By Marianne Penker

How can students and academics starting out in transdisciplinary research begin to come to grips with knowledge co-production?
Colleagues and I developed a useful analytical framework comprising the following four elements:
- typology of actor roles (who?)
- research phases (when?)
- objectives and forms of actor integration (why?)
- types of knowledge (what?).
These four elements are illustrated in the figure below.
The development of the framework was based on the literature and our experiences in running a doctoral school on transdisciplinary sustainability research (see Enengel et al. 2012).