POWERING COLLABORATION AND CO-LEARNING IN TRANSDISCIPLINARY INNOVATION-ORIENTED RESEARCH

The challenges societies are facing today, and potential solutions, have become multidimensional. Issues such as the climate crisis or biodiversity decline cannot be understood and addressed in isolation. The same applies to the challenges faced by the agri-food sector and the question of its further development. Both, challenges and solutions, are transcending disciplinary boundaries. While rigorous disciplinary and interdisciplinary research approaches remain important, they tend to have limited impact if detached from decision-making processes. For many challenges, new transdisciplinary (TD) research approaches are necessary that support decision-making. The main aim of my PhD research was to better understand preconditions for and the obstacles to effective TD sustainability research. A particular interest is to understand how mutual learning between researchers and with practice partners occurs, and how learning can foster research-practice collaboration. A diverse range of research methods and data is used in my analyses. They include semi-quantitative longitudinal data based on three sets of online surveys, mid-term semi-structured interviews and three in-depth case studies. Through my analyses of mutual learning processes I reaffirm the importance of “learning to collaborate” for the success of teams while I also show how it can be operationalised and further investigated in other projects and contexts. More generally, four groups of limiting and enabling factors for successful TD innovation-oriented research were distinguished: project design, project management, professional facilitation and the capacity to co-learn and collaborate.