Understanding exclusion, sharing benefits and building in reflection in transdisciplinary collaborations

By Annisa Triyanti, Corinne Lamain, Jessica Duncan and Jillian Student

How are ways of knowing excluded in transdisciplinary collaborations? How can transdisciplinary collaborations provide fair compensation for all who dedicate time and effort to the collaboration? How can transdisciplinary processes be made more fair, inclusive and equitable by including reflective processes?

Transdisciplinary collaborations aim to bring together different forms of knowledge, for example academic knowledge with knowledge of practitioners, activists, community groups, etc. Important questions to unpack the politics of transdisciplinary collaborations include:

• Who decides which societal challenges are addressed?
• Who has the most access and power to mobilize actions and resources?
• Who decides who will be involved?
• Who receives benefits?

In this i2Insights contribution we focus on a prerequisite of just transdisciplinary collaboration, namely recognition that diverse types of knowledge have value – they are not the same, but they can contribute to the aims of the collaboration and the advancement of more complex understandings. In particular, we consider: understanding exclusion, sharing benefits and facing challenges using reflection.

Understanding exclusion

Exclusion in transdisciplinary collaborations takes place at four levels. Namely, exclusion of:

• disciplines
• societal perspectives and knowledge
• generations
• marginalized perspectives.

We are particularly concerned with ways of knowing that are often marginalized and join the call for epistemic justice. Three key barriers to epistemic justice are:

1. unconsciously held assumptions about academic knowledge having more value than other types of knowledge – eg., practitioner, indigenous, marginalized knowledges. Additional assumptions are that the natural sciences are valued more than the social sciences and the humanities.
2. practices are still deeply rooted in colonial hegemony and the dominance of epistemologies from the Global North. Research agendas in the Global South have often been appropriated through Western conceptualizations, with little effort to meaningfully gain and integrate local knowledge and philosophies.
3. lack of recognition of heterogeneity within teams and subsequent challenges of representation. Individual actors do not represent all of the perspectives of groups they belong to. Different (groups of) actors have different access to resources, knowledge, and power. Commonly, those who offer the resources have the decision-making power in terms of research agendas and who is involved.

Sharing benefits

Transdisciplinary collaborations, as processes of co-learning and knowledge co-creation, require investments of all involved parties— investments of time, energy, resources, knowledge, and trust.

However, benefits are not always equally shared. When it comes to monetary compensation, for example, salary is primarily, if not only, available for the academics within transdisciplinary collaborations supported through science funders. Even when monetary compensation is available for non-academic or extra-academic partners, complex disbursement rules and practices can be a hindrance. Being able to pay some partners and not others can also lead to problems. Furthermore, not all organizations can afford this compensation: are privileges reproduced when rich Western universities can afford to hire non-academics, and others cannot?

Benefits are not just financial. The knowledge that results from the collaborative research is also a benefit, that may have different implications for the various partners. This can also create tensions in a group. Research results could, for example, not align with the political objectives or provide the desired scientific proof for a social movement that is part of the collaboration. At the same time, this can put researchers in a difficult position in terms of what and how to share their analysis. These tensions need to be explored together.

There is also need to pay attention to non-human actors or ecological contexts that are intrinsic to projects. The ‘do no harm’ principle is the minimum requirement, with teams also invited to engage more creatively in order to share benefits with other beings.

Need for reflection

There are no easy answers to these challenges. But a failure to think them through, a failure to plan, a failure to create transparent processes, grounded on trust, can be very risky, for people, for collaboration, and for science. The process of collaboration requires ample attention at all stages for communicating, trust-building, reflecting, and engaging with integrative approaches.

Attention is needed for processes and practices that facilitate the level of reflection that equitable and meaningful transdisciplinarity demands. This means that the entire trajectory will require ample time and that it takes longer for outputs to emerge, which in itself needs to be reflected upon: does this cause difficulty for team members? Collaborations may begin well ahead of the start of a research project, when potential team members find each other around a common question, concern or interest. This may be initiated by a practitioner organisation, or from the academic side. Some suggestions for matters of reflection to include along the way:

• What are the core values underlying the collaboration?
• Which key principles guide the process of collaboration? For inspiration see this earlier i2Insights contribution that we co-authored with others on fair and just transdisciplinary collaborations.
• Which rules of engagement apply? (Include methods for decision-making and gathering, as well as on how to extend or reduce the team.)
• Is the research agenda truly defined collectively, so that it responds to the needs and interests of all involved team members? Which assumptions underlie the agenda?
• Which interests are conflicting?
• Each year the research agenda is revisited: do earlier assumptions still hold, or have they been tested and is the approach in need of revision?
• Which roles do all team members hold?

Asking these reflective questions helps to rethink and reorient research processes. They can provide a base for explicit recognition of, and actions to address, power imbalances.

Doing transdisciplinarity is a skill in itself and far too few scholars and practitioners are offered training to learn the required attitudes and competences (as well as unlearn problematic practices). Also, different roles in the team require different (levels of) skills. A dedicated person may be assigned to fulfil the role of a facilitator or mediator, or a team may expect all its members to achieve some level of training. Key attitudes and competences are:

• listening
• reflecting
• understanding of one’s own perspectives and biases, which includes exercises on positionality, power balance reflection and stakeholder mapping
• perspective-taking
• ability to integrate different types of knowledge
• systems approaches/holistic thinking
• collaboration (including barriers to participation)
• ‘managing’ conflicts.

This i2Insights blog post is based on contributions we made to the TRED (Transdisciplinary Research, Education and Dialogue) conference in 2023, especially in a session on “Repoliticizing Transdisciplinary Research and Learning.” For more on the conference see: https://td-academy.org/en/events-archiv/tred-conference-2023-co-creating-space-for-collaborative-research-and-learning-to-inspire-interact-and-integrate/

Note: The authors are listed in alphabetical order by first name.

Biography: Annisa Triyanti PhD is Assistant Professor specializing in disaster and climate risk governance for sustainability at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She applies and explores transdisciplinarity in research and education and actively advocates for co-learning with diverse societal actors across various educational programs.

Biography: Corinne Lamain, MSc is Director, Centre for Unusual Collaborations, The Netherlands. The Centre for Unusual Collaborations is part of an alliance between Technical University Eindhoven, Wageningen University and Research, Utrecht University and University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. She works on facilitating knowledge production that contributes to environmental justice, especially through transdisciplinary research. She is also a PhD candidate working on the militarization of climate action at the International Institute for Social Studies located in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Biography: Jessica Duncan PhD is Associate Professor in the Politics of Food Systems Transformation at the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She is a founding member of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations. Her research pioneers new ways of understanding and imagining food governance processes to support just and sustainable transformations.

Biography: Jillian Student PhD is a postdoctoral researcher on inter- and transdisciplinarity at Wageningen Institute for Environment and Climate Research, Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands. Her research integrates different scientific disciplines, forms of knowledge and approaches to better understand emerging environmental changes that affect and are affected by human decision-making.