By Nina Maria Frölich and Annika Weiser.
2. Annika Weiser (biography)
Which contextual factors affect the design, processes, methods and outcomes of transdisciplinary research projects? How can they best be considered by teams designing transdisciplinary research?
Most would agree that context matters, especially in transdisciplinary approaches. But how can we make it work for us in designing impactful context-sensitive transdisciplinary research? Here we provide a useful framework that structures the various aspects of “context,” here understood as a combination of circumstances that interact with and influence a transdisciplinary research project. Based on theoretical literature, as well as an analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews about international transdisciplinary research projects (Tolksdorf et al., 2025), we identified three dimensions, with a total of nine key context factors, illustrated in the figure below.
Dimension 1: Outer context
Outer context is external to transdisciplinary research projects and represents the wider environment and systems in which a transdisciplinary research project is situated. The five outer context factors are:
- organisational structures,
- political and legal factors,
- social-ecological and socio-economic factors,
- power asymmetries,
- cultural relations.
While outer context factors, such as legal regulations, can only be influenced from within a specific transdisciplinary project to a limited extent, this emphasizes the role of intentionally designing transdisciplinary research in a context-sensitive manner, adapting processes and formats to the conditions that we find.
Dimension 2: Inner context
Inner context involves:
- types of knowledge held by both scientific and societal actors,
- team (researchers and practitioners) composition and dynamics.
Inner context factors have a hybrid character, meaning their close relationship to the processes and outcomes of the transdisciplinary research project allow them to be partly influenced by transdisciplinary research design. However, inner factors also characterise aspects strongly tied to the individual background of different team members, eg., a member’s skills or beliefs, which result in unique team dynamics, which again are only controllable to a limited extent by—but can and should be considered in—transdisciplinary research design.
Dimension 3: Spatial and temporal context
Spatial and temporal context comprise:
- spatial factors (global, national, local) and associated multi-scale dynamics,
- temporal factors that determine which other context factors might be present in a certain place and moment, how they evolve over time, and include the historical context the project is embedded in, as well as other time-related issues relevant to the project, including inner context factors such as differences between scientists and non-scientists in how they manage time.
The spatial and temporal dimensions underlie and relate to all inner and outer factors highlighting that context in transdisciplinary research is shaped by and relies on boundary-setting strongly defined by space and time.
It is worth noting that some factors can be relevant to more than one dimension. For example, power asymmetries (outer context factor) and time (temporal context factor) can also be ranked among inner factors.
Questions for reflecting on context in designing transdisciplinary research projects
The following questions can help transdisciplinary research teams understand how context affects the design of their projects and to plan accordingly.
General Questions
- Which context factors (inner/ outer/ temporal and spatial) may hinder the achievement of your project outcomes?
- Which context factors (inner/ outer/ temporal and spatial) may support the achievement of your project outcomes?
- How may your project potentially influence the context it is embedded in?
Outer Context: Political and legal factors
- Which political interests of different stakeholders may influence your project?
- Which legal frameworks and regulations is your project embedded in?
- Are sudden changes in the political or legal framework likely to influence your project?
Outer Context: Power asymmetries
- Which kind of power imbalances exist in the project?
- How do power imbalances impact the project team and process?
- How and when are power imbalances within the project addressed/ reflected?
Outer Context: Social-ecological and socio-economic factors
- Which impacts do socio-economic and social-ecological factors have on your project?
- Are there trade-offs between ecosystem services and human wellbeing present in the project area?
- Which groups of people are excluded from decision-making?
- Where do you see potential for conflict or synergies between project aims and societal norms and rules of stakeholders?
Outer Context: Cultural relations
- How does the research team attempt to understand the local cultural context (as outsiders)?
- Which adverse effects could community entry without sufficient sensitivity have?
- Which values are present among stakeholder groups?
Outer Context: Organisational structures
- Which different organisational structures meet in the project?
- Which possibilities and restrictions do they bring along for project processes and intended outcomes?
- How much space for changes and revisions along the research process do the organisational structures allow for?
- To which degree are the intended outcomes and products of your project supported by academic criteria?
- Which different academic cultures meet in your project?
- How do you deal with different protocols?
- In which way do funding structures support or hinder transdisciplinary research, specifically your project aims?
- In which way does payment of researchers (from Global North and Global South) as well as compensation of practitioners influence their contributions to the project?
Inner Context: Types of knowledge
- What are the strategies and methods to include the various knowledge types of involved scientists, practitioners and stakeholders in the transdisciplinary research process?
- How does the team deal with dominance of certain forms of knowledge (eg., science in the Global North)?
Inner Context: Team composition and dynamics
- How might the composition of the team (eg., disciplines, positionalities, skills, ontologies) influence the project?
- To what extent does the research team include room for reflection (eg., on processes, context, power) into the project?
- How might the team dynamics support/ hinder your project aims in terms of trust, ownership, communication?
Spatial Dimensions
- Which needs and interests of stakeholders are attached to the spatial scope of the project?
- How do different scales (local, regional, national, international) and multi-scale dynamics influence the project?
Temporal Dimensions
- Is the project time frame adequate to the project aims?
