In the field of veterinary and animal sciences, most research activities are situated in a societal context that is characterized by discussions on animal use, welfare, public health and environmental sustainability. Complex challenges like this can only be tackled by real collaboration between different disciplines and partners outside academia. Research teams needs to move beyond discipline-specific perspectives to create outcomes that are both scientifically sound and problem-solving oriented.

This need for transdisciplinarity has been recognised by many national and European research funding programmes relevant to veterinary and animal sciences. Project consortia are not only required to collaborate with different academic disciplines but also to explicitly include non-academic partners. Some universities have also reformed their evaluation schemes for researchers to take account of these developments (e.g. Utrecht University’s Recognition and Rewards Vision). This has led to most of us already working in multi-actor teams in such transdisciplinary research projects.

Transdisciplinary research does not imply a novel theory of knowledge or one specific method; it is rather characterised by more general normative aspirations. In recent years, several frameworks have been developed that embrace these aspirations. However, to researchers outside the community of those who study transdisciplinary processes, these concepts often seem vague and lack a connection to their daily workflow. This is particularly true for researchers from veterinary and animal sciences, two fields which are often grounded in radical positivism. As a result, researchers retreat to their own disciplinary niches and work on their own questions within joint research projects. External stakeholders often pursue different interests than the academic researchers or regard themselves more as research subjects than as equal research partners. A common example for this problem is to truly integrate work packages dealing with ethical aspects of animal topics into the whole project and to create functional outcomes together with the veterinary work packages.

Additional efforts of facilitation are necessary to practically implement transdisciplinary collaboration in these research consortia. In my presentation I introduce an exercise which I used to facilitate collaboration on socio-ethical questions in research and innovation among a team consisting of philosophers, biologists, animal scientists, veterinarians, engineers, R&D team members of breeding companies and representatives of animal protection NGOs. The stakeholder tokens exercise is a participatory, playful and holistic approach to stakeholder analysis adapted by Yoo (2021). It employs a style of role play, enables participants to make sense of complex stakeholder networks and relationships related to their research topic and stimulates reflection. By seeking out a robust set of stakeholders, legitimizing their inclusion and reflecting on their dynamic relationships, the participants gained a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the societal context in which their investigations take place. During the exercise it became for instance clear that all project partners regarded animals as stakeholders in their own right and that institutional ethics committees were not seen as sufficient to stimulate genuine reflection. The exercise paved the way for a number of collaborative follow-up activities and student projects within the consortium, which are still underway.

Many German non-university research organizations –in particular institutes of the Max Planck society, Fraunhofer society, Leibniz association, and Helmholtz association– have a long history of engaging in some types of collaborative knowledge creation and transdisciplinary research. However, research disciplines and methodologies, organizational approaches as well as individual mindsets differ widely across and within the four organizations and their independent member institutes, making it particularly hard to incentivize research teams to tackle current challenges by co-producing actionable knowledge jointly with practice partners from both the public and the private sector. We take a step back and measure the preferences of scientists in these German key research organizations regarding knowledge co-production and more. Administered online and distributed via internal communication departments, we conducted a discrete choice experiment accompanied by further survey questions. 917 respondents completed our survey. We asked participants to choose one out of two hypothetical research projects characterized by six attributes (funding volume, academic success, societal impact, knowledge transfer, knowledge co-production, and practice partner type), of which most had three levels (low, medium, high). Respondents were randomly allocated into two blocs, both of which were asked to make eight choices. Standard logistic regressions produce highly significant coefficients for virtually almost all attribute levels. Obvious preference rankings were all confirmed (i.e. researchers prefer high over low academic success, ceteris paribus). Contrasting organization-specific sub-samples reveals clear preferential differences between researchers from different research associations, in particular Max Planck vs Fraunhofer, where the former prefer knowledge transfer to the public sector, while the latter are keener to engage in knowledge co-production with the private sector. However, a latent class analysis shows that there are also intricate differences of preferences within research societies, rendering blanket policies to encourage research-practice collaboration too simplistic. Based on the results of our survey we discuss approaches how to foster transdisciplinarity among the thousands of top scientists in German non-university research and to what degree our findings are transferable to other national contexts.

The most pressing research topics of our time are too complex for a single discipline to tackle. This also holds true for sustainable development – the topic of a 5-year transdisciplinary transformative research project at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (2018-2022). Yet, we experienced issues of e.g., problem framing, mental models, and prejudices against other disciplines that hampered our interdisciplinary collaboration and led to frustration. From a collective identification of ‘pain points’, to a cross impact analysis of influencing factors and team workshops, we administered different formats to help address the arising issues. Here, two main topics of “attitude” and “leadership” emerged. From there, based on the latest state of the art in science of cross-disciplinary team science, we developed key criteria for successful interdisciplinary collaboration. These encompass an interplay of a) three dimensions (epistemic, social, and psychological) and b) three levels (person, team, university). This framework not only underlines the importance of a holistic approach to knowledge integration, but also explicitly recognizes the role of social and psychological elements in interdisciplinary collaboration. In our case, those were less accessible – also due to remote working during the COVID19-pandemic. This perspective helped us in understanding the given issues and guided us through the remaining time of the project, opening new ways of thinking and interacting. By the end of the project, we administered an online survey among the team members to gather relevant learnings for future projects. The survey revealed that most team members were newcomers to the field of transdisciplinary transformative research and that conflict management, rules of decision-making, and active reflection of team processes could have been improved. However, overall, team members indicated a pronounced psychological safety in the subgroups. With these insights, we would like to share our experiences and stimulate a discussion on how to actively shape inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration and how to sensitize team members for this task.

Abstract

The presentation will present findings of a survey and structured interviews whose main objectives were to, firstly definitional, to understand understand what researchers in Africa define and consider as transdisciplinary research. Secondly, gain deeper insights into the perceptions of transdisciplinary research as a research approach, the state of readiness of researchers in Africa to conduct transdisciplinary research. Thirdly, to guage the extent of transdisciplinary research that is already taking place and challenges. Fourthly, draw insights on how transdisciplinary research could be assessed and evaluated and what if at all is different about assessing TD research from traditional disciplinary research. Lastly, determine training and other support needs of researchers with regards to transdisciplinary research.