By Lisa Andrews, Stefania Munaretto, Heleen Mees and Peter Driessen.
2. Stefania Munaretto (biography)
3. Heleen Mees (biography)
4. Peter Driessen (biography)
What are the challenges in engaging different actors and integrating knowledge across disciplines? What does it mean to do this work ‘well’? What brings about successful engagement, boundary crossing and knowledge integration to enable impact? More specifically, how can transdisciplinary research project actors collaborate to produce outputs and foster societal impact?
The following framework identifies 12 boundary work activities to support transdisciplinary research project actors to collaborate, co-create and integrate knowledge that leads to societal impact across project phases. Here, impact is defined as the desired long-term societal, economic and/or environmental changes agreed upon by the involved transdisciplinary actors based on the problem and scientific knowledge gaps they aim to address, with impact resulting from a chain of events to which the transdisciplinary project has entirely or in part contributed.
Because it is difficult to measure the impact of these types of projects, the knowledge to action framework of Cash and colleagues (2003) was used as a proxy for understanding how boundary work activities that balance perceptions of credible, salient and legitimate knowledge may lead to more knowledge uptake and therefore impact over the long term.
The 12 boundary work activities and how they relate to credible, salient and legitimate knowledge, as well as the definition of impact, are based on reflections on practical experience in transdisciplinary projects in the climate and water sectors, as well as a synthesis of different bodies of scientific literature, including project management, knowledge systems, socio-ecological transformations, stakeholder engagement, impact and complexity. In particular, the boundary work activities were chosen based on what is often cited in the literature, gaps noticed in practice, and loosely based on the work of Lang and colleagues (2012), which highlighted the phases of transdisciplinary projects and principles across those phases to be applied as interface practices.
List of Boundary Work Activities to enhance credible, salient and legitimate knowledge
Activity 1: Co-create calls for project proposals with funders and stakeholders, that are inclusive of societal problems and related knowledge needs, and informed by reflection on previous projects and current context.
Activity 2: Iteratively identify all relevant project partners and external stakeholders to build a collaborative and inclusive team.
Activity 3: Build relationships to ensure knowledge co-creation and to mitigate conflicts.
Activity 4: Iteratively design a project architecture in which roles and responsibilities are fairly and explicitly defined based on skills, expertise and experience.
Activity 5: Collectively define the scope of the problem based on the identified societal problems in the project call for proposals and related knowledge needs.
Activity 6: Collectively design the overarching project goal, activities, outputs, and outcomes, and make the relationships among them explicit.
Activity 7: Collectively design a progress monitoring structure including reflection moments to ensure effective and flexible implementation based on problem definition, as well as accommodating changes that occur during project execution.
Activity 8: Leaders coordinate and motivate the team consistently throughout the project.
Activity 9: Co-create knowledge across disciplines and develop knowledge outputs, including intermediate products such as knowledge synthesis outputs.
Activity 10: Generate and disseminate final targeted outputs (eg., reports, methods, assessments, factsheets, tools, technologies).
Activity 11: Perform inclusive and reflexive transdisciplinary project evaluation with the whole team.
Activity 12: Integrate knowledge into science and society or prepare for further development of the knowledge generated by the project (eg., training, workshops, communications, roadmaps for future development using Theory of Change).
Applying these 12 boundary work activities across the phases of a transdisciplinary project should enhance credible, salient and legitimate knowledge co-creation and outputs, and therefore lead to knowledge use resulting in outcomes and impact over time. The conceptual framework shown in the figure below borrows from the work of Belcher and colleagues (2020) to demonstrate how the boundary work activities take place across the spheres of control, influence and interest of transdisciplinary projects over time.
Conclusion
In applying the activities throughout the project and across the phases, the idea is to enhance the opportunity for impact to occur. In your experience, can and do all these activities always need to be applied within a project timeframe to ensure transdisciplinarity, and / or to enable societal impact? How do you define impact of a transdisciplinary project?
