Integration and Implementation Insights
A global, comprehensive, living toolkit improving research, education and impact on complex real-world problems
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What are fake interdisciplinary collaborations and how do they arise?
Fake interdisciplinary collaborations are a form of performative scientific behaviour that claims to be interdisciplinary but lacks knowledge integration across disciplines. There are three social mechanisms that can result in such fake collaborations.
1. Irresponsible project management
Irresponsible project management has two manifestations:
By Flurina Schneider, Zarina Patel, Katsia Paulavets, Tobias Buser, Jacqueline Kado and Stefanie Burkhart.
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.
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:
By Toby Lowe
Why is the idea that we can measure our impact to understand how well we are performing fundamentally flawed? Why is it impossible to “demonstrate your impact” in complex environments?
Although the idea of measuring impact is seductive, almost all useful social change is achieved as part of a complex system. In other words, your work is a small part of a much larger web of entangled and interdependent activity and social forces.
The systems map of the outcome of obesity, shown in the figure below, illustrates this perfectly – it shows all the factors contributing to people being obese (or not), and all the relationships between those factors.
This is the reality of trying to make impact in the world – your actions are part of a web of relationships – most of which are beyond your control, many of which are beyond your influence, quite a few of which will be completely invisible to you.
By The Aeschiried Integrators
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:
By Marcel Bursztyn and Seema Purushothaman
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.
By tdAcademy 2021 GAIA paper authors
What are the key aspects of transdisciplinary research and how can they be integrated effectively?
Four key aspects of transdisciplinary research are:
These are illustrated in the figure below, along with a summary of an ‘ideal’ transdisciplinary research process.
1. Context dependencies
Context dependencies are the factors that influence both the research design and the interpretation of results and include: who is involved (the actors), the social, cultural, political and other conditions, and the research setting (for example is it outside the lead researchers’ home country).
By The Care Operative and “Transforming Academia” workshop participants at 2021 International Transdisciplinarity Conference
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.
By Denis Karcher and Chris Cvitanovic
How well do researchers achieve the research impacts they aim for? And if there is a mismatch, does it matter?
Together with colleagues (Karcher et al., 2021), we systematically searched for and reviewed nearly 400 studies that described goals and outcomes that were claimed for knowledge exchange at the science-policy interface. Although our focus was on the environmental sciences, the results may be more widely useful.
Big ambitions
The eight top goals that studies described for their knowledge exchange activities were:
1. Usability, eg., that the interaction with policy makers and/or the knowledge created were credible, legitimate, relevant, and timely (458 references).
By Niki Ellis, Anne-Maree Dowd, Tamika Heiden and Gabriele Bammer
What does it take for research to be impactful? How should research impact be assessed? How much responsibility for impact should rest with researchers and how much with government, business and/or community partners?
We present five key insights based on our experience in achieving research impact in Australia:
1. Planning for impact is essential
By Gabriele Bammer
How can we affirm, value and capitalise on the unique strengths that each individual brings to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research? In particular, how can we capture diversity across individuals, as well as the richness and distinctness of each individual’s influence and impact?
In the course of writing ten reflective narratives (nine single-authored and one co-authored), eleven of us stumbled on a technique that we think could have broader utility in assessing influence and impact, especially in research but also in education (Bammer et al., 2019).We wrote the reflective narratives for a special issue on Julie Thompson Klein’s academic work, in our case especially her impact in Australia and New Zealand. (A taste of Klein’s work can be found in her contributions to this i2Insights blog.)
The process of writing the reflective narratives was unstructured, with each of us writing as much or as little as we wished on whatever aspect of Klein’s work had resonated with us.
By Maria Helena Guimarães, Olivia Bina and Christian Pohl
If disciplines shape scientific research by forming the primary institutional and cognitive units in academia, how do researchers start being interested in and working with a transdisciplinary approach? How does this influence their career development?
We interviewed 12 researchers working in Switzerland who are part of academia and identify as ‘transdisciplinarians’.
They described seven types of motivations: