TD for SD – Transdisciplinary Research for Sustainable Development

Overview

The aim of the TDR for SD project is to examine the results of transdisciplinary research projects (TDR) in the field of sustainable development. Transdisciplinary research integrates different disciplines as well as non-academic actors into the research process and thus has a high value for researching complex sustainability issues. Nevertheless, the usefulness of such projects remains controversial. Interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as the involvement of non-academic actors in the research process, can have a negative impact on academic productivity, for example, and often leads to an increased time commitment. Furthermore, there is a great variety of transdisciplinary research projects, which differ in the type of actors and disciplines involved, but also in the design of the research process. In this project, we investigate the range of outcomes that TDR projects can achieve and the extent to which this is influenced by the type of project as well as various contextual factors (e.g. political situation).

The research process includes the following steps:

Systematic analysis of theoretical and practical knowledge to develop hypotheses about the outcomes of transdisciplinary research projects and to what extent the type of project or contextual factors influence them (literature review, expert interviews)
Conducting four case studies to test the developed hypotheses (document analysis, survey, interviews, social network analysis)
Comparative analysis of the case studies

Start

February 2020

Funding

ETH Grant

Collaborators

Dr Eva Lieberherr (NARP)
Rea Pärli (NARP)
Dr Manuel Fischer (external pageeawag)
Julia Schegg (NARP)