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.