Current post
Ten dialogue methods for integrating judgments
By David McDonald, Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane
2. Gabriele Bammer (biography)
3. Peter Deane (biography)
What formal dialogue methods can assist researchers in synthesising judgments about a complex societal or environmental issue when a range of parties with different perspectives are involved? How can researchers decide which methods will be most suitable for their purposes?
We review ten dialogue methods. Our purpose is not to describe the dialogue methods in detail, but instead to review the circumstances in which each method is likely to be most useful in a research context, bearing in mind that most methods a) were not developed for research, b) can be applied flexibly and c) have evolved into different variations. The methods are clustered into six groups:
Recent posts
Three lessons for community engagement in international research
By Aysha Fleming
What’s required for researchers to effectively engage with local communities in international research tackling complex socio-ecological problems?
In a project involving Indonesian and Australian researchers working with local communities to restore peatlands in Indonesia, we identified three key elements for international collaboration with stakeholders:
- project design
- individual and collective skills and competencies
- processes to support knowledge integration.
Collaboration agreement template
By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
2. Michael O’Rourke (biography)
As scientific research continues to move towards collaborative knowledge production, scientists must become more adept at working in teams. How can teams improve their chances of collaboration success? What is a good way to facilitate dialogue about shared values, norms and processes of collaboration? Are there ways of anticipating, identifying, and addressing obstacles as they arise?
We have designed a collaboration agreement template to assist teams in:
A process for generating new cross-disciplinary projects
By Gemma Jiang
What is a good way for researchers in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives, who may not know each other well, to generate viable project ideas?
This blog post introduces a field-tested “double helix” process that leverages the benefits of idea generation by a large group and idea refinement in small groups.
This double helix process is most helpful in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives that meet at least one of the following three characteristics:
- Tackling wicked problems with both scientific and societal significance
- Requiring deep integration across multiple disciplines that will eventually lead to new meta-disciplines
- Consisting of more than 20 core research members.
i2Insights as a repository
By Gabriele Bammer
How is Integration and Implementation Insights (i2Insights) shaping up as a repository of resources useful for tackling complex societal and environmental problems?
i2Insights has two major purposes:
- connecting a community of researchers to each other, and
- building a repository or knowledge bank of resources.
i2Insights has set out to achieve both purposes using the format of blog, with short, easy-to-read contributions from researchers located anywhere in the world, and with encouragement to peers to comment. We have sought to summarise these purposes in the tagline for i2S:
A community blog providing research resources for understanding and acting on complex real-world problems
Highlighted posts
Three principles for co-designing intervention strategies
By David Lam
What processes are involved when researchers and local actors co-design context-specific intervention strategies? This ‘how to’ knowledge is outlined in the three principles described below. Local actors can include non-governmental organisations, local leaders, community groups and individual activists.
Principle 1. Explore existing and envisioned initiatives fostering change towards the desired future
Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling
By Sondoss Elsawah and Anthony J. Jakeman
2. Anthony Jakeman (biography)
As we enter a new decade with numerous looming social and environmental issues, what are the challenges and opportunities facing the scientific community to unlock the potential of socio-environmental systems modeling?
What is socio-environmental systems modelling?
Socio-environmental systems modelling:
Facilitating serendipity for interdisciplinary research
By Catherine Lyall
How can institutions facilitate the serendipitous encounters that so often appear to characterise interdisciplinary careers? Is there an inherent hypocrisy in university leaders, research funders and policymakers claiming that they want to facilitate interdisciplinarity and then not creating the conditions that experienced interdisciplinarians say they need in order to foster this style of working?
Here I examine the importance of informal interactions, physical locations, the ‘small stuff’ and ‘slow research.’
Managing uncertainty in decision making: What can we learn from economics?
By Siobhan Bourke and Emily Lancsar
2. Emily Lancsar (biography)
How can researchers interested in complex societal and environmental problems best understand and deal with uncertainty, which is an inherent part of the world in which we live? Accidents happen, governments change, technological innovation occurs making some products and services obsolete, markets boom and inevitably go bust. How can uncertainty be managed when all possible outcomes of an action or decision cannot be known? In particular, are there lessons from the discipline of economics which have broader applicability?