- Is enough time considered in the project design for building relationships and reflexive processes?
- How are different timetables, time resources and time handlings of actors aligned in the project?
- How does the history of both scientific research and of the local context (eg., political context) influence the project and its actors?
- How do prior interactions between scientists and practitioners influence current relationships?
Concluding questions
Where do you consider the framework to be especially useful with regard to context-sensitive transdisciplinary research? Are there other dimensions and factors relating to context that you would add? Would you organise the factors differently? Are there additional questions that you think would be helpful for teams designing transdisciplinary research projects? Do you have experience to share of how you have adapted your research design to specific contextual conditions?
To find out more:
Tolksdorf, F. L., Weiss, M., Jiménez-Aceituno, A., Frölich, N. M., Amoah, N. A. B., Lam, D. P. M., Grauer, C., Baird, J., Ballnat, C., Horcea-Milcu, A-I., König, B., Laycock Pedersen, R., Máñez Costa, M., Manuel-Navarrete, D., Martin, D. A., McGlynn, B., Mehring, M., Mühlthaler, S., Schneider, F., Singer-Brodowski, M., Villalba, L., Weiser, A. and Lang, D. J. (2025). Why context matters: Understanding transdisciplinary research through the lens of nine context factors. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research. 1–37. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2025.2527104
The questions above are taken verbatim from this article, which provides extensive references for all aspects of this i2Insights contribution.
Reference:
Lang, D. J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P. G., Swilling, M. and Thomas, C. J. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: Practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7, S1: 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: Nina Maria Frölich M.A. is a researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Her current research focuses on the development of transdisciplinary research that promotes amplification processes in international contexts.
Biography: Annika Weiser PhD is a researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, focusing on real-world labs as transdisciplinary research settings within sustainability science.
Dear Nina
I would appreciate seeing that paper when it is available. My email is burkeje@verizon.net
I would add one additional thought and that has to do with the broad topic of surprise, be it political, technical, or military intelligence. Your research would appear to have value in that context and could, perhaps, include mindset as a factor.
Thank you.
Jim
Dear Jim, thanks for sharing your email. I will reach out to you once the paper is published. Surprise, or the respective mindset, is an interesting thought and might be a valuable addition to the inner context factor “types of knowledge”. Other than that, the COVID-19 pandemic was already addressed by the interviewees as surprising event that shaped the spatial dimension.
Best, Nina
Dear Nina
If I am belaboring a point, feel free to whack me on the nose with a newspaper. I think the example of Covid is an excellent one to consider mindset and surprise. The foresight community had been warning of a Covid-like pandemic and those with a more expansive mindset tended to process the risk, while those who were aware but biased against action were more likely to be surprised. I appreciate your response.
No need to reply.
Jim
Thank you for a thoughtful article and best of luck on your continuing research. I wonder if epistemic knowledge associated with the team members, the funders, and guiding research norms would be part of this framework, along with team biases and assumptions? Consider, also, the effect on context by tacit and explicit awareness. Would it be fair to suggest that context also is affected by analytical tools?
Thank you for sharing your work.
Jim
Thank you for your thoughtful comment and for engaging with the article. Regarding your first question on epistemic knowledge, I would argue that such forms of knowledge, along with related dynamics (including underlying biases and assumptions), are incorporated into the inner context factors. The implications of funding, meanwhile, can also be reflected in the outer context layer of the framework.
On your second question about whether analytical tools affect context, I would generally agree. Analytical tools—or methods more broadly—can shape and interact with context. In a follow-up paper, we have explored the dynamics between context and methods/ formats in TD research projects in more detail, and I’d be happy to share it with you once it is published.
Nina
I was struck by the fact that the only quote in the section on types of knowledge referred to unknowns: “So this dynamic of going there to learn something that is considered as an unknown because it’s not codified in scientific terms is kind of, of course, very arrogant.” Likewise, in one of the research project descriptions a reorientation of the project arose because stakeholders prioritized a different set of unknowns than the researchers did. And yet, there is no mention of orientations towards unknowns in the list of contextual factors– and no other mention of unknowns in the paper. But this is about research, no?
Views and frameworks about unknowns are not encompassed by considering knowledge frameworks, although of course they are influenced by knowledge frameworks. As anyone in ignorance studies will attest, ignorance is more complex than simply an absence of knowledge. Considerations about what is unknown (and why a belief that it is known is false), and likewise what can, should, must, or must not be known are deeply embedded in one’s cultural background and the researcher-stakeholder relations at the time as well as one’s knowledge framework. I strongly recommend incorporating an inner context factor in your framework that refers to how researchers and stakeholders view and prioritize unknowns, perhaps calling it “orientations toward unknowns”.
Thank you very much for your insightful feedback. The perspectives you raise regarding orientations toward unknowns and distinctions between knowledge frameworks add valuable depth to the discussion of context factors in transdisciplinary research. While our framework is based on the synthesis of literature and empirical case studies, we recognize that further differentiating these dimensions could strengthen future analyses of transdisciplinary processes. Your suggestions will be taken into consideration as this conceptual work continues to evolve.