Institutionalisation

From slogan to practice: Restoring transdisciplinarity as a serious way of working

By Hussein Zeidan.

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Hussein Zeidan (biography)

Do you sense a growing gap between the promise of transdisciplinarity and the way it is often practised? Have you recognised instances where a paper praises integration, yet treats it as little more than a symbolic gesture, instead of a serious intellectual and ethical commitment?

How did we get here, and how can we reclaim transdiscipinarity from superficial habits that weaken its potential?

How did we get here?

The rise of transdisciplinarity has been remarkable. Funding agencies promote it. Universities showcase it. New centres and programmes are built around it. This visibility has helped many people experiment with new forms of collaboration.

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Tenth annual review

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

By Gabriele Bammer.

This is the tenth annual “state of the blog” review.

What are the major achievements of i2Insights for 2025? What have been the main themes of the contributions made? How do these reflect the aims of i2Insights?

This is the last post for 2025. We’ll be back on January 13, 2026 and already have a number of great contributions to start the new year.

Achievements

We celebrated three major achievements in 2025.

1. Our 10th anniversary

In November i2Insights marked its 10th birthday as a global, comprehensive, living toolkit.

We are particularly delighted that INTEREACH (Interdisciplinary Integration Research Careers Hub) is devoting its 2025-2026 webinar series to spotlighting themes from i2Insights.

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i2Insights@10years: Strengthening a global, comprehensive, living toolkit for tackling complex problems

By Gabriele Bammer.

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How can i2Insights best capitalise on its first ten years and the wealth of resources contributed from around the world? How can you contribute to strengthening the i2Insights toolkit?

On 25 November 2025, i2Insights celebrates its 10th birthday as a toolkit to support researchers and educators tackling complex societal and environmental problems, specifically providing tools to understand and address complexity. It sets out to be:

  • global, with contributions from around the world
  • comprehensive, tackling all aspects of addressing complex problems
  • living, continuing to grow and stay up-to-date.

It’s a good time to reinvigorate the aims, strengthen the toolkit and celebrate achievements.

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A library guide to support transdisciplinarity

By ANU Library Guide Working Group.

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Author biographies

What tools can libraries develop to support transdisciplinary education and research? What are the challenges and requirements to make such tool development happen? 

Here we describe a library guide (commonly abbreviated to LibGuide), a tool often developed by individual libraries to showcase their resources on a particular subject and to provide a consistent pedagogical approach to such subject-specific resources.

The library guide that we developed focused on transdisciplinary problem solving and aims to provide introductory materials for students and academic staff across our university (The Australian National University). In particular, it supports the introduction of a university-wide educational program to ensure that all undergraduates develop skills allowing them to work with others to understand and creatively address amorphous and complex problems.

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Why interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not enough for addressing complex problems

By Gabriele Bammer.

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

As the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches becomes more widely recognised, how can we overcome the danger that they are seen to be all that is needed for tackling complex problems? What are the limitations of these approaches? What else might be required?

My starting point is that improved understanding of, and action on, a complex societal or environmental problem usually requires a number of research questions to be addressed. Different questions require different kinds of research approaches. Let’s illustrate this by considering the following complex problem:

As effort goes into making cities more sustainable, how can we incorporate illicit drug users into a more sustainable city X?

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What roles do you play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects?

By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

What roles do researchers typically play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects? How can they be made transparent in order to reflect on them?

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects typically require different roles and the researchers involved may play one or more of them. There is a plethora of literature describing various ideal-typical roles and we used the literature on researchers’ roles in sustainability science to develop a reflection tool on researcher roles in inter- and transdisciplinary projects.

A Role Reflection Tool

The reflection tool consists of a role survey for individual researchers, a spider web graph for immediate role visualization on the individual and project team level, and a set of questions for individual and project team reflections.

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Transforming and weaving knowledge in a complex world: The butterfly and the spider

By Frédéric Darbellay.

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Frédéric Darbellay (biography)

Inter- and transdisciplinarity is today increasingly recognized as a field of study in its own right, with its own theoretical and conceptual foundations, its methodological approaches, its national and international scientific communities and networks.

The field aims to meet the demand for the collaborative, integrated and forward-looking responses that are needed to address the complexity of global issues. Inter- and transdisciplinarity is establishing itself not only as a pioneering and transformative field of research, but also as an essential approach to rethinking the organization of knowledge in academic structures and beyond.

