By Nina Maria Frölich and Melanie Mbah.
2. Melanie Mbah (biography)
How can transdisciplinary researchers bring together context, format and methods in a way that recognises their interdependence and their dynamic nature?
Much existing guidance on transdisciplinary research treats context as one design task, and the choice of format and methods as another, separate task. However it is more realistic to see them as interdependent, and that the relationship between them keeps shifting throughout a project.
By context we mean the organisational, political, socio-economic, socio-ecological, cultural, hierarchical, spatial, and temporal structures that frame a transdisciplinary project, as well as the team dynamics and types of knowledge involved.
By format we mean the overall structure that carries a project through its phases, from framing the problem together, through generating new knowledge, to feeding results back into practice―for example a real-world laboratory, a Theory of Change process, an arts-based approach or a step-by-step guide.
Within any format, researchers and their practice partners draw on specific methods: workshops, interviews, role-plays, mapping exercises, and so on.
We define junctions as dynamic spaces where researchers and practice partners continuously negotiate the fit between context and format plus methods, which is a nuanced, often bidirectional relationship. Negotiating at junctions allows for active, iterative design decisions throughout the research process that can also deal with the challenges and frictions that inevitably emerge.
We identified four key areas for negotiation at junctions: adaptivity, hierarchy, inclusiveness and trust.
Adaptivity
Adaptivity is about adjusting format and methods as circumstances change―a new government, a new team member, a pandemic―while also recognising that the format chosen at the outset determines the capacities to adapt later. For example, what works from an academic perspective may be disconnected from the day-to-day priorities and availability of practice partners and may therefore need to be adapted.
A useful question to ask is: which context conditions matter most for your choice of format and methods, and how would you know if they needed to change?
Hierarchy
Hierarchy captures the power imbalances that run through transdisciplinary collaboration―within a research team, between science and practice, and especially between partners from the Global North and Global South. Format choices can either entrench these imbalances or help expose and soften them.
A useful question to ask is: what hierarchical structures―resource disparities, language barriers, institutional power―exist within your team and beyond it, and how might your choice of format make them more transparent or even enable participation for those with less formal power? (See also inclusiveness below.)
Inclusiveness
Inclusiveness is about whose knowledge and perspectives get integrated into a project, and how. Inclusive participation mostly depends on how much room there is for perspectives to be heard and the availability of resources, particularly of those with non-institutional backgrounds. For example, using arts-based methods, such as poetry slams and songwriting, can allow practice partners to participate on their own terms.
A useful question to ask is: whose ideas and epistemologies are currently included in your process, who is missing, and which format or methods might best engage them?
Trust
Trust is both a precondition for collaboration and something that has to be built and rebuilt through deliberate design choices. Respected community members or long-standing local collaborators who already have a standing with the people a project wants to reach can act as “door-openers.” A door opener signals legitimacy, translates between different social groups, and smooths the way for practice partners who might otherwise have kept their distance from the research, especially in settings where there is little trust or historical conflicts.
A useful question to ask is: what is the current level of trust between the different actors in your project, why is that, and which of your methods could help you (re-)build trust?
Putting junctions to work
Recognising junctions matters because they determine whether design choices translate into equitable collaboration and meaningful outcomes. We find these considerations useful:
- Map adaptivity, hierarchy, inclusiveness and trust at the outset of your project, asking in turn, where things currently stand, and define measures to maintain or strengthen that position.
- Build iterative reflection―regular exchanges or inclusive sessions―into the project timeline. Continuous reflection and formative evaluation can help to adapt to changed circumstances, and transparent communication can build trust and help counteract entrenched hierarchies both inside and outside the project.
- Think about how much room your format leaves for adaptation and what fits your context best. A tightly sequenced format with a fixed set of methods gives a project a clear methodological backbone but leaves less room to improvise when circumstances shift. A more open format, like an arts-based approach, trades structure for more capacity to improvise or adjust as you go.
- Consider how you can be flexible in funding and timelines for everyone involved, internal and external to the project. Ongoing learning and changing take time and resources, so funding structures need enough space to let projects unfold as the context evolves.
Conclusion
This i2Insights contribution draws on a broad study of interviews and workshops covering 23 transdisciplinary projects worldwide (Frölich et al., 2026). Our discussion of junctions does not cover every tension that can arise in transdisciplinary research, but offers a starting point for thinking, deliberately, about how context and format and methods shape each other throughout a project, rather than only at the design stage.
How have you experienced junctions in your work and how have adaptivity, hierarchy, inclusiveness and trust played out? Are there other ways that you have negotiated the intersection between context, format and methods? Can you share ways of building in the flexibility of funding and time that navigating junctions seems to require?
