In this month’s Global Social Challenges focus, we turn our attention to the evolving landscape of academic knowledge practices through our Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Approaches theme. As traditional methods increasingly fall short in addressing complex global problems, our latest article explores how new forms of collaboration – across disciplines and beyond academia – are reshaping research and impact. Our Global Social Challenges themes align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to help social scientists drive real-world impact.
Underlying the increasing interest in and applications of interdisciplinary (ID) and transdisciplinary (TD) methodologies has been sustained evidence that today’s complex and ‘wicked’ societal problems can rarely be solved by individual disciplines. Indeed, different forms of expertise and knowledge, and the perspectives of different stakeholders or communities of practice, need to be combined. Even having different disciplines working in parallel (i.e. multidisciplinarity) is often inadequate because of a failure to catalyse the added value that can be achieved by combining their respective insights, experience and ways of seeing and knowing the world within a team.
While quite distinct, these terms are often used interchangeably, so it is important to clarify their respective meanings. We define interdisciplinarity as integrating different academic disciplines (as distinct from multidisciplinarity, which denotes collaborations among different disciplines), and transdisciplinarity as integrating perspectives from academic and other stakeholders and/or communities of practice. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are multidimensional and entail heterogeneous practices, values, methods, institutionalising processes, imaginaries and programmatic approaches.
TD approaches were initially developed in relation to participatory public and multi-stakeholder engagement around local infrastructure and service delivery, seeking to overcome dissatisfaction with top-down, expert-led models that incorporated little, if any, active public participation. More recently, TD has found increasing deployment in research, both into dimensions of the methodologies themselves and in terms of widening substantive participation or co-design and hence buy-in to decision making over allocation of scarce resources among competing projects, and in tackling climate change, pandemic and other major societal challenges.
We have both been involved in such initiatives over many years, demonstrating their value in bringing diverse societal actors – and the communities of practice and professional disciplines – together and making a positive difference. Such exercises are, to be sure, often complex and challenging, as well as time-consuming because making progress depends upon developing an understanding of other participants’ world views, perceptions and priorities.
In an urban climate-change resilient development context where vulnerability to flooding, for instance, is becoming problematic, perceptions of the nature of the problem (and hence the most appropriate intervention to address it) among different municipal professional staff – a civil engineer, a housing specialist, an urban ecologist, a sociologist – will differ. Bringing other key stakeholders to the table, e.g. local elected councillors and civil society organisations such as the local residents’ association and environmental group, will increase the challenge of finding common ground commensurately. Residents defined in terms of income, social group, residential location relative to the flooding, and political affiliation will probably also have very different perceptions. Differences over climate change can often be addressed by avoiding seeing it as yet another competing demand on scarce funds, but rather as a hazard with the potential to undermine sustainable development – and hence achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
A distinctive but ultimately very successful form of TD co-design was undertaken by the Campaign for an Urban SDG – which became SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities. This brought together a group of some 35 specialists in different urban academic disciplines and professional communities of practice from around the world, some in individual capacities and others as stakeholder group representatives. While some were known to one another beforehand, others were not. Over some 18 months in 2014-15, we worked together intensively through a quarterly series of face-to-face and online workshops, with emails in between, seeking to understand respective priorities and perceptions around what and how to measure, and then combine these into practicable targets and indicators that would also be politically acceptable to the diversity of UN member states.
These examples clearly show the wealth of methods and tools that have been consolidated in the last decades for inter- and transdisciplinary research. Global societal challenges demand more integrated and contextualised methodological approaches that ground solutions and transformations at different levels. Inter- and transdisciplinary research has now achieved a significant maturity in several world regions, pushing to rethink the boundaries of research and the role of scientists.
Only devoting the time to engage meaningfully and respectfully can build the trustful relations on which calm and more balanced debate about the matter at hand depends. By definition, each situation is unique, so that no template approach or shortcut manual is likely to succeed. External facilitation can often be valuable in highly polarised, conflictual or unbalanced situations. While achieving consensus might be ideal, it is often unrealistic, so some decision-making mechanism will need to be agreed upon where there is a meaningful majority view. In addition, TD methods are not readily scalable. They work best – and indeed probably require application – in relatively small-scale contexts, where the immediacy of sustained face-to-face communication can be effective.
For all these reasons, substantive ID and TD approaches do not appeal to everyone, particularly in relation to the urgency of tackling problems and spending project funds within a specific financial year. Many professionals and elected representatives accustomed to exercising professional or political authority baulk at the prospect – and reality – of having to sit at the table with a wide range of stakeholders, some of whom may lack any or substantial formal education or professional credentials – and treat and be treated as somehow equals, with or without specialist facilitation.
The field has matured greatly over time, especially with the step change in levels of recent interest and publication. One of the leading lights in this endeavour over some 40 years, our former colleague and collaborator, Julie Thompson Klein, sadly passed away in January 2023, and we have just published a special collection in Global Social Challenges Journal of original research and shorter interventions in her honour.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, a lead author on the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, and an editor-in-chief of the Global Social Challenges Journal.
Bianca Vienni-Baptista is Group Leader Cultural Studies of Science & Technology (CSTS) at ETH Zürich and an associate editor of the Global Social Challenges Journal.
Part of our Global Social Challenges programme, the Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Approaches strand supports the Sustainable Development Goals.
Volume 4 (2025): 1 (Mar 2025): Special Collection: Transformative Inter- and Transdisciplinary Methods for Global Societal Challenges edited by David Simon and Bianca Vienni-Baptista is available to read open access on Bristol University Press Digital.
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