Integration and Implementation Insights
A global, comprehensive, living toolkit improving research, education and impact on complex real-world problems
By Erika Angarita, Anna Hajdu, Yanyan Huang, BinBin Pearce, Guadalupe Peres-Cajías, Hussein Zeidan and Yuanyuan Zhu.
How can a student and their supervisors develop a shared map for a PhD project when they come from different disciplinary traditions, hold different assumptions about knowledge and quality, and operate within institutional systems that are still largely structured around single disciplines? How can they navigate what may feel obvious to one and may be invisible to another?
By Sobia Khan and Julia E. Moore.
How can we move beyond considering power as the source of implementation challenges and bottlenecks, and instead focus on how we can change or shift the nature of power? How might you experience implementation differently if you knew how to unpack power dynamics and had strategies to navigate power in your implementation practice or research?
This i2Insights contribution is a companion to our previous post on cultivating trust. Trust and power go hand in hand and can’t be dealt with in silos – when considering trust, you also need to consider power and vice versa. The framework presented here helps to understand the dimensions of power and actionable steps for navigating each of these dimensions. Here we describe a second aspect of the Cultiv8 tool to unpack power dynamics.
Before you act: Reflect on the context
By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.
What are some useful ways of thinking about trust when developing plans to implement your research or strengthen your team? More importantly, what are some practical ways to build trust both as an individual and as an organisation?
Indeed, when asked about some of the most challenging parts of implementing changes and taking part in research collaborations, people often talk about trust. Trust is essential for equity and for working with people in effective ways, but so few of us are trained in how to build trust.
This i2Insights contribution provides a practical approach to thinking about trust, along with actionable steps to cultivate trust to help you achieve your goals, whether you are working with others to implement evidence or looking to strengthen your team dynamics.
By Katie Moon.
In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?
In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.
A French version of this post is available
How can researchers improve the quality of their interdisciplinary proposals? What would help in clarifying project formulation, enriching description, maximizing relevance, facilitating workplan implementation (by anticipating possible difficulties) and enhancing impact?
The self-assessment checklist provided below aims to help project leaders and their research teams systematically consider the specific interdisciplinary aspects of an interdisciplinary research project, whatever their original discipline or experience of interdisciplinarity.
By David R. Garcia.
How can academics, researchers, and educators become skilled at the craft of engaging with policy makers? Who should they aim to engage with and what are some key factors in engaging effectively?
Based on my experiences as a US legislative staffer, state policy director, statewide political candidate and professor, here are my six best tips.
Tip #1: Be prepared to work with politicians. Yes, politicians
In academic contexts, “policymaker” is an ill-defined term that is often applied to all policy actors, and does not account for relevant distinctions between different policy actors.
Edited by Gabriele Bammer.
What do policy makers find useful or problematic about research and the way in which it is delivered? How would they like to see research presented to them?
In 2003 R. John Gregrich, then Chief of the Treatment Branch, Office of Demand Reduction, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive Office of the President, Washington, DC, USA, laid out a number of suggestions for researchers about more effectively interacting with policy makers. The description here has been generalised beyond alcohol and other drugs policy.
Seven tips for the general presentation of research findings
1. Research is often inaccessible to policy makers.
Research findings can be both hard to find and hard to understand; in particular the language and format of peer-reviewed publications demand more effort than is warranted from policy makers.
By Basirat Oyalowo.
How can transdisciplinarity in Africa help achieve higher education’s third mission, namely making a contribution to society? What are the best pathways for achieving this? What are the key obstructions and potential ways around them?
Higher education’s third mission involves adding to the first two missions of teaching and research towards providing service to society. However, general pathways to achieving this are still unclear. A few studies have explored how and why the local impacts of universities need to be measured, but these are generally from outside Africa and concentrate more on quantitative methods to measure specific impact, such as economic impact.
Transdisciplinarity provides opportunities to consider the diversity of societal needs and values, to benefit from local knowledge, to involve scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups.
By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.
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.
By Vivian Nguyen and Chris Cvitanovic.
What are the practical enabling conditions necessary for effectively implementing strategies to enhance knowledge exchange at the science-policy interface?
To address this question, we undertook a comprehensive and global review of the published literature in the field of environmental management. Specifically, following established scoping review protocols, we examined 56 empirical case studies that document enablers of effective knowledge exchange between science and policy. By doing so, we also identified and provided actionable insights that can help anyone working at the interface of science and policy to enhance their knowledge exchange efforts, ultimately leading to more impactful and desirable outcomes, and ensuring that the benefits of knowledge exchange efforts outweigh the cost of implementation.
By Lisa Andrews, Stefania Munaretto, Heleen Mees and Peter Driessen.
What are the challenges in engaging different actors and integrating knowledge across disciplines? What does it mean to do this work ‘well’? What brings about successful engagement, boundary crossing and knowledge integration to enable impact? More specifically, how can transdisciplinary research project actors collaborate to produce outputs and foster societal impact?
The following framework identifies 12 boundary work activities to support transdisciplinary research project actors to collaborate, co-create and integrate knowledge that leads to societal impact across project phases. Here, impact is defined as the desired long-term societal, economic and/or environmental changes agreed upon by the involved transdisciplinary actors based on the problem and scientific knowledge gaps they aim to address, with impact resulting from a chain of events to which the transdisciplinary project has entirely or in part contributed.
By Lisa Andrews, Bárbara Willaarts, Andreas Panagopoulos, Radhika Kanade, Nelson Odume, Bodil Ankjær Nielsen and Ingrīda Brēmere.
Are there similar challenges, responsibilities, and methods in transdisciplinarity across countries, scales, contexts and actor types?
In exploring five transdisciplinary case studies from projects on the topics of the water-energy-food-environment nexus and climate change adaptation, we identified three main lessons learned. These were common across the cases from South Africa, India, Greece, Latvia and Denmark, despite their different contexts, types of actors and project structures. These lessons were shared in a workshop at the 2024 Sustainability, Research and Innovation (SRI) Congress in Finland.