Transdisciplinary Research and Sustainability

Collaboration, Innovation and Transformation

Martina Padmanabhan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315441467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Transdisciplinarity is a new way of scientifically meeting the challenges of sustainability. Indeed, interdisciplinary collaboration and co-operation with non-academic 'practice partners' is at the core of this; creating contextualised, socially relevant knowledge about complex real-world problems.

Transdisciplinary Research and Sustainability breaks new ground by presenting transdisciplinary research in practice, drawing on recent advances by the vibrant transdisciplinary research communities in the German-speaking world. It describes methodological innovations developed to address wide-ranging contemporary issues including climate change adaptation, energy policy, sustainable agriculture and soil conservation. Furthermore, the authors reflect on the challenges involved in integrating non-academic actors in scientific research, on the tensions that arise in the encounter of theory and praxis, and on the inherently normative, political nature of sustainability research.

Highlighting the need for academic institutions to be transformed to reflect transdisciplinarity, this timely volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sustainability Science, Transdisciplinary Studies and Philosophy of Science.

1 Introduction

Transdisciplinarity for sustainability

Martina Padmanabhan

Introduction

To meet the challenges of achieving sustainable societies, research has to change fundamentally by embracing transdisciplinarity. The orientation towards problems of sustainability has consequences for framing, conducting and theorising transdisciplinary research. Transdisciplinarity goes beyond interdisciplinary cooperation among different academic specialisations, to integrate practitioners’ expertise into the process of knowledge creation. This volume brings together theoretical reflections and narrative accounts of methodological innovations drawn from experiences of transdisciplinary research projects in the German-speaking world and shows how research is changing to meet the challenges of sustainability. In this context, particular attention is paid to the interface between science and policy and the emergence of intermediary research institutions linking academia to practice. A transdisciplinary approach to science requires thinking out of the box in order to tackle sustainability challenges arising from interconnected social and environmental complexities that span disciplines, knowledge bases and value systems and thus present themselves as wicked problems (Brown et al., 2010). These complex problems are ‘wicked’ because knowledge about them is incomplete or contradictory, people hold conflicting opinions about them, research to address them is expensive, and they are entangled with other problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Wicked problems cannot be overcome by existing modes of problem solving. Transdisciplinarity is an alternative approach that combines academic disciplines with personal, local and strategic understanding, recognises multiple knowledge cultures, accepts the inevitability of uncertainty and considers ethical positions.

Transdisciplinarity dates back a few decades and refers to the theory and practice of research as collaboration among different knowledge holders, with the aim of contributing to problem solving in a complex world and generating socially robust knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994). The term was first used during the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) conference on interdisciplinarity (Jantsch, 1970), reflecting the emergence of environmental research linked with critical social sciences in and outside universities that was stimulating interest in an ‘engaged interdisciplinarity’ that went beyond the confines of academic institutions. In the context of the philosophy of science, Mittelstrass (1987, pp. 152–158) introduced the concept of transdisciplinarity as a further development of the concept of interdisciplinarity in response to the worrying complexity of academic disciplines and their growing specialisation. Gibbons et al. (1994) called for a new mode of knowledge production, also known as Mode 2 science, that was context driven, problem focused and interdisciplinary. This paved the way for the ‘Zurich definition’ of transdisciplinarity agreed on at the International Transdisciplinarity Conference in 2000 (Scholz & Steiner, 2015a, p. 531) as “a facilitated process of mutual learning between science and society that relates a targeted multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research process and a multi-stakeholder discourse for developing socially robust orientations about a specific real-world issue”.

New scientific fields are emerging that deal with global change dynamics, governance of sustainable development and transformations towards sustainability (Future Earth, 2014). In German-speaking countries, transdisciplinary research in sustainability studies has been promoted by governmental research funding programmes since 2000. These include the programmes ‘Mensch – Umwelt’ (Human-nature in Switzerland, ‘KulturLandschaften’ (cultural landscapes) in Austria, and ‘Sozial Ökologische Forschung’ (Social-ecological research) in Germany. The book is very much an outcome of the last of these, as described in more detail below.

In the current state of debate, integration of knowledge emerges as the central methodological challenge (Bergmann et al., 2012; Jahn et al., 2012). ‘Real-world problems’, characterised by interactions and feedback effects between social action and ecological effects, are a central concern of transdisciplinary research. Policies that aim to promote social-ecological transition processes must deal with the complexity of causal chains, feedback loops and problems of scale (Nagabhatla, N. et al., 2014). Furthermore, values and interests shape perceptions. The assessment of any problem situation must therefore take account of the subjectivity (and diversity) of stakeholder perspectives; an analysis of positionality is required in order to arrive at intersubjective and trans-subjective conclusions (Kunze & Padmanabhan, 2014). Describing transdisciplinarity as a pathway towards sustainability simultaneously encapsulates a demand and a challenge: a demand articulated in the search for applicable science and a challenge to achieve new modes of knowledge creation to this end (Thompson Klein, 2015; Lang et.al, 2012; Schneidewind & Augenstein, 2012). In the German-speaking world, traditions of thought such as human ecology and the diverse approaches developed for social-ecological research have contributed to the development of transdisciplinarity by advancing theory, devising new methods, and improving interaction with practitioners. The discourse on transdisciplinarity initiated in the German-speaking academic community has become more diverse and international, opening up and linking up with similar debates in the English-speaking world (Ruppert-Winkel et al., 2015). Transdisciplinary research fruitfully contributes towards the societal goal of sustainability as articulated in the internationally ratified global Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015).

