Latest contribution
Tenth annual review
By Gabriele Bammer.
This is the tenth annual “state of the blog” review.
What are the major achievements of i2Insights for 2025? What have been the main themes of the contributions made? How do these reflect the aims of i2Insights?
This is the last post for 2025. We’ll be back on January 13, 2026 and already have a number of great contributions to start the new year.
Achievements
We celebrated three major achievements in 2025.
1. Our 10th anniversary
In November i2Insights marked its 10th birthday as a global, comprehensive, living toolkit.
Recent contributions
Six key steps for stakeholder engagement
By Khara Grieger, Kimberly Bourne, Alison Deviney and Nourou Barry.
2. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
3. Alison Deviney (biography)
4. Nourou Barry (biography)
How can you systematically plan stakeholder engagement? What are the key issues that need to be considered? What guiding questions can help?
STEP 1: Identify and clarify engagement goals
Spend time at the beginning of the engagement process to clearly identify why you are engaging with stakeholders. Common goals include sharing knowledge or information; collecting insights, perspectives, or information from stakeholders; and co-creating or co-designing solutions. Other potential goals may include building trust and improving transparency, enhancing collaborations and partnerships, and improving the implementation of decisions.
Your ability to engage will depend on the time and resources available.
Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map
By Katie Moon.
In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?
In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.
i2Insights@10years: Strengthening a global, comprehensive, living toolkit for tackling complex problems
By Gabriele Bammer.
How can i2Insights best capitalise on its first ten years and the wealth of resources contributed from around the world? How can you contribute to strengthening the i2Insights toolkit?
On 25 November 2025, i2Insights celebrates its 10th birthday as a toolkit to support researchers and educators tackling complex societal and environmental problems, specifically providing tools to understand and address complexity. It sets out to be:
- global, with contributions from around the world
- comprehensive, tackling all aspects of addressing complex problems
- living, continuing to grow and stay up-to-date.
Stories of self, us, and now: A tool for navigating uncertainty
By Gemma Jiang, Alexis Niki, Darius Melvin and Sarah Hind.
2. Alexis Niki (biography)
3. Darius Melvin (biography)
4. Sarah Hind (biography)
In times of uncertainty, especially when the role of research, as well as research funding are under threat, how can research teams effectively respond? How can storytelling help?
We show how Marshall Ganz’s (2009) Stories of Self, Us, and Now framework can move groups from individual experiences of uncertainty (Self) to shared meaning (Us), and toward concrete action steps (Now).
Workshop Context
Leadership team members from a large transdisciplinary, cross-institutional research center, entering the fifth (final) year of their funding cycle, partnered with an external team science expert
Highlighted contributions
Adaptive skilling
By Seema Purushothaman
How can tribal societies forge a healthy equilibrium wherein short-term gains in livelihoods can be achieved without permanent loss in quality and security of tribal life? Are there lessons beyond the developmental journeys of the marginalised to how societies can craft informed, deliberative and adaptive mechanisms to generate blended knowledge that links diverse systems of learning and practice?
We suggest that the answer lies in adaptive skilling (Purushothaman et al., 2022).
What is adaptive skilling?
The process of adaptive skilling is more than mere avoidance of deskilling or just ensuring the continuity of individual and social learning. It also differs from a ‘reskilling’ approach that brings back traditional skills or brings in alien and unsustainable skills.
Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum
By Gabriele Bammer
What can researchers interested in stakeholder engagement learn from two classic frameworks on citizen involvement in government decision making – Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 (International Association for Public Participation) spectrum of public participation?
Arnstein’s ladder
Sherry Arnstein (1969) developed an eight-rung ladder, shown in the figure below, to illustrate that there are significant gradations of citizen participation in government decision making.
The two bottom rungs are manipulation and therapy. Manipulation refers to putting citizens on “rubberstamp advisory committees or advisory boards” (p. 218) to “educate” them or engineer their support. Therapy involves changing the citizen view of the problem.
Three narratives describing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers
By Laura Norton, Giulia Sonetti and Mauro Sarrica
2. Giulia Sonetti (biography)
3. Mauro Sarrica (biography)
How do inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves? Do these narratives disrupt the status-quo and help integrate inter- and trans- disciplinarity into current academic institutions?
Below, we describe three narratives that can be applied to how inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves, namely as:
- Heroes
- Refugees in sanctuaries
- Navigators of shifting borders.
Understanding diversity primer: 7. Culture
By Gabriele Bammer
How can we begin to understand cultural diversity? How does culture affect how problems are framed, understood and responded to? How does culture affect how well those contributing to the research work together?
In this primer, the term ‘culture’ is used to describe the social behaviours and norms of groups in society. There is, therefore, overlap with values, but culture and values are not identical. Cultural differences are commonly thought of in relation to the inhabitants of different countries, but can also apply to occupations, religions, age-groups, members of different social classes and much more.