Identifying and addressing challenges faced by transdisciplinary research teams in climate change research
Introduction
Research into mitigation of and adaptation to climate change requires not only scientific knowledge of the climate system but also expertise in technical and social sciences in order to transform our current socio-technical systems. As a result such projects require not only development and integration of academic and non-academic expert knowledge in a collaborative way but also public outreach and engagement needs to be undertaken by these collaborative research consortiums to enable deliberation and action on institutional, socio-cultural, organizational and technological change that is urgently required. Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is increasingly accepted as the appropriate approach for complex and socially relevant problems, specifically when dealing with transitions to sustainable, resilient and low-carbon societies (Kinzig, 2001, Pohl, 2005, Boon et al., 2014, Lang et al., 2012).
Cities are increasingly the focus of interventionist research projects dealing with climate change adaptation and mitigation. This is due to the global urban demographic shift with more than 50% of the population now living in urban conditions, and because cities contribute around 70–80% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is also because of the growing economic and political importance of cities (OECD., 2010, Satterthwaite and Dodman, 2009, UN-Habitat, 2011, UNEP., 2011, Ryan, 2013). Patterns of production and consumption are defined shaped by urban living. Despite having no formal standing as actors within global processes to address climate change, cities have become a locus for action (Rosenzweig et al., 2010, Bulkeley, 2010). Cities involve complex and dynamic interactions between built and urban form, technology, social and cultural behaviour and systems of provision (energy, water, food, transport, waste and information). Therefore, it is no surprise that the term “wicked problem” was first conceived in urban planning theory (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Also, urban research was one of the earliest areas to adopt transdisciplinary approaches (Ramadier, 2004).
Collaboration and coordination between researchers from different disciplines is one of the main characteristics of TDR (Bergmann et al., 2005, Burger and Kamber, 2003, Guggenheim, 2006, Max-Neef, 2005, Wickson et al., 2006, Späth, 2008, Zierhofer and Burger, 2007). TDR is similar to other types of collaboratory research yet has three distinctive qualities: 1. It is agenda driven (Max-Neef, 2005, Wickson et al., 2006, Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2006, Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn, 2007, Wiek, 2007, Späth, 2008); 2. It aims not only at the integration of knowledge from different disciplines but also presumes theoretical and methodological transformation of each discipline will take place through the process of research (Bergmann et al., 2005, Wickson et al., 2006, Guggenheim, 2006, Zierhofer and Burger, 2007); 3. It involves non-academic participants with significant stakes in the research problem and process, either directly as researchers or indirectly as informants (Burger and Kamber, 2003, Bergmann et al., 2005, Max-Neef, 2005, Wickson et al., 2006, Guggenheim, 2006, Zierhofer and Burger, 2007, Späth, 2008).
Academic scholarship includes evaluations of transdisciplinary projects and performance of TDR teams (e.g. Bergmann et al., 2005, Klein, 2008, Polk, 2014, Roux et al., 2010, Späth, 2008, Stokols et al., 2003, Walter et al., 2007) and helpful resources about designing TDR and leading TDR teams (Bennett et al., 2010, Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn, 2007, Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2008). There is also a substantial body of literature exploring the challenges associated with TDR (Stokols et al., 2008), a summary of which we report in Section 2. This literature includes challenges associated with knowledge integration (e.g. Zierhofer and Burger, 2007), methodological challenges (e.g. Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn, 2008, Polk, 2014), challenges associated with both theoretical and practical knowledge generation in TDR (Jahn et al., 2012) and challenges of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries (e.g. Cheruvelil et al., 2014) and with stakeholders (e.g. Polk, 2015). In these studies, the exploration of challenges is framed with references to the research process (such as studies on challenges associated with integration of knowledge or on methodological challenges) or with a focus on specific challenges experienced by TDR team members (such as related to team formation or team communication). There are also studies which mention challenges associated with TDR projects, some discussing interrelationships between these challenges without a particular focus on teams' experiences (e.g. Lang et al., 2012). Nevertheless, despite this richness in literature, there are no case studies systematically reporting on the challenges experienced by TDR teams during different phases of project execution.
In this paper we present a reflective account and analysis of our experiences during the early phases of a TDR project with the aim of identifying challenges encountered by TDR teams during project execution and propose strategies for addressing them. We focus on the first fifteen months of an ongoing (four year) project about low-carbon transitions in Australian cities as a case study. The overall methodology we used was a participatory action research approach executed from the beginning of and run in parallel with the subject case study. A range of methods covering document analysis of project progress meeting minutes, reflective research journaling, and collaborative group reflection informed the case study findings.
The following section reviews existing literature about challenges faced by TDR teams and provides a conceptual framework for our case study analysis. The third section explains the case study and research methodology. The fourth section reports the case study findings on challenges faced by the research team, how these were managed or mitigated, and overall insights derived from the case study. The final section provides the recommendations we propose and our concluding remarks.
Section snippets
Challenges faced by transdisciplinary research teams: summary of literature
Despite the potential of TDR to tackle complex, real-world problems better than disciplinary research, academic literature suggests that TDR poses challenges that need to be considered and overcome through strategies developed as part of the research.
Integration is an inherent and arguably the most challenging characteristic of TDR (Bammer, 2005, Pohl, 2014). It is also a core quality criterion for research validity in TDR along with consensus on problem framing, research objectives and
The project
Visions and Pathways 2040: Visions, Scenarios and Pathways for Low-carbon Resilient Futures in Australian Cities (VP2040) is a four year long project aiming to develop visions, scenarios and pathways for low-carbon resilient city futures in Australia. The project is funded by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low-carbon Living (CRC LCL). Cooperative Research Centres are an Australian Federal Government program to fund scientific research by bringing together research institutions,
Complexity and prevalence of challenges
Table 2 presents a summary of challenges the research team faced during the first fifteen months of the project. We identified 21 distinct challenges. Two of these challenges were of emergent, twelve were of inherent, three were of institutional and two related to teamwork. Only two of these 21 challenges (challenge Nos. 16 and 17) belonged to a single category and all of the others belonged to two or more categories. The number of categories that apply to a challenge can be seen as an
Conclusions and recommendations
Cities have increasingly been the focus of interventionist research projects dealing with climate change adaptation and mitigation. These research projects are of transdisciplinary character by being agenda driven, requiring the integration of knowledge from different disciplines and involvement of non-academic stakeholders both in problem framing and problem solution. Transdisciplinary research projects are messy and challenging to design from the outset, and therefore require emergent
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the Cooperative Research Centre Low-carbon Living (Project ID: RP3008) and its partners for funding the research project that is the subject of this paper. The authors would like to thank four anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback on the earlier versions of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Christian Pohl, Matthias Bergmann and Merritt Polk for providing invaluable insights about the challenges faced by transdisciplinary research
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