To find out more:
Andrews, L. M., Munaretto, S., Mees, H. L. and Driessen, P. P. (2024). Conceptualising boundary work activities to enhance credible, salient and legitimate knowledge in sustainability transdisciplinary research projects. Environmental Science and Policy, 155: 103722. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103722
References:
Belcher, B., Davel, R. and Claus, R. (2020). A refined method for theory-based evaluation of the societal impacts of research. MethodsX, 7: 100788. (Online – open access) DOI): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.100788
Cash, D., Clark, W., Alcock, F., Dickson, N. M., Eckley, N., Guston, D. H., Jäger, J. and Mitchell, R. B. (2003). Knowledge systems for sustainable development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, 14: 8086-8091. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1231332100
Lang, D. J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P., Swilling, M. and Thomas, C. J. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: Practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7, 1: 25-43. (Online) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Lisa Andrews MSc is a PhD candidate, currently working at KWR Water Research Institute in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, and is conducting her PhD in affiliation at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the project “Turning climate commitments into action” (IMPETUS). Her research focuses on how transdisciplinary research projects can enable impact in the fields of water and climate.
Biography: Stefania Munaretto PhD currently works as Senior Scientific Researcher at KWR Water Research Institute in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, with an adjunct research position at Copernicus Institute of Utrecht University, also in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on inter- and transdisciplinary research concepts, methods, tools and their practical applications to enhance the societal impact of sustainability research, particularly in the water sector.
Biography: Heleen Mees PhD is an associate professor of local sustainability governance at Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. She is the research coordinator and member of the Management Team of the Environmental Governance group within the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Her research interests concern (supra-) local governance issues related to urban sustainable development and climate change adaptation governance.
Biography: Peter Driessen PhD is a full professor of Environmental Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands and he is head of the research group Environmental Governance. His research focuses on the scholarly and political debate on sustainability governance, by analyzing interventions that have the potential to make governance outcomes more congruent with sustainability goals.
Hello Lisa:
Thanks for the links to the articles.
To answer your question at the end of your reply: not quite, but close. I did lead an evaluation of a complex project in East Africa that had a significant applied transdisciplinary approach. The article is entitled “How did conservation agriculture go to scale? A case study in utilization-focused evaluation (2022). https://journals.sfu.ca/jmde/index.php/jmde_1/article/view/703
Figure 4 (page 66) provides a glimpse of the multiple disciplines that were integrated. It would have been difficult to apply use your 12 activity areas to guide the evaluation questions, as much of the integration was emergent; some was by design but not all.
Another resource of possible interest was a tool we developed to evaluate collaboration; it is summarized in this blog https://evaluationandcommunicationinpractice.net/planning-evaluating-collaboration/ and we have never actually applied it.
Of possible interest to you and your co-authors.
Kind regards,
Ricardo
Hi Ricardo,
Thanks for these insights – I will have a look into them! Definitely sounds like food for thought.
Cheers
Wonderful and inspiring. I see the 12 activities as possible guides to integrate Developmental Evaluation. Do you have any examples of M&E of such collective efforts, especially the knowledge translation effects?
Editor’s comment: M&E is an abbreviation for monitoring and evaluation
Hi Ricardo, thank you for your comment. Indeed, we could also see these in the future being used as guides for evaluation. At this point, I am not sure if I have any concrete examples of M&E of the knowledge translation effects, however, I have also seen quite a bit of work in using the Theory of Change (ToCs) approach as an M&E tool. We have been using ToCs in the EU project IMPETUS https://climate-impetus.eu/get-involved/#resources without the use of strict indicators, but as is mentioned in this paper here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10961-017-9607-7 – there is potential for that as well. In our work, we use the attributes of credibility, salience and legitimacy (CSL) as a proxy for impact – i.e. if the boundary work activities can balance the co-creation of CSL knowledge, then there is a higher likelihood of the knowledge being used and therefore leading to impact. However, as mentioned in this paper (https://academic.oup.com/rev/article/27/2/132/4855909?login=false), the authors took the CSL framework a step further and investigated its potential as an evaluation tool, however found that it was challenging to measure and required further insights into the contextual dynamics … so all of that to say – it is quite complex to monitor and evaluate transdisciplinary (TD) projects, but certainly not impossible and requires further research and case examples!
Have you come across any good examples for how to do M&E in TD projects?