Transdisciplinary research

Social challenges, such as supplying the population with clean drinking water, adapting to climate change or preserving biological diversity, are extremely complex: today's actions potentially have an impact even into the distant future. Local and global levels are closely interwoven and changes in everyday activities are important as are coordination processes at national and international levels. In view of these challenges, individual disciplines of established science are reaching their limits. 

Transdisciplinary research is regarded as a genuine mode of sustainability research with the aim of helping to shape social reality. In joint learning processes between science and society, it links the search for social solutions to problems with advances in scientific knowledge. The prerequisite for sustainable problem solutions is that social actors are involved in the research process. Their views on problems and their everyday and practical knowledge are therefore brought together with scientific questions and findings. This knowledge integration ensures that the results of research can be linked to science and society.

The transdisciplinary research process


In an ideal transdisciplinary research process, three phases can be distinguished: In the first phase, the aim is to combine social and scientific problems thus creating a common object of research. The second phase focuses on the generation of new knowledge – knowledge integration. That way, it is possible to use the diversity of scientific as well as non-scientific knowledge to develop viable problem solutions. In the third and final phase of the transdisciplinary research process the integrated results will be assessed. The initial question of this evaluation process is: What contribution do the results make to social progress – i.e. how valid and relevant are they for dealing with the social problem at hand and also what contribution do they make to scientific progress. So it is important to determine what new insights have been gained within the disciplines and beyond and where new boundaries of knowledge and thus new research questions have become visible.

Publications

Lux, Alexandra, Stefanie Burkhart (2023): Transdisziplinarität in der Anpassungsforschung. Eine Dokumenten- und Literaturanalyse. Climate Change 02. Dessau-Roßlau

Marg, Oskar/Lena Theiler (2023): Effects of transdisciplinary research on scientific knowledge and reflexivity. Research Evaluation, rvad033

Schneider, Flurina et al. (2022): How context affects transdisciplinary research: insights from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Sustainability Science

Schäfer, Martina, Matthias Bergmann, Lena Theiler (2021): Systematizing societal effects of transdisciplinary research. Research Evaluation, rvab019

Lux, Alexandra, Martina Schäfer, Matthias Bergmann, Thomas Jahn, Oskar Marg, Emilia Nagy, Anna-Christin Ransiek, Lena Theiler (2019): Societal effects of transdisciplinary sustainability research - How can they be strengthened during the research process? Environmental Science & Policy 101, 183–191

Schneider, Flurina et al. (2019): Transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge and sustainability transformations: Three generic mechanisms of impact generation. Environmental Science & Policy 102, 26–35

Jahn, Thomas, Florian Keil (2015): An actor-specific guideline for quality assurance in transdisciplinary research.  Futures 65, 195–208

Bergmann, Matthias, Thomas Jahn, Tobias Knobloch, Wolfgang Krohn, Christian Pohl, Engelbert Schramm (2012): Methods for Transdisciplinary Research. A Primer for Practice. Frankfurt/ New York: Campus Verlag

Jahn, Thomas, Matthias Bergmann, Florian Keil (2012): Transdisciplinarity: Between mainstreaming and marginalization. Ecological Economics 79, 1–10