How can researchers improve the quality of their interdisciplinary proposals? What would help in clarifying project formulation, enriching description, maximizing relevance, facilitating workplan implementation (by anticipating possible difficulties) and enhancing impact?
The self-assessment checklist provided below aims to help project leaders and their research teams systematically consider the specific interdisciplinary aspects of an interdisciplinary research project, whatever their original discipline or experience of interdisciplinarity.
How can research effectively strengthen Indigenous leadership and incorporate respectful design to support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination?
We retrospectively reflected on our experience of working together in a project focused on land and fire management in a specific region in Australia, a project that involved Indigenous Cultural Fire Practitioners, Elders, and community members, as well as Local Aboriginal Land Councils, local councils and government agencies (Gothe et al., 2025). This reflexive analysis aimed to understand and share what we have learned as participants in this Indigenous project as a contribution to the complex work of ensuring meaningful ways to support Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and the use of co-design in Indigenous-led land-based projects situated in urban contexts.
How can research funding programmes address existing inequalities in global science systems? How can they foster science-society-policy interactions and transdisciplinary research in the Global South?
Inequalities in science disadvantage the Global South in terms of classical science metrics such as the number of researchers and publications, but also in terms of access to research, funding and infrastructure. Early career researchers are particularly affected.
To address these inequalities, financial investment in research capacity is needed from both national governments and international donors. However, dependence on international funding reinforces the influence of the Global North in setting research agendas in the Global South. We argue that international research funders can mitigate this challenge by supporting transdisciplinary research, because transdisciplinary research integrates different perspectives to resonate with local realities and problems.
How to do capacity development well in the research and knowledge for development sector? And since the pandemic pushed everyone online, how can capacity development be done well digitally too? In particular how to avoid making the same mistakes, with disappointing results and frustrated partnerships?
As an international development organisation, INASP has been doing this work for the last thirty years and while it isn’t easy, we think it is possible to do it well. There are also very simple starting points: we have to listen carefully, start with what already exists, and see ourselves as enablers and partners, who are also learning in the process, not experts with all the answers.
We recognise capacity building is an imperfect term too – and a contested concept, with origins in colonial and in post-war technical projects to accelerate development and ‘catch-up’ the South.
The INASP approach is summarised in our learning and capacity development framework shown in the figure below.
How can transdisciplinary researchers efficiently and effectively support diverse and time-poor actors in participatory scenario planning processes?
Scenario planning is a useful tool for policy development, especially for contexts with high uncertainty and complexity as described by Bonnie McBain in her i2Insights contribution, Designing scenarios to guide robust decisions. However, participatory scenario planning takes time, as pointed out by Maike Hamann and colleagues in their i2Insights contribution, Participatory scenario planning.
To address this challenge, we designed, tested and evaluated a rapid scenario planning method for a regional sustainability transition. In this case, the regional authority (host organization) wanted to increase collaboration and strengthen the link between municipal spatial planning and regional development by building consensus on the region’s most important development issues over a 30-year horizon to 2050.
What is Appreciative Inquiry? How does one shift from research that focuses on problems and negative details to the strengths-based approach of Appreciative Inquiry? What are the benefits and requirements of such an approach? And what is it about Appreciative Inquiry that fosters change?
Appreciative Inquiry, developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, is a five-step process (originally four steps), as shown in the figure below. The steps are:
Definition – deciding what to study is critical in moving humans in a positive direction
Discovery – discovering and appreciating best experiences
Dream – imagining the ideal – how it would be if those valued experiences happened most of the time
Design – defining the dream more clearly and discussing steps towards realizing it
Destiny – implementing wide ranging actions, improvisation, learning, and adjustments.
What are some key tips for establishing new, large consortia to tackle complex global challenges? What are the best ways to coordinate large groups of researchers, practitioners and publics towards a shared goal?
