Institutionalisation

Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) 3.0: An updated framework to foster expertise for tackling complex problems

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

How can researchers interested in tackling complex societal and environmental problems easily find and draw on what they need from inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and a range of other ways of combining disciplinary and stakeholder perspectives in order to bring about improvements? How can the necessary expertise be fostered and supported in a systematic way?

These are the questions that I have been addressing for more than 20 years in considering whether a new discipline – Integration and Implementation Sciences or i2S – could provide a way forward. i2S 3.0 is the third conceptualization of this discipline and the current version is summarised in the figure below.

At this stage in its development, i2S is focused on providing a framework and conduit for sharing concepts, methods, processes and other tools that are currently fragmented across inter- and transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and other approaches.

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Eighth annual review

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

Which i2Insights contributions inspired you in 2023? What did you learn that was new and how did it help you in tackling the complex societal or environmental problems you focus on? What would you like to see in 2024 and beyond?

One of the delights of curating i2Insights is learning something from every blog post. Another is the personal interactions involved in broadening the global community of contributors, introducing fresh voices and fresh insights, alongside those who are more seasoned contributors.

In this last blog post for 2023, I survey three of the year’s many highlights and what they mean for the operation of i2Insights:

  • integration and synthesis as an emerging ‘hot’ topic
  • re-introducing “golden oldies,” ie. tried and tested tools
  • increasing the number of countries represented by contributors, with an accompanying focus on decolonisation.

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Six lessons from Iran for strengthening cross-disciplinary research

By Reza Dehnavieh

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Reza Dehnavieh (biography)

How can universities in countries which have centralised and traditional discipline-based systems encourage cross-disciplinary research and education?

Here I describe lessons from the work of the Institute for Futures Studies in Health, which is an Iran-based organization specializing in foresight activities in Iran’s health system. The Institute is affiliated with Kerman University of Medical Sciences, and was launched in 2012. The Institute utilizes knowledge management in combination with the development of a more desirable future as the key concept at the core of its identity and follows four main goals:

  1. evidence-based decision-making,
  2. networking among stakeholders within and outside the health sector,
  3. developing capabilities and empowerment of stakeholders, and
  4. outlining strategic perspectives on health.

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A framework for building transdisciplinary expertise

By ANU Transdisciplinarity Working Group

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Author biographies

What expertise should everyone have in order to effectively play their role in tackling complex societal and environmental problems? Is there a framework that can help everyone develop rudimentary skills and provide a pathway to enhancing them as and when necessary?

We were charged with addressing these questions, not for everyone, but for all undergraduates at our university, The Australian National University (ANU). In particular, we were asked to ensure that all ANU graduates would be able to work with others to understand and creatively address amorphous and complex problems. More formally, this was described as proposing how undergraduates could develop the “Capability to Employ Discipline-based Knowledge in Transdisciplinary Problem Solving.”

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A practical framework for transforming academia through inter- and transdisciplinarity / Un marco práctico para transformar el mundo académico mediante la interdisciplinariedad y la transdisciplinariedad

By Bianca Vienni Baptista and Danilo Streck

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1. Bianca Vienni Baptista (biography)
2. Danilo Streck (biography)

A Spanish version of this post is available.

How can the role of inter- and transdisciplinarity be re-imagined at higher education institutions?

This i2Insights contribution presents a practical framework developed with Julie Thompson Klein and based on fifteen case studies from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America that described how inter- and transdisciplinarity have been institutionalised in higher education.

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Towards a theory of change to institutionalise integration experts and expertise

By The Aeschiried Integrators

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Author biographies

Integration experts and expertise are crucial for realising the full potential of inter- and transdisciplinary research. However, the expertise of those who lead integration is poorly recognized in the current academic system and these academics often experience a range of impediments to their careers. What can be done to recognise integration experts and expertise and to support the careers of such experts?

We define integration experts as specialists “who lead, administer, manage, monitor, assess, accompany, and/or advise others on integration” in order to achieve the full potential of inter- and transdisciplinary research (Hoffmann et al. 2022).

