By Roxana Roos.
How can indigenous, local, artisanal, craft, tacit, counter, gendered and experiential knowledge better inform solutions to complex problems, such as climate change? How—when faced with conditions of complexity, uncertainty and competing tenable knowledge claims—can the actionable knowledge base be pluralized and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality, potentially actionable knowledges and sources of relevant wisdom? What are the pitfalls and challenges ahead?
I start with some cautions for the usual practice of transdisciplinary research and then highlight key aspects of cross-cultural dialogue, alongside pitfalls and challenges.
Integration can reproduce undue asymmetries
Transdisciplinary research is an approach that enables science and other ways of knowing to interact constructively to address collaboratively-framed problems. The present practice seems guided by the assumption that different ways of knowing can and need to be “integrated,” “translated,” “weaved,” or “synthesized” to arrive at solutions for complex problems such as climate change adaptation.
From a knowledge equity perspective, this assumption is highly problematic because such synthesis can often not be done without implying some form of hierarchy between ways of knowing. Valuable actionable insights provided by other ways of knowing may get lost in translation and synthesis or become overshadowed by the ways of knowing that are valued higher in such hierarchies (such as knowledge stemming from the exact sciences).
These hierarchies will often reproduce colonial and other power asymmetries between the various knowledge holders involved, privileging some ways of knowing while marginalizing or silencing other ways of knowing, and subsequently limiting the option space for solutions and favoring particular types of solutions (such as “technofixes”).
In an earlier i2Insights contribution on Navigating the complexities of decolonizing knowledge production, Alemu Tesfaye further highlights the role of historical inertia, power structures, institutional barriers, rigorous academic standards, and global interconnectedness as factors that reinforce hierarchies with Western knowledge systems on top.
Co-creating robust solutions
Cross-cultural dialogue constitutes an alternative approach to bridging ways of knowing. It assumes a fundamental equality between all the knowledge holders involved in a transdisciplinary project and their ways of knowing. Rather than basing solutions on the end-result of a comprehensive knowledge synthesis across different ways of knowing, cross-cultural dialogue is primarily aimed at co-creating solutions that make sense in relation to all relevant ways of knowing considered in a dialogue. As this search for robust solutions does not necessarily require the integration of the different ways of knowing, it allows incommensurable and incompatible ways of knowing to equally contribute to finding solutions.
Outsideness
The cross-cultural dialogue approach to bridging diverging ways of knowing that my colleague Jeroen van der Sluijs and I champion is primarily based on the work by the Russian literary scholar and cultural philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, in particular his concepts of dialogue and outsideness.
Outsideness allows participants in a cross-cultural dialogue to see a clear distinction between themselves and others, to open-up for and appreciate differences and diversity in thinking and understanding, without trying to force one’s own way of knowing and one’s own truths on those one interacts with. Outsideness can help participants in transdisciplinary research broaden their horizons of understanding, learn new things and critically evaluate their prejudices. All this requires that participants in transdisciplinary research with different worldviews, cultures and historical practices recognize such diversity as productive and enriching.
Pitfalls and challenges
Our perspective also highlights the challenges and pitfalls associated with cross-cultural dialogue and emphasizes that participants in transdisciplinary research must be aware of these. Examples include:
- dialogue can be abused to camouflage hidden agendas or can be instrumentally used as a lubricant for implementing predetermined solutions.
- the fact that non-scientists often see scientists as authorities when it comes to knowledge can lead to a teacher-student relationship where non-academics can look up to scientists, agree with everything they suggest, and view statements from scientists as unquestionable truths, leading to less trust in their own—possibly more valid—ways of knowing.
- The choice of communication language (often English) can produce asymmetries, misunderstandings of concepts and difficulties for non-native speakers in expressing their ideas, suggestions and objections.
- Judging the other person’s perception of reality based on one’s own understanding and seeing differences between partners (cultural, linguistic, mindset, etc.) as a sign of weakness are further examples of common pitfalls that may occur when dialogic interactions are established.
It is of key importance that participants in cross-cultural dialogues are aware of these challenges and pitfalls and that the process of interaction is attentive to power asymmetries.
Questions to the reader
What are the challenges and pitfalls that you see in fostering fruitful cross-cultural dialogues across diverging ways of knowing in your own transdisciplinary work? What obstacles to achieving knowledge equity in transdisciplinary research have you experienced and how did you tackle these? Please share your thoughts in reply and let’s start a dialogue.
To find out more:
Roos, R. and van der Sluijs, J. (2025). Bridging different ways of knowing in climate change adaptation requires solution-oriented cross-cultural dialogue. Frontiers in Climate, 7: 1544029. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2025.1544029
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: Roxana Roos PhD is a Norwegian transdisciplinary researcher working in the field of environmental change. She has worked in various international projects where she studied researchers’ practices of engagement with local communities. At present she is a researcher at the Cultures Environnements Arctique Représentations Climat (CEARC) research centre of Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), a constituent university of the federal Université Paris-Saclay, France, working in the CLIMArcTIC project “From regional to global impacts of climate change in the Arctic: an interdisciplinary perspective”. Based on fieldwork in Northern Norway she applies a social science approach to elicit potentially actionable ways of knowing within local arctic communities, and to study their knowledge needs and user perspectives regarding the deployment of so-called “climate services.”