Describing this type of research is cumbersome. As a shorthand we have started to use the terms ‘LMITs’ (pronounced ‘limits’) and ‘New LMITs’ to denote similarly characterised projects and teams that are: ‘Newly forming’, ‘Large-scale’, ‘Mission-orientated’, and ‘Inter- and Trans-disciplinary’.
Drawing on our own experience over the past three years of establishing a New LMIT, we suggest six primary inter-related recommendations for other New LMITs, and for those who fund or support such research groups:
1. Factor in (far) more time than you might expect
2. Seek out funders who understand
By Oghenekaro N. Odume, Akosua B. K. Amaka-Otchere, Blessing N. Onyima, Fati Aziz, Sandra B. Kushitor and Sokhna Thiam
1. Oghenekaro N. Odume; 2. Akosua B. K. Amaka-Otchere; 3. Blessing N. Onyima; 4. Fati Aziz; 5. Sandra B. Kushitor; 6. Sokhna Thiam (biographies)
Why is transdisciplinary research that aims to co-produce knowledge across academic disciplines, policy contexts and societal domains often so difficult? What are the key challenges that need to be overcome?
We identified five key challenges when we analysed five projects implemented in nine African cities which were part of the Leading Integrated Research for Agenda 2030 in Africa (LIRA) program (Odume et al., 2021).
Challenge #1: Conceptual threshold crossing
Science-policy-society interactions require active engagement of diverse actors, often with different discursive language and epistemic backgrounds. Translating academic discourse into accessible everyday language can be challenging. In the same vein, policy and societal actors use discourse unfamiliar to academic actors.
Conceptual threshold crossing in terms of intellectual, ontological, and cognitive transformation is particularly challenging when projects are not just about understanding problems or raising awareness, but about true co-production of knowledge and co-ownership of the resulting outcomes.
How can the integration required in large inter- and transdisciplinary programs be effectively led? What challenges do leaders of integration in such programs face and how can they address them? What are the particular challenges in using a theory of change as an integrative tool?
We describe five key challenges that we encountered when leading the integration for a large 10-year inter- and transdisciplinary research program, which explored novel non-grid water and sanitation systems that can function as comparable alternatives to conventional large network-based systems. We experienced these challenges when applying the tool Theory of Change to facilitate communication, collaboration and integration among the team members (for more on theory of change see the i2Insights contribution by Heléne Clark). We also share the strategies we employed to address these challenges. The lessons we developed are likely to be applicable to other inter- and transdisciplinary research programs.
An i2Insights story based on one originally told by Thea Snow, David Murikumthara, Teya Dusseldorp, Rachel Fyfe, Lila Wolff and Jane McCracken
1. Thea Snow; 2. David Murikumthara; 3. Teya Dusseldorp; 4. Rachel Fyfe; 5. Lila Wolff; 6. Jane McCracken (biographies)
How is storytelling important in driving systems change? What does good storytelling look like? What makes it hard to tell stories about systems change work? We address these three questions.
But first, what do we mean by systems change? We use the definition developed by New Philanthropy Capital (Abercrombie et al. 2015): “Systems change aims to bring about lasting change by altering underlying structures and supporting mechanisms which make the system operate in a particular way. These can include policies, routines, relationships, resources, power structures and values.”
What’s required for researchers to effectively engage with local communities in international research tackling complex socio-ecological problems?
In a project involving Indonesian and Australian researchers working with local communities to restore peatlands in Indonesia, we identified three key elements for international collaboration with stakeholders:
What are the key ingredients for successfully developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals? What’s required for a team to successfully work together at the proposal development stage?
Here we provide seven lessons based on our experience, divided into:
team characteristics
structuring the grant proposal writing process.
Team characteristics
Lesson 1: Invite a mix of new blood and established experience.
It is useful to have team members at various stages of their careers, as well as researchers who have worked together previously and those who have never met before. It can work well to have clusters of researchers who have worked intensively within the cluster, but who are new to each other across clusters.