This i2Insights contribution presents the results of a pilot workshop held in Aeschiried, a mountain village in Switzerland, in February 2023 to develop a theory of change focused on Germany and Switzerland to achieve the following:

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Institutionalizing evidence-informed policy-making in Latin America and the Caribbean / Institucionalizando la toma de decisiones informadas por evidencias en Latinoamérica y el Caribe/ Institucionalizando a formulação de políticas informadas em evidências na América Latina e Caribe

By Directors and Coordinators of the Latin American and the Caribbean Evidence Hub

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Author biographies

A Spanish version and a Portuguese version of this post are available

How is the routine use of evidence in policy in Latin America and the Caribbean progressing? How is it being institutionalized?

We provide a brief history of key initiatives to institutionalize evidence-informed policy making mechanisms in the region.Research and policy interface

* The Latin American and the Caribbean Evidence Hub is an interdisciplinary and trilingual team who work together to create a dynamic and diverse community that articulates and mobilizes producers, intermediaries and users of knowledge in the region for decision making informed by the best available evidence. In 2022, it organized workshops with multi-country stakeholders and a regional meeting.

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Seventh annual review

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

This annual end-of-year review presents the highlights from 2022 and examines how i2Insights is progressing in building a global community and a repository for sharing research tools to tackle complex societal and environmental problems.

There is currently no other repository that provides easy access to a range of research tools for addressing complex problems in ways that bring together systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, action research, post-normal science, implementation science, design thinking and many more approaches.

Progress is in the right direction, but the i2Insights team is keen to go further and faster. How can the number of contributions and readers be increased? What would you find helpful for i2Insights to do more of or differently? How can we promote productive discussions on more contributions? If you have thought about contributing but have not, what’s stopping you? 

This is the last blog post for 2022. i2Insights returns on January 10, 2023 (Australian time).

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Three narratives describing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers

By Laura Norton, Giulia Sonetti and Mauro Sarrica

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1. Laura Norton (biography)
2. Giulia Sonetti (biography)
3. Mauro Sarrica (biography)

How do inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves? Do these narratives disrupt the status-quo and help integrate inter- and trans- disciplinarity into current academic institutions?

Below, we describe three narratives that can be applied to how inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves, namely as:

  • Heroes
  • Refugees in sanctuaries
  • Navigators of shifting borders.

Heroes or the individual escape narrative

This narrative sees inter- and trans- disciplinarity as an individual escape. It focuses on internal characteristics that act as drivers to leave a disciplinary context, which is a box, a silo, a shape that hinders researchers’ ways of conceiving and doing science.

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Insights into interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in India and Brazil

By Marcel Bursztyn and Seema Purushothaman

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1. Marcel Bursztyn (biography)
2. Seema Purushothaman (biography)

How are interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity faring in India and Brazil? How do they differ from interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in the Global North? Are there particular lessons to be drawn from India and Brazil for the global interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary communities?

India and Brazil are among the most prominent countries of the Global South in the worldwide academic scene. Both have problems in common, but they have also singularities.

The focus in both countries at the institutional level tends to be on what is referred to as interdisciplinarity. The emergence of a new generation of liberal universities and other academic institutions open to interdisciplinary scholarship has allowed a small cohort of interdisciplinary scholars to emerge.

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i2Insights as a repository

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

How is Integration and Implementation Insights (i2Insights) shaping up as a repository of resources useful for tackling complex societal and environmental problems?

i2Insights has two major purposes:

  1. connecting a community of researchers to each other, and
  2. building a repository or knowledge bank of resources.

i2Insights has set out to achieve both purposes using the format of blog, with short, easy-to-read contributions from researchers located anywhere in the world, and with encouragement to peers to comment. We have sought to summarise these purposes in the tagline for i2S:

A community blog providing research resources for understanding and acting on complex real-world problems

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A collaborative vision and pathways for transforming academia

By The Care Operative and “Transforming Academia” workshop participants at 2021 International Transdisciplinarity Conference

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Author biographies

What do we want academia to be like in 2050? Is academia on the right track? What will it take to agree on and realize a joint vision that can steer life in science towards a more sustainable and agreeable place to work, to learn, to share and to appreciate knowledge?

The issues raised here are based on a workshop with more than 40 participants at the International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2021. The discussion was initiated and hosted by the Careoperative, a leadership collective motivated to explore, embody and pollinate transformational sustainability and transdisciplinary research.

Careoperative’s discussion springboard

As a starting point for the discussion, Careoperative members shared ideas on how the current academic system discourages the kinds of leadership required for sustainability transformations (Care et al. 2021).

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