However, inter- and transdisciplinarity remains a diverse and constantly evolving field, shaped by various schools of thought and enriched by a global and intercultural perspective. This diversity constitutes its richness and calls for an inclusive approach, capable of representing the plurality of scientific communities, approaches and practices.

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Ninth annual review

By Gabriele Bammer.

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

This is the ninth annual “state of the blog” review.

As we wrap up another year of i2Insights, what are the key issues to reflect on in our nine year history? What have been the highlights of year nine? What changes are underway or planned?

Moving forward globally

A key issue to reflect on in our nine year history is how well i2Insights is achieving its goal of being a global resource. In tackling complex problems through Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science or other approaches, I have always thought that we have a unique opportunity to advance globally, combining experience from around the world. This would make us different from most disciplines and fields, which were first established in the Global North and then exported to the Global South.

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Fostering transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Lessons for funders

By Flurina Schneider, Zarina Patel, Katsia Paulavets, Tobias Buser, Jacqueline Kado and Stefanie Burkhart.

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1. Flurina Schneider; 2. Zarina Patel; 3. Katsia Paulavets; 4. Tobias Buser; 5. Jacqueline Kado; 6. Stefanie Burkhart (biographies)

How can research funding programmes address existing inequalities in global science systems? How can they foster science-society-policy interactions and transdisciplinary research in the Global South?

Inequalities in science disadvantage the Global South in terms of classical science metrics such as the number of researchers and publications, but also in terms of access to research, funding and infrastructure. Early career researchers are particularly affected.

To address these inequalities, financial investment in research capacity is needed from both national governments and international donors. However, dependence on international funding reinforces the influence of the Global North in setting research agendas in the Global South. We argue that international research funders can mitigate this challenge by supporting transdisciplinary research, because transdisciplinary research integrates different perspectives to resonate with local realities and problems.

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Team science is an integral competency for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Program

By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke

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1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
3. Michael O’Rourke (biography)

What roles do research and development agencies have in actively preparing research teams to engage productively in collaborative research? Is it enough to require that teams engaging in funded research prepare themselves to collaborate effectively?

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Program was launched in 2019 to fast track the development of ideas into real-world applications and solutions intended to have substantive societal and economic impact. Building upon basic research and discovery and using a convergent approach, the program accelerates use-inspired research toward impact by funding multidisciplinary teams from a wide range of disciplines and sectors to solve complex societal and economic challenges.

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Considerations for creating and funding new toolkits for inter- and transdisciplinary research

By Bethany Laursen, Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Gabriele Bammer, Antonietta Di Giulio, Theres Paulsen, Melissa Robson-Williams and Sibylle Studer.

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1. Bethany Laursen; 2. Bianca Vienni-Baptista; 3. Gabriele Bammer; 4. Antonietta Di Giulio; 5. Theres Paulsen; 6. Melissa Robson-Williams; 7. Sibylle Studer (biographies)

Are you thinking about creating a new toolkit for inter- and transdisciplinary research? What questions can help you consider whether to embark on such an effort? If you are a funder, how can you decide whether to support existing toolkits or fund new ones? And how can toolkits help your reviewers in considering funding applications?

We are the core members of the Toolkits and Methods Working Group hosted within the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance). Since 2020, we have jointly mapped and visualized the previously uncharted landscape of inter- or transdisciplinary toolkits.

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Three spaces of change for reorienting North-South research partnerships

By Geetika Khanduja, Peter Taylor, Andrea Ordóñez, Erica Nelson and Tracy Mamoun

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1. Geetika Khanduja; 2. Peter Taylor; 3. Andrea Ordóñez; 4. Erica Nelson; 5. Tracy Mamoun (biographies)

What are some of the challenges that researchers from the Global South face when engaging in development research initiatives, and how can resetting the relationships that underpin North-South collaborations help? What are the pivotal areas where change is needed?

Challenges

The main concerns for many researchers in Global South-based institutions are around the deep-rooted structural challenges that underpin the research for development space, such as:

  • funding dependence on external sources,
  • insufficient national expenditures on research,
  • lack of agency in the design and implementation of research projects,
  • publication pressures built on problematic Global North “output”-driven demands,
  • competing incentives for promoting and achieving policy uptake.

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