Transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Challenges and recommendations

By Laila Sandroni and Marcel Bursztyn.

What are the key challenges in conducting research that aims to bridge science, policy and grassroots demands? How can such challenges be addressed?

This i2Insights contribution is based on transdisciplinary research that we and colleagues undertook with local communities in Brazil (Sandroni et al., 2026) and we suggest that the challenges and recommendations have broader relevance. Some are relevant to all transdisciplinary research, while others have particular resonance in Global South contexts.

Challenges

Key challenges centre around timing; tensions in worldviews; urgency and impact of climate change; process-oriented research and academic outputs; and language, concepts, and translation.

Timing

The differing rhythms of academia, public policy, and local actors can be challenging. Two examples are:

• the time available for fieldwork is often inadequate, especially when fieldwork sites are remote and hard to get to
• political “windows of opportunity” and other state-level public policy processes can have urgent timelines that researchers and communities can find difficult to meet.

Tensions in worldviews

There are different levels of divergence in worldviews, and some of them are surpassable, while others are not. Three examples are:

• among researchers and local actors, where a research topic may raise concerns of retaliation from powerful actors among the local participants
• among researchers themselves, where there may be conflicting perspectives, varying by place, discipline, and the distinct characteristics of each researcher
• among different local actors who may have different visions about development models and desirable actions.

Urgency and impact of climate change

The disruptive effects of climate change are already affecting societal actors in many ways and may pose challenges to the construction of longstanding bonds. In our research, an intense drought posed a significant challenge to the development of activities at the study sites, both in making sites inaccessible and in the gigantic impacts on local communities that lacked the means to cope with new scenarios of scarce resources. Researchers addressed this crisis by supporting calls for action from local communities.

Process-oriented research and academic outputs

There can be tension between producing what communities need and what the funding agencies and career progression systems for researchers ask for. This can be addressed by working simultaneously on non-academic outputs and academic publications, although it demands a massive amount of work from researchers.

Language, concepts, and translation

Concepts often require translation or modification to make sense in local contexts. Examples include:

• local people may not identify with a concept such as “landscape”, which is basic to landscape ecology
• social movements may see a concept such as climate change adaptation as too passive for the action that they see is required
• researchers may miss concepts that are critically important to local communities, such as land tenure security.

Recommendations

Key recommendations focus on place-based research, involving extensive and intensive fieldwork; intensive workshops; funding flexibility; pre-existing and larger networks; use of shared concepts; non-academic outcomes; and training.

Place-based research, involving extensive and intensive fieldwork

Comprehensive and well-prepared fieldwork involving diverse researchers “glues the researcher to reality”, as one study participant reported. Fieldwork can be helpful even for researchers not directly involved on-site, such as the algorithm designers for a landscape model. Of course, this requires an adequate budget. These benefits can be complemented by retreat-like experiences and having project members and local researchers who live in an area.

Intensive workshops

Promoting gatherings, meetings with different focus groups, and other local events can be critical tools for addressing timing challenges and conflicting worldviews. Helpful processes can include:

• hiring professional facilitators
• being highly aware of local customs when scheduling these meetings
• planning appointments well in advance and confirming them several times.

Funding flexibility

Offering financial support to non-academic researchers for their time and effort can significantly change the involvement of a local community in a project and facilitate a fairer distribution of resources and efforts within a co-production framework. In addition, the ability to reallocate the budget for various costs can be critical, including investments that can benefit the researched communities. For example, if researchers find that a community is badly affected by energy scarcity and can see a ready solution (eg., household solar energy), funding pilots to test such solutions can be an effective use for the budget, with longer term impacts on research relationships and outcomes.

Pre-existing and larger networks

Trust bonds and pre-existing relationships can be pillars of transdisciplinary research. It is helpful if projects can activate networks built over time at many levels, from on-the-ground connections with local societal actors, such as study site coordinators and implementers, to significant national and international-level research networks. To build on the energy scarcity example above, a long term relationship with a non-government organisation can lead to follow-up with concrete action if pilots (such as for household solar energy) succeed.

Use of shared concepts

If language is a challenge, shared concepts can be developed that include common thematic areas to unite different groups of people. Any transdisciplinary process requires a starting point that provides consistency to the project, allowing the coproduction process to thrive.

Non-academic outcomes

It can be helpful to produce community-based publications that serve the needs of local actors involved in the project, as well as videos aimed at broad audiences. Platforms that share project data data in ways that can support policy-making can also be helpful.

Training

Researchers can benefit from training in “soft skills” that are not covered in traditional academic programs. These include creating communication materials, facilitating transcultural dialogues, fostering intergender and intergenerational interactions, collective planning, workshop facilitation, interdisciplinary coordination, and capacity building for local researchers.

Conclusion

In our context, working with marginalized populations that have little-to-no access to public policy and decision making meant that a crucial benefit of transdisciplinary science was building bridges that create communication flows from communities to policy. Because science and policy share a standard set of instrumental and technical vocabularies, we could leverage our social legitimacy to form a rational consensus and utilize this common language to work as allies for grassroots demands. Examples from our work include:

• public policy “insiders” at federal and state levels joining our project as masters or PhD students
• using a serious game to bring together fishermen and various municipal-level policymakers to change fishery policy
• producing policy briefs for a range of organisations.

How does this resonate with your experience? Do you have other challenges or recommendations to share? How have you used your research as a tool to organize and translate grassroots demands to policy arenas?

To find out more:

Sandroni, L., Bursztyn, M., Távora, R. and Dalboni, J. (2026). From communities to policy: Transdisciplinary lessons from the Global South. Environmental Science and Policy, 180, 104405. (Online): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104405 or https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901126001000

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution or the work on which the contribution is based. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Biography: Laila Sandroni PhD is a lecturer in the department of Sociology at the University of Brasilia in Brazil. She is a co-director for the Center for Convivial Conservation at Wageningen University, The Netherlands and leads the Applied Solutions Network for the Global Council for Science and the Environment, in Washington DC, USA. Her work is grounded in the dialogue between the social and natural sciences and other forms of knowledge in discussions about environmental issues. She has a particular interest in topics related to biodiversity conservation, decolonial theory, and struggles for socio-environmental justice.

Biography: Marcel Bursztyn PhD is a full professor at the University of Brasília, Brazil, affiliated with the Center for Sustainable Development. He has experience in the field of socioeconomics, with an emphasis on sustainable development, focusing primarily on the following topics: regional development, public policy, sustainability, the Amazon, the Northeast region, environmental management, climate change, and research ethics.