Stakeholder engagement – Integration and Implementation Insights

Navigating inter- and transdisciplinary PhD supervision: Practical questions for students and supervisors

April 28, 2026April 7, 2026

By Erika Angarita, Anna Hajdu, Yanyan Huang, BinBin Pearce, Guadalupe Peres-Cajías, Hussein Zeidan and Yuanyuan Zhu.

authors_angarita_hajdu_huang_pearce_peres-cajías_zeidan_zhu — 1. Erika Angarita; 2. Anna Hajdu; 3. Yanyan Huang; 4. BinBin Pearce; 5. Guadalupe Peres-Cajías; 6. Hussein Zeidan; 7. Yuanyuan Zhu (biographies)

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?

We developed a structured checklist of questions designed to support supervision conversations and reduce tensions resulting from unspoken assumptions.

The Cultiv8 tool Part 2: Actionable insights for navigating power

April 14, 2026March 19, 2026

By Sobia Khan and Julia E. Moore.

authors_sobia-khan_julia-moore — 1. Sobia Khan (biography)
2. Julia E Moore (biography)

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

The Cultiv8 tool Part 1: Actionable insights for cultivating trust

March 19, 2026March 17, 2026

By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.

authors_julia-moore_sobia-khan — 1. Julia E Moore (biography)
2. Sobia Khan (biography)

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.

A framework for navigating the impact of using artificial intelligence on collaborative research communication

March 24, 2026March 3, 2026

By Faye Miller.

faye-miller_2025 — Faye Miller (biography)

How can research teams recognise when their use of artificial intelligence is affecting their ability to integrate different knowledge and perspectives? How can they navigate the impact of artificial intelligence on their collaborative processes?

When research teams use artificial intelligence in collaborative work, new complexities emerge, especially subtle shifts in communication patterns that can fundamentally alter how teams integrate different perspectives and knowledge forms. Consider an environmental team relying on artificial intelligence summaries across hydrology, ecology, and policy. They might miss crucial disciplinary nuances, or follow its “evidence-based” recommendations that may clash with community priorities.

Moving from epistemic paternalism to transformative transdisciplinarity

February 17, 2026

By David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani.

authors_david-ludwig_charbel-el-hani — 1. David Ludwig (biography)
2. Charbel N. El-Hani (biography)

How can we overcome the epistemic paternalism that has long shaped relations between science and society? How can a transformative vision of transdisciplinarity emerge from the interplay between epistemic diversity and epistemic decolonization?

Demands for transdisciplinary research reflect an intricate politics of knowledge that can be described through a triad of paternalism, diversity, and decolonization. Epistemic paternalism has become widely criticized in many debates about development and modernization. For example, international development projects are often deeply paternalistic by assuming that science and technology of the “developed world” should be simply exported into the “underdeveloped world,” where they are imagined as generating economic growth and societal progress.

Participatory content analysis

February 10, 2026February 3, 2026

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

andreanne-chu-breton-carbonneau — Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau (biography)

How can participatory action research with trusted community-based organizations ensure that communities most impacted take part in interpretating the data, turning findings into deeper insights and more meaningful community-led solutions?

Participatory content analysis is a final step in participatory action research and enables a community research team to analyze data to identify content themes, visually map relationships, and derive actionable insights based on local knowledge and lived expertise. The community research team comprises academic researchers, community-based organization partners, and “resident researchers,” who are community members recruited—with support from the community-based organization partners—from groups most impacted by the research area.

Actor constellation role plays

January 20, 2026

By Alexandra Frangenheim.

How can transdisciplinary researchers gain a better understanding of systemic and multi-causal problems, including recognising different thought styles, appreciating the complexity of intervening, and anticipating points of conflict?

Actor constellation is a role play for identifying the relevance of various actors involved in specific problems. It is useful for problem framing when a research team is formed, for example to plan empirical inquiries or to identify relevant actors for addressing research questions. It also enables researchers from different disciplines and practitioners to uncover hidden dynamics and possible systemic solutions to the problem of interest, and to unlock the potential of shifting perspectives to ultimately develop new narratives.

When research participants represent relevant actors in a role play, their implicit assumptions about relationships, structures, interaction and actors’ knowledge are made explicit.

Six key steps for stakeholder engagement

January 13, 2026December 9, 2025

By Khara Grieger, Kimberly Bourne, Alison Deviney and Nourou Barry.

authors_grieger_bourne_deviney_barry — 1. Khara Grieger (biography)
2. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
3. Alison Deviney (biography)
4. Nourou Barry (biography)

How can you systematically plan stakeholder engagement? What are the key issues that need to be considered? What guiding questions can help?

STEP 1: Identify and clarify engagement goals

Spend time at the beginning of the engagement process to clearly identify why you are engaging with stakeholders. Common goals include sharing knowledge or information; collecting insights, perspectives, or information from stakeholders; and co-creating or co-designing solutions. Other potential goals may include building trust and improving transparency, enhancing collaborations and partnerships, and improving the implementation of decisions.

Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map

December 2, 2025December 2, 2025

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.

Four conditions for co-designing for First Nations leadership

November 11, 2025October 21, 2025

By Jessica Wegener, Barry Williams, Jacqueline Gothe and Sarah Jane Jones.

authors_wegener_williams_gothe_jones — 1. Jessica Wegener (biography)
2. Barry Williams (biography)
3. Jacqueline Gothe (biography)
4. Sarah Jane Jones (biography)

How can research effectively strengthen Indigenous leadership and incorporate respectful design to support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination?

We retrospectively reflected on our experience of working together in a project focused on land and fire management in a specific region in Australia, a project that involved Indigenous Cultural Fire Practitioners, Elders, and community members, as well as Local Aboriginal Land Councils, local councils and government agencies (Gothe et al., 2025). This reflexive analysis aimed to understand and share what we have learned as participants in this Indigenous project as a contribution to the complex work of ensuring meaningful ways to support Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and the use of co-design in Indigenous-led land-based projects situated in urban contexts.

Six elements of effective co-design

October 7, 2025September 30, 2025

By Will Allen.

What does co-design for tackling complex challenges look like in practice?

Co-design is a collective way of navigating complexity, taking different forms depending on context. The following six elements are a reflection on patterns I’ve seen emerge through practice, especially in settings where multiple perspectives matter.

1. Starting with shared grounding: Creating early alignment through shared values, context, and purpose

In many collaborative projects, there’s a tendency to begin by defining tasks – what needs doing, by whom, and when. But in complex settings, where multiple perspectives and values come into play, it’s often more important to begin with relationships. It helps to understand where people are coming from, what matters to them, and how they see the purpose.

Transdisciplinary research with and for artificial intelligence

August 26, 2025August 19, 2025

By Florian Keil, Melina Stein and Flurina Schneider.

authors_florian-keil_melina-stein_flurina-schneider — 1. Florian Keil’s biography
2. Melina Stein (biography)
3. Flurina Schneider (biography)

Is artificial intelligence, a technology aggressively advertised as the ultimate cure-all, fundamentally incompatible with transdisciplinarity and its decades-old insight that the “wicked” problems of the real world do not lend themselves to one-dimensional solutions? Should transdisciplinary research outright reject a technology that is already undermining efforts to achieve social and environmental justice? Or can artificial intelligence actually support transdisciplinary research when used responsibly?

Using artificial intelligence in transdisciplinary research requires a critical mindset