To find out more:
Frölich, N. M., Rhodius, R., Jauer, L., Mbah, M., Weiser, A. and Lang, D. J. (2026). Navigating four junctions: A framework to design context- and format-sensitive transdisciplinary research. Sustainability Science. (Online – open access): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-026-01848-2
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 was used during preparation of this i2Insights contribution to improve clarity and conciseness. All AI-generated suggestions were critically reviewed by the authors, who retained full responsibility for deciding whether to incorporate, modify, or reject them. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Nina Maria Frölich MA 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: Melanie Mbah PhD is senior researcher and research coordinator for transdisciplinary sustainability research at the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut) in Freiburg, Germany. Her main areas of interest are: transdisciplinary research on formats and methods as well as in thematic fields such as energy and heat transition as well as nuclear waste disposal.
Nina, I had to think about this for awhile because my context involves multi-sector convenings rather than transdisciplinary research – imagine a 23-year series of conversations that began as dinner salons and continues over Zoom, that attracts mostly practitioners and some academics, that fosters everyone’s continuing growth as public service leaders in their own domains through interaction with others. I.e., there is not an overarching project with its funders, contracts, timelines, and deliverables, although my prior work in government was replete with them. Although you and Melanie were aiming at a different audience, there are more commonalities than differences and I find your questions to be useful. There may be nothing below that you two haven’t already thought of, but here goes.
Regarding ADAPTIVITY, I think that it must be two-way in order for projects to realize their full potential. Even in institutional settings, it is possible to avoid having everything be dictated the way it often is, so that people who may not feel seen or whose needs aren’t being met don’t “vote with their feet,” withdrawing their energy and support. It’s what made me reach out yesterday to long-time participants in the Washington, DC metro area, the state of Rhode Island, and Portugal to ask how a recent experimental session they attended affected them and whether I should do it again. At the same time, it isn’t possible to be all things to all people and still reach project goals. There has to be a give and take.
Before I retired, if we were at a point that nothing could be changed and people were disengaging, we might try something novel and potentially reenergizing on the side. This is worth remembering. E.g., during the final weeks of a brutal slog that involved sending a mixed team of employees and contractors to a different state to establish all aspects of a groundbreaking call center over several months, when people began burning out and making mistakes I mailed a ridiculous, large cardboard box containing only bags of candy and a Nerf basketball with hoop. The subject line in the thank-you note that came back from the group’s extremely formal supervisor said it all: “Thank You !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Regarding HIERARCHY, power imbalances, and INCLUSIVENESS, I’m convinced that the overall project leader can choose to have a huge, enduring impact on how this is framed and experienced by all participants. When I began inviting people to dinner salons in 2003, my goal was to include anyone who wanted to have a civil conversation with a speaker on some topic related to improving government. That meant convening a group that was diverse in terms of age, status, race/ethnicity, gender, and sector (civil service, military, nonprofit, for-profit contractor) – and having 25-year-olds sitting next to people at the top of their careers. These actions made it work every time:
Although having food and drink makes things more convivial, the last 8 years have shown that we can do without it when we must, and everything still works.
Regarding TRUST, I appreciate immensely what you say about building it. My own experience in a simpler context has been that exuding sincere goodwill, being scrupulous about keeping my word, and making a gathering or project irresistible (think catnip) successfully substituted for legitimacy when I began.
Good luck to you both as you amplify the impact of transdisciplinary research. I expect that your efforts will be game-changing.
Thanks so much, Kitty. I really appreciate you sharing these reflections on and experiences of the past decades of collaborative work. That helps a lot to put our work into context and I look forward to learning more about your work.
Ditto, Nina!
Thank you for this outline. My only addition under inclusiveness would be to mention appreciating Indigenous ways of practicing science as part of Indigenous Knowledge systems. This avoids the hierarchy of considering Western-originated science as the only way of doing science that warrants the label of science. That is why many Indigenous scholars and practioners speak of ethnoscience. So ways in which communities, including formerly colonized ones, participate in knowledge production is not confined to the examples you mentioned such as using arts-based methods, such as poetry slams and songwriting, which can allow practice partners to participate on their own terms. We need to appreciate also how such communities interact with their environments (of which they see themselves a part) in ways that can be, and have been, called scientific. This is based on a specific ontology, epistemology and axiology which is relational at root. See, for instance, the work of Bagele Chilisa, Margaret Kovach, Linda Smith, Patrick Ngulube and a myriad of other authors calling for decolonization as part of the transdisciplinary research agenda .
Norma, as a non-academic, I would very much like to know of an introductory reading that would provide a ‘way in’ to this ontology, epistemology and axiology which is relational at root. Where’s a good place to start?
Kitty, While waiting for Norma’s response, you might look at her i2Insights contribution:
Practising responsible research within an Indigenous paradigm by Norma Romm
https://i2insights.org/2024/05/21/indigenous-paradigm-and-responsible-research/
Norma, When you respond, you might look at Kitty’s i2Insights contribution:
How informal discussion groups can maintain long-term momentum by Kitty Wooley
https://i2insights.org/2021/10/26/maintaining-informal-discussion-groups/
Hello Kitty! Thanks for your message. Besides the insights contribution of mine named by Gabriele in her message below, here are a few pertinent references that might be helpful for you. I am putting them in alphabetical order:
Celiane Camargo-Borges & Maggie Slaska (2026): Editors of a book called An Invitation to Relational Research Constructing New Horizons in Knowledge, Methodology and Beyond (Published by Palgrave Macmillan). . This book offers examples of researchers (many from the Global South) organising research in terms of a relational orientation.
