Results from your search will be shown on this page below the search form – you may need to scroll down to the results if the page does not automatically take you there after you submit your search.
Instructions:
- All blog posts are searched (pages from the menu are not searched)
- Search outputs are weighted by relevance.
- If searching with two or more words, the system uses an AND operator.
- Selecting a tag, author tag and/or category binds the search to only those posts which have those taxonomy term/s.
- A search output can be obtained by filling out any one field (ie., the search box; or, categories; or, tags; or, authors). If all fields are left blank, then the search returns the blog scroll.
- Exact word combinations can be searched for by using quotation marks (eg., “transdisciplinary learning”).
- Keyword matching is on partial words.
- The reset button (beneath the ‘Submit search’ button) will clear all entries in the search form, as will clicking on the ‘Search…’ link in the top of the right sidebar; or, reloading the page.
- Stopwords are used and for more information on stopwords and how search generally works on this page, see the ‘in-detail’ instructions below.
The search function checks all blog posts but not pages (ie., it does not check the ‘About’, ‘Index’ and other pages listed in the main menu).
For posts, search checks within titles, body text, category and tag text (and not comments).
Searches are weighted by relevance, with affects the order in which posts appear, with titles and content getting the most weighting, tags and categories lesser weighting.
Increasing the number of search terms and selections generally focuses the search output (ie., decreases the number of outputs).
Keyword matching is based on whole words.
If you enter two or more words into the search box, the relationship between the words is based on an AND operator (meaning the more words you add, the tighter (less content is returned in) the search output).
- For example, entering transdisciplinary learning into the search box would provide an output that lists all posts with both the word transdisciplinary and the word learning anywhere in the text. Posts with only transdisciplinary in the text or posts with only learning in the text would not be included in the output.
To find a specific word combination (eg., critical systems), wrap in quotation marks (ie., “critical systems“).
The search system uses ‘stopwords’; which are words that are overly common and so are excluded from being searched for if they are put into the search field (in order to avoid flooding the user with results). For example, words such as ‘has’, ‘sometimes’, ’whether’ are stopwords and can’t be searched on individually (that is, no search result will be returned). Such stopwords can be entered as part of a string of words, but as they are not in the search index they do not count towards the search output. There are also words that are very common across our blog posts and which we allow (to be searched on). These words relate to the way we build the content of our posts (eg., ‘biography’; ‘online’) or are related to the blog’s subject matter (eg., ‘research’, ‘university’). Just be aware that if you search on such words (either alone or in a string), you will get a very large number of results. At the time of writing, the following words are examples to avoid using: biography; change; development; experience; knowledge; science; PhD; policy; practice; process; research; social; time; university; work. A good rule of thumb if using a single search term and if there are a lot of results returned (in 2026, there were over 500 blog posts on this site), is to use one or more of the other fields (eg., tag), or add extra search terms to the search field, or try a different term that speaks to what you are searching for.
When you open a post that was found by your search, you can find where your specific word or word combination appears by using your computer’s search function (eg., on a computer running Microsoft Windows, Control ‘F’ will allow you to search the post (as well as anything else in the active screen)).
Restrict searches to particular tags, categories and/or author tags by using the dropdown selectors.
- Eg., if you choose the tag Advocacy, the search will only be conducted within posts that have that tag assigned to them.
- If you added the category Cases to that search, then only posts that had both the tag Advocacy and the category Cases assigned to them would be searched.
An alternative to selecting categories, tags or authors from their respective long drop-down list is to type the term or author name you are looking for in the relevant selector field. Typing one letter will jump to the lead word in the alphabetical listing (ie, typing ‘s’ takes you to the first tag or category in the list of those starting with ‘s’). Further addition of letters will home in on a tag, category or author until it is found or until the choice of letters exhausts the possible set of tags, categories or authors (in which case that tag, category or author is not in our list). NOTE: all authors are also available in reverse name order under ‘Authors‘ in the menu bar.
In the category, tag and author dropdown list, the number in brackets after each entry indicates the number of posts with that category, tag or author assigned to them.
Tags or authors with a zero in brackets “(0)”, placed after the tag or author text, are not currently linked to any blog posts. In the case of tags, most of these tags identify alternative tags, which, if searched, will yield a result. For example, “Assumptions – see ‘Mental models’ tag (0)” signifies that blog posts about ‘assumptions’ are tagged with ‘mental models’ and not ‘assumptions.’ Occasionally there will be a tag (or author tag) with “(0)” which refers to a new tag (or author tag) on a blog post which has not yet been made public. This tag (or author tag) will be searchable once the blog post is public (usually within a week).
For the category selector, choosing one of the two parent categories (main topics or resource types) searches all blog posts, as all blog posts are assigned a main topic and a resource type.
Establishing, discussing, and sustaining accountability in your team: Seven strategies
By L. Michelle Bennett, Michael O’Rourke, and Edgar Cardenas
2. Michael O’Rourke (biography
3. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
How can I hold my teammates accountable?
Being willing and able to hold yourself and others accountable depends heavily on the collaborative culture created by the team (see previous i2Insights contribution by L. Michelle Bennett on Mindset matters for interdisciplinary teams: Choose a collaborative one).
Collaborative cultures characterized by psychological safety, transparency, and an ability to engage in productive conflict provide the strongest foundation for accountability.
A framework for transdisciplinary boundary work
By Lisa Andrews, Stefania Munaretto, Heleen Mees and Peter Driessen.
2. Stefania Munaretto (biography)
3. Heleen Mees (biography)
4. Peter Driessen (biography)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Three spaces of change for reorienting North-South research partnerships
By Geetika Khanduja, Peter Taylor, Andrea Ordóñez, Erica Nelson and Tracy Mamoun
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.
Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity
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.