Tilburg University (TiU) is a humanities and social sciences university in the Netherlands. In TiU’s 2022-2027 Strategy Weaving Minds and Characters, the university explicitly chooses to strengthen the societal impact of its research. The implementation of this ambition is carried out through Academic Collaborative Centers (ACCs). In the ACCs, researchers work together intensively with a range of societal organizations, businesses, governments etc. Key to this collaboration in the ACCs is co-creation: a collaborative and participatory approach involving multiple stakeholders (researchers, societal partners, businesses, students, the civil community) in a process where (academic) research and practical and social initiatives mutually enrich each other. Via co-creation, the Centers bring together different perspectives and expertise, including academic and practice-derived knowledge required to address complex problems and generate meaningful and useful outcomes. The ACCs target pressing societal issues such as sustainability transitions, inequality and wellbeing and health. The collaboration with partners is long-term and structural. ACCs provide a place for interaction between societal partners and TiU’s interdisciplinary research-communities, creating room for transdisciplinarity to thrive.

To build robust and durable ACCs, TiU appointed multiple professors to act as Academic Leads. These professors are rooted in different faculties, thus securing the interdisciplinary nature of the Centers. Dedicated post-doctoral researchers, appointed within the ACCs, carry out research while operating in a highly innovative transdisciplinary environment. Their perspective is central to this conference presentation. We aim to present the opportunities and challenges that a transdisciplinary environment poses on these early career researchers (ECRs), using their experiences as a case study.

We define early career researchers as researchers who defended their PhD thesis up to 6 years ago. For them, working in the context of an Academic Collaborative Center comes with both pros and cons.

To name a few pros: participation in transdisciplinary teams exposes early career researcher to various perspectives and domains of knowledge, broadening their understanding. It provides networking opportunities to expand the researcher's professional network, as they interact with experts and professionals from different fields. In terms of capacity building, their creative problem-solving-skills are stimulated, which is beneficial when tackling complex problems.

However, the emphasis on transdisciplinary research within ACCs can be at odds with the way science has been conducted traditionally, that is, within the boundaries of their own discipline. This can create uncertainty for early career researchers. Working in a transdisciplinary team could result in ECRs spending less time on becoming an expert in a specific field. Furthermore, co-creation processes simply take time and making impact demands different types of (academic and non-academic) outputs, both of which can entail a decreased emphasis on traditional academic outputs such as scientific publications. This can lead to career path ambiguity.

In the presentation we will focus on the important role of ECRs in developing the ACCs. After a short introduction on the ACCs, our ECR Yvette Drissen will elaborate on how she shapes her research in a transdisciplinary context.

In this presentation, we will discuss the innovative initiatives of the InterAmerican Institute (IAI) for Climate Change Research. The IAI is an intergovernmental entity that serves 19 member states in the Americas, each with its unique context. The IAI aims to cultivate and disseminate knowledge that deeply understands and addresses global environmental change in a context-specific manner. The institution is dedicated to promoting transdisciplinary research and sharing its findings to create actionable knowledge for policymakers. The ultimate goal is to play a crucial role at the science-policy interface by producing not only robust but also practical knowledge.

This presentation will offer two concrete examples of the transdisciplinary activities developed over the last year by the IAI: the training program titled “Tropical Forests in the Americas: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Changing Environments” and the “Handbook of Recommendations for Transdisciplinarity”. The IAI Transdisciplinary Academy aims to advance transdisciplinary knowledge and practice of global environmental change research and to inform decision-making in the public and private sectors. The academy also facilitates sharing information, best practices, and regional dialogue on priority issues in the Americas, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainable food production. Following this line, this initiative will foster research collaboration at the regional level by linking researchers across disciplines, policymakers, and locally based leaders from different countries, thus strengthening a regional Americas transdisciplinary network on tropical forests.

The Handbook of Recommendations for Transdisciplinarity emerged from a workshop in Panama in 2023, a collaborative effort involving academics and stakeholders from six transdisciplinary projects under the Small Grants Program: The Role of Ecosystem Services in Adaptation to Global Change for Human Wellbeing (SGP-HW). This manual responds to the explicit needs and demands of social actors, offering a toolkit for community organizations and researchers interested in embracing a horizontal, inclusive approach to transdisciplinary research. It encapsulates a wealth of perspectives formed from interviews and participatory workshops with non-academics across the Americas, reflecting the rich tapestry of views on climate change and related challenges.

In conclusion, our presentation aims to highlight the IAI's pioneering efforts in promoting a transdisciplinary paradigm, where diverse knowledge systems and stakeholder engagement converge to create meaningful, context-aware solutions to the pressing climate challenges facing the Americas.

Serious planning problems still persist in