Bagele Chilisa (2020). Indigenous Research Methodologies (2nd edition) . Sage. In this book Bagele Chlisa offers a detailed account of an Indigenous relational ontology, epistemology, axiology and methodology (which informs a postcolonial Indigenous research paradigm).
Norma Romm (2024). An Indigenous relational approach to systemic thinking and being: Focus on participatory onto-epistemology. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 37(6), 811-842. According to Google Scholar, this article has had 12k downloads to date and has also been cited in 6 news outlets. In the article, I explain the systemic relational understanding of Indigenous sages and scholars, where being, knowing, and valuing are co-constitutive and inextricably intertwined in an ongoing process of world-making. The idea is that we participate in world construction at the moment of “knowing” and cannot avoid making an impact on what is being explored, for which we need to bear some responsibility.
Shawn Wilson (2008). Research is Ceremony. In this book Wilson depicts ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology as a unified circle: relationships define reality (no “thing” exists independently of relations), the process of knowing involves moving together to gain insight into these (dynamic) relations, while recognising that we are not separate from them as “knowers”. This in turn means we have ethical obligations in relation to all that we encounter. (Chilisa, who favorably quotes Wilson, puts this as: “we are accountable to all our relations” in the research process.)
Finally, an interesting set of talks (by myself and two colleagues from Uganda, namely, Francis Adyanga and Daniel Buyinza) is offered at https://council.science/events/indigenous-knowledge-transdisciplinary-africa/
We gave our presentation under the auspices of the International Science Council in March 2026. The title of the presentation is: Indigenous knowledge in transdisciplinary research and education: Experiences from Africa
I hope that you will find some of these works as offering a “way in” for you into a relational research approach.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
All the best
Norma
Thank you, Norma, for this is a valuable addition. And thank you, Kitty, for the follow-up questions.
You are right that inclusiveness should go beyond participation on communities’ own terms to recognizing Indigenous knowledge systems as ways of practicing science in their own right, rooted in relational ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies. We touch on this only briefly in the full paper and are grateful for the references, which point to important work for the transdisciplinary research agenda.
Thanks dear Nina. I have now copied the reference to your full paper and will read it soon!
Thank you, Norma. I was very interested by your presentation with Francis Adyanga and Daniel Buyinza. Also, I’ve ordered the book, Research is Ceremony, based solely on this sentence of the author’s: “I further develop the relationships I have with the ideas through my relationship with my sons.” The dialogue in the former and the use of story in the latter make the research much more accessible to me as a public service practitioner. I’ve been convening academic-practitioner dialogues in search of fruitful complementarity that would have bigger payoffs for the world for a long time. Both these things are encouraging.
Hi Kitty – you and other readers may be interested in the i2Insights contributions that see research as ritual – scroll through https://i2insights.org/tag/rituals/.
This is wonderful to hear dear Kitty. Can you post some examples of how you organise academic-practioner dialogues that make a difference to the ideas of those situated in academia and the practices and ideas of practioners as they both work alongside each other such that academic discourses shift while social constructions also shift?Do you have feedback from them in the form of stories or reflections that you can cite?
This is important work!
Your feedback is encouraging, Norma – thanks.
Virtually, I’ve focused on the preliminary task of pulling those who think academic-practitioner dialogue is important in principle out of the woodwork and into the same Zoom room, facilitating “get to know you” conversations in an informal setting. My bias is conversation rather than sage-on-the-stage webinar, because the former is less passive and generates more information that’s relevant. The feedback shows up mostly in the form of continued participation. I find conversation makes it easier to gauge level of interest, work through preconceived notions about what works, and even enlist co-creators for experimental projects.
In person, via the annual national conference of the American Society for Public Administration, I’ve begun proposing breakout sessions that have the potential to attract PhD and MPA students to panels of seasoned practitioners that create an opportunity for them to meet and continue conversations afterward, so that they leave with a more complex, generative idea of how future interactions could further the goals of both kinds of people. In this year’s panel on local government, when city managers based in 3 different states let down their hair and talked about their circuitous career paths and described what their work actually looks like, students who attended were asking questions and the panelists were inviting them to stay in touch. Again, very basic – although a student told me later that their view of what’s possible in academic-practitioner relationships had expanded.
dear Kitty
This is an excellent way of soliciting feedback in terms of people’s continued participation!
Thanks for this response.
All the best,
Norma
Nina and Melanie, the questions you pose at each of the junctions could be useful to me as my work of convening across sectors deepens. Thanks for this most useful article.
Thanks a lot for your feedback. I would be interested to hear about your experience of applying them.
Nina,
You’re welcome; I hope to hear more from you and Melanie!
I’ll think about this in light of my Senior Fellows and Friends experience and send you an email.
Kitty