Sustainability research requires transdisciplinary research approaches that overcome barriers between disciplines and genres. A closer cooperation between natural, engineering and social sciences is necessary: professional and lay experts need to interact, and scientific research can no longer ignore considerations of political feasibility. Working towards a sustainable transformation of society challenges the narrow confines of academic disciplines and their self-conceptualisation. Both theoretical explanations and methodological procedures require further development to serve transdisciplinary ends (Wiek et al., 2012). Considerable institutional changes along with the emergence of new norms and quality standards are required to establish transdisciplinarity as part of the mainstream of science for sustainability (Schneidewind & Augenstein, 2012). Moreover, in situations where multiple stakeholders interact, which are paradigmatic for transdisciplinary research, it is inevitable that the assessment of quality will differ among actors (Jahn & Keil, 2015). In transdisciplinary research, therefore, tension will inevitably arise in the encounter of theory and praxis, i.e. in the space between the elaboration of theory and its application in the real world. The epistemological stance of transdisciplinarity allows these tensions to be understood as arising from the contextualised nature of knowledge and its production. From this perspective, science turns out to be an intrinsic part of societal problems – as well as of their possible solutions. This insight is linked to a wider debate on the conditions for transdisciplinary research in an academic system that is organised along disciplinary lines and on what changes need to be made.

The German Committee Future Earth (Deutsches Komitee für Nachhaltigkeitsforschung), part of the international research initiative Future Earth, is dedicated to developing the capacity of science to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (Schmalzbauer & Visbeck, 2016; Padmanabhan, Chapter 14). This will require further programmatic development of transdisciplinarity, increasing self-reflexivity on the part of researchers (Popa et al., 2015), insistence on the practical relevance of their results, methodological innovation for cooperation with lay practitioners, and explicit recognition of the constitutive relationship between science and politics.

This volume presents the work of researchers in the German-speaking world, undertaken in response to these programmatic requirements of transdisciplinary research: our intention is to contribute in three specific ways towards their achievement. First, this book is a space for a fruitful exchange among different generations of German transdisciplinary researchers. It shows how core concepts developed over decades by researchers in different transdisciplinary research communities are being used and further refined by a new generation of researchers that is opening up new research frontiers. Second, this volume highlights the key role played by those who act as intermediaries between academic research and practice. By building bridges between academic research and solution-oriented social and political engagement, these researchers make a vital contribution to the production of the transdisciplinary knowledge required to achieve sustainability goals. Third, this collection is intended as an introduction in the English language to the lively debates and new developments in transdisciplinary research in the German-speaking world. The book provides a window on the German-speaking transdisciplinarity community and its recent theoretical and empirical contributions the increasingly international field of transdisciplinary social-ecological research. Together the authors of this book chart the conditions, processes, applications and potentials of transdisciplinary science as currently practiced by communities of scientists, practitioners and activists.

This introduction provides an overview of the unfolding and merging of discourses and practices in sustainability science and transdisciplinarity, paying special attention to the contribution of the German social-ecological research community to international debates (Ruppert-Winkel et al., 2015). Some preliminary remarks on terminology may help to make German debates more accessible to Anglophone readers. In English usage, the term ‘science’ is very often taken as a synonym for ‘natural sciences’. In this volume, ‘science’ is used in the sense of Wissenschaft, which in the German discourse stands for the whole of the ‘sciences system’, including natural and social sciences and also the researchers working in these fields and the institutions where they work. This meaning is similar, but not identical, to the English term ‘academia’.

In the German discourse, the world of ‘science’ is contrasted to the world of practice, or ‘praxis’, which refers to the application of knowledge for practical purposes by professionals and experts outside of academia. These experts (e.g. policy makers, planners, farmers and natural resource managers) are referred to as ‘practice partners’ (‘Praxispartner’; Bergmann, et al., 2012) in transdisciplinary research. In the more ‘action-oriented’ traditions of participatory research in the Anglophone world (such as participatory action research and many other similar approaches; see Christinck & Kaufmann, Chapter 9), non-academic participants are more commonly referred to as, for example, ‘stakeholders’ or ‘local people’. Practice partners are stakeholders, but a particular class of stakeholder whose expertise enhances their potential to contribute to knowledge creation, which is the principal concern of transdisciplinary research. From its origins in the German-speaking world, the transdisciplinarity approach described in this volume is increasingly being taken up worldwide, in particular by the global research initiative on environmental change and global sustainability ‘Future Earth’.

The remainder of this introduction is structured as follows. The next section outlines three challenges for sustainability science. This is followed by an examination of the origins and key features of transdisciplinarity, a review of principal schools of transdisciplinary theory and practice in the German-speaking world and, finally, a discussion of two key features of transdisciplinarity, knowledge integration and the quest for ‘transformation knowledge’. The introduction concludes with a review of the chapters which make up the remainder of the book.

Meeting the challenges of sustainability science

The great variety of meanings given to the term ‘sustainability’ seems to call for a clarifying and systematising theory to achieve uniformity. The political and ethical understanding of sustainability as a collective commitment to abandon our current unsustainable path for the sake of humans and other species does not provide a sufficiently solid scientific foundation. Sustainability thinking is inherently based on normative orientations that, increasingly, are legitimised democratically and backed by international law. Grunwald (2015) suggests taking this provisional consensus as a starting point for a fruitful dialogue between theory and praxis of sustainability, in which rational discourse improves on (always provisional) theoretical knowledge of sustainability, while at the same time shaping actions taken to promote sustainable development. Such an approach takes the political foundation seriously, but at the same time sees the struggle to operationalise sustainable development as an opportunity to build an ethically driven, shared theoretical framework, expressed in concepts such as strong and weak sustainability (Michelsen et al., 2016). Here the feedback loop between theory and practice becomes evident: the discourses on real-world decision-making and the theoretical foundations of sustainability are intrinsically linked, highlighting the need to understand sustainability as a process.

The call for a comprehensive theory for sustainable development must be carefully distinguished from the concern to develop a theoretical understanding of sustainability research (Grunwald, 2015). Sustainability science is a research approach that aims to elucidate societal effects on the natural environment and vice versa. It adopts a systems perspective, whose goal is the preservation of essential planetary life-support processes while simultaneously meeting fundamental human needs (Clark & Dickson, 2003; Jäger, 2009; Kates et al., 2001). Its concerns go beyond an anthropocentric conceptualisation to embrace fundamental ethical and philosophical questions about justice, power and the relation between the human and the non-human world. From a methodological and epistemological viewpoint, process, integration of different types of knowledge and involvement of practitioners are key components of sustainability science (Brandt et al., 2013). However, in themselves these features do not describe a common research framework; rather they represent a focused communication platform. As much transdisciplinary research rests on case studies (see Ziegler, Chapter 8), the valorisation of research is a challenge, one that is met by the demand for clear conceptual frameworks, a common terminology, and a corpus of validated methods. The call for more securely established, canonical epistemology and ontology is seen as a way to increase the credibility of interdisciplinary research that engages with practitioners in order to contribute to sustainable transitions.

Kläy et al. (2015) identify the dichotomy between facts and values, whereby normative concerns – deeply ingrained in sustainability issues – are excluded from science, as the principal factor hindering efforts to make science accountable to society. As a first step, this impasse could be broken by nurturing niches for sustainability research to provide institutional settings for the development of quality criteria for normative science. However, this should be followed by a joint learning process, aimed at the self-conceptualisation of the transdisciplinary research community as a thought collective (see Fry, Chapter 6) and – ultimately – the transformation of the ‘science system’. Given the diverse histories of transdisciplinarity and the unfolding of discourses on sustainability, it remains open whether it is desirable, or attainable, for this process to lead to the merging of different existing schools.

A central concern of transdisciplinarity for sustainability science is knowledge integration (Defila & Di Giulio, 2015; Jahn et al., 2012; Ruppert-Winkel et al., 2014). This addresses deep-rooted differences among academic disciplines, in terms of ontology, epistemology and methodology, as well as on social and institutional levels, and between academia and practice. Delineating the different streams of sustainability science, ranging from natural science-driven environmental sciences to ecofeminist thinking in the humanities, highlights the challenge involved in integrating knowledge from different traditions for the solution of real-world problems. This overarching task can be broken down into four interrelated fields of research and action that address four limitations in the present-day science system.

First, the academic institutions and governance structures for research are not conducive to the normativity and urgency that characterise societally relevant research (see Ziegler, Chapter 8). Recognition of the mutual embeddedness of the means and ends of scientific, social and political endeavours requires a reconfiguration of the position of science in society. This volume explores the sources of resistance to such a transformation (Dedeurwaerdere, 2013) and identifies promising entry points, from both institutional and conceptual perspectives. It outlines the current framework conditions for transdisciplinary research, and deliberates on options for future co-ordinated action to bring about change not only through, but also for science (Grunwald (Chapter 2), Singer-Brodowski et al. (Chapter 3) and Hofmeister (Chapter 4)).

Second, the way science is currently organised institutionalises the fiction that knowledge creation is an end in itself: the task of scientists. An orientation towards problem assessment and solutions to sustainability problem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: transdisciplinarity for sustainability
• Part I Understanding sustainability science as challenge and necessity
• Part II Cooperating with partners of practice
• Part III Pursuing methodological innovations for transdisciplinarity
• Part IV Policy interface: creating dialogues with policy makers
• Index