Latest contribution
Transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Challenges and recommendations
By Laila Sandroni and Marcel Bursztyn.
2. Marcel Bursztyn (biography)
What are the key challenges in conducting research that aims to bridge science, policy and grassroots demands? How can such challenges be addressed?
This i2Insights contribution is based on transdisciplinary research that we and colleagues undertook with local communities in Brazil (Sandroni et al., 2026) and we suggest that the challenges and recommendations have broader relevance. Some are relevant to all transdisciplinary research, while others have particular resonance in Global South contexts.
Challenges
Key challenges centre around timing; tensions in worldviews; urgency and impact of climate change; process-oriented research and academic outputs; and language, concepts, and translation.
Recent contributions
Implementation strategies: Functions and intentions
By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.
2. Sobia Khan (biography)
When planning for change, how can you usefully think about the intended function or purpose of your implementation strategy? And what are effective ways to usefully think about how the strategy will operate in practice, the mechanisms that shape how people experience it, and how change is activated?
We have developed thirteen intended functions or purposes that an implementation strategy can serve. Functions clarify what a strategy is meant to accomplish. In addition, we have developed 35 intentions of implementation strategies, which describe how people engage with a strategy and how it leads to change.
Functions of implementation strategies
Individuals and teams who are planning, implementing, or supporting change may find it useful to review the 13 functions or purposes of strategies for change that are described in the table below in order to clearly communicate, and effectively plan for, what they are aiming to achieve.
The ontologies of restricted and general complexity
By Jean Boulton.
What is a useful way to clarify the underpinning ontological ground of complexity? What can we learn from the work of Edgar Morin (2006), who distinguishes between those working within the frames of restricted and general complexity? And how are these frames relevant to practice?
Morin makes a distinction between:
- a framing of complexity that sits within the ontology of classical science, which he calls ‘restricted complexity’
- the ‘general complexity’ of the ‘real world,’ where general complexity is more paradoxical, more integrating, more challenging, ambiguous and uncertain – but also ripe with potential.
Restricted complexity emanates from the world of models, maps and mathematics. The aim is to find ways to represent the complexity of the real world, by finding a good map.
General complexity, by contrast, starts further back into the primordial mud, and champions the attainment of knowledge through wandering the ‘territory’.
Three dimensions of context
By Gabriele Bammer.
In research tackling complex societal and environmental problems, what is involved in taking context into account when aiming for more comprehensive understanding of a problem, as well as research support for policy and practice change so that the problem is better dealt with?
As outlined in my work developing Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), considering context involves dealing with circumstances at three levels:
- social or big picture, eg., the historical, political, economic, cultural, geographical and other circumstances
- organizational, especially the structure and culture of the research and stakeholder organisations involved
- individual, especially the positionality or identity of researchers and stakeholders.
Each of these dimensions of context has widespread ramifications, affecting:
- how a problem manifests and is understood, including what is studied and how, as well as the unknowns considered to be pertinent
- what actions are likely to be considered and to have a chance of being successful.
Four lessons for pursuing participatory action-oriented PhD research inside the university system
By Raymond Hyma and Javier García Martínez.
2. Javier García Martínez (biography)
What happens when participatory, relational, and action-oriented inquiry meets the institutional architecture of the PhD: tight timelines, individual authorship, and demands for methodological certainty? What does it mean to pursue participatory and action oriented research as a PhD project inside the university system?
We are PhD candidates in a university alliance connecting Australia and the UK, navigating participatory and action-oriented commitments across two institutional contexts. We noticed that much of the literature about participatory doctorates is written retrospectively, once the thesis is submitted and the mess has been tidied into a coherent story. Our contribution is different: we write from the middle, while decisions are still being negotiated, while constraints are still shaping the work, while we are still learning how to stay accountable to participatory values in real time.
So, what are we learning so far?
Highlighted contributions
How to organize an “all-hands” meeting
By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier
2. Diane Boghrat (biography)
3. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
What is an “all-hands” meeting? What’s required to assemble an effective planning team? What should the planning team consider in setting parameters for the meeting?
What is an “all-hands” meeting?
Here we consider all-hands meetings in the context of our experience with a large cross-disciplinary institute, where members are geographically distributed. An annual all-hands meeting is an effective mechanism many such organizations employ to bring all members together in person.
An all-hands meeting differs from a science conference in two main ways. First, its participants are identified members within the boundary of the organization. It is usually not open to a wider audience. Second, its topic areas extend beyond the research projects supported by the organization. Such topics can include strategic planning among leadership, community building among early career researchers, professional and interpersonal capacity building topics, and development of team science competency.
Wisely navigating knowledge co-production: Towards an ethics that builds capacities
By Guido Caniglia and Rebecca Freeth
2. Rebecca Freeth (biography)
How can I ensure that marginalized voices are heard in this project? Whom do I call on to offer the next perspective in this workshop and why? How can I intervene in this particular disagreement in a productive way? These are typical questions that researchers and practitioners involved in knowledge co-production processes ask themselves. They express deep ethical concerns, which also have epistemological and political implications, as they address the question: What should I do in this situation? What is right and wrong for me to do here?
We suggest that a perspective based on the ancient virtue of practical wisdom may help researchers and practitioners alike working in knowledge co-production to navigate the complexities of these questions.
Practical wisdom: An ancient virtue for wise navigation
Our answers to the deep ethical questions that emerge in collaborative and participatory research will vary depending on the specifics of the situation we are in, who is involved, as well as our own positionality and role in research projects or academic institutions. There is no formula to follow.
Making the Nominal Group Technique more accessible
By Jason Olsen
Looking to gain real insights from those with lived experience about a specific topic? Interested in a low-cost method that fosters equal participation and discussion over participant domination in a research focus group? Want to know about modifications to make pan-disability (ie., working with participants with different impairments) research focus groups more inclusive?
The Nominal Group Technique developed by Ven and Delbecq (1972) has been used for more than 50 years. Key to its success is the posing of a single unambiguous and unbiased question about a problem that can generate a wide range of answers. The process structures the meeting to enable critical dimensions of the question to be identified, ranked and rated in a way that:
- limits the influence of the researcher leading the project, as well as the influence of attendees,
- allows participants to clarify the question’s dimensions and gaps,
- increases the likelihood of equal participation for all group members,
- affords equal influence to different, and potentially conflicting, values and ideas.
Integration in inter- and transdisciplinary research: how can the leadership challenges be addressed?
By Lisa Deutsch and Sabine Hoffmann
2. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)
How can the integration required in large inter- and transdisciplinary programs be effectively led? What challenges do leaders of integration in such programs face and how can they address them? What are the particular challenges in using a theory of change as an integrative tool?
We describe five key challenges that we encountered when leading the integration for a large 10-year inter- and transdisciplinary research program, which explored novel non-grid water and sanitation systems that can function as comparable alternatives to conventional large network-based systems. We experienced these challenges when applying the tool Theory of Change to facilitate communication, collaboration and integration among the team members (for more on theory of change see the i2Insights contribution by Heléne Clark). We also share the strategies we employed to address these challenges. The lessons we developed are likely to be applicable to other inter- and transdisciplinary research programs.