shape integration. The paper thereby intends to help diagnosing where different fields of tension come from, and how they are interrelated and impact ITD integration. We conclude by discussing entry points for action for several actors interested in making sure that ITD initiatives can unfold their full integration potential in practice.