It goes without saying, that the challenges faced by societies in transforming into more sustainable and resilient futures affect and engage a variety of stakeholders across multiple decision-making levels and sectors, including various knowledge domains and scientific disciplines. There is an urgent need for better collaborative spaces for the transformative science partnerships that are needed for solving large-scale sustainability challenges, so called ‘wicked’ problems. Wicked sustainability problems defy resolution because they are characterized by very heterogeneous problem features. For example, they are highly contested and often politically explosive, engaging a diverse array of societal values and actors. They have a high degree of knowledge complexity, that not only transcends disciplines and areas of expertise, but also have no temporal or spatial limits/boundaries, resulting in multiple causalities and effects and making future trends highly uncertain. To capture and address such features requires multi-scalar, multi-generational and multi-sectoral transformation processes across a diversity of disciplines, sectors, organizations, stakeholder groups and locations.
Many innovative projects have been undertaken to address the systemic nature of sustainability problems and to develop different types of collaborative processes to address them. However, less systematic knowledge has been gathered on how science itself can be better positioned to support transdisciplinary processes on a wider scale, to impact societal transformations more effectively.
This workshop will focus on building a better understanding of the support functions and mechanisms that create the institutional conditions needed for supporting, legitimizing, and scaling up transdisciplinary and co-production research and practice within both academia and practice. The underlying motivation is the need for universities and research institutions to develop a diversity of functions for involving a heterogeneous set of societal actors, values, and knowledge in collaborative research, incentivize participation, and create the skills and competencies needed to systematically address sustainability challenges.
A 20-minute introduction will exemplify existing support structures within a transdisciplinary platform – The Centre for sustainable urban futures in Gothenburg, Sweden – and associated success factors, challenges, and perceived gaps. The Centre for sustainable urban futures is a collaborative partnership between eight organisations in West Sweden, representing both research and practice. It is tasked to address complex social challenges in the context of urban development, and to facilitate the building of integrated knowledge and capacity that can transform cities and communities in a sustainable manner. Examples will also be given from associated attempts to facilitate transdisciplinary co-production in project settings.
Following, participants of this workshop will be invited to co-reflect on existing support mechanisms and how these fit into the idea of a “TD ecosystem”, based on the following questions:
1. The university's role and responsibility in contributing to societal change:
a) What characterizes a university that contributes to positive/sustainable development in the surrounding society?
b) To what extent and how is TD collaboration one of the activities that universities should be undertaking?
2. Mapping and reflecting on existing support mechanisms for transdisciplinary collaboration and co-production:
a) What experiences do you have with different types of TD support?
b) What already existing mechanisms can we build on?
3. Exploring future support mechanisms:
a) What functions or mechanisms should a TD support structure have?
b) What could a 'TD ecosystem' bring?
We will look to harvest the experiences in the room through a co-creation method consisting of individual reflection, beehive discussions and open space. Building upon the experiences and competences within the group, we will seek to explore the potential design of elements and mechanisms that appear to be missing. The outcome will be a co-designed preliminary outline of a TD ecosystem prototype, designed to capture the diversity of functions that a local support system for need to involve.
We welcome all participants interested in developing support functions for capacity building in and for inter- and transdisciplinarity, and in achieving learning for societal transformation. Particularly, we reach out to those who have experiences from linking such functions in a composed system, conceptually as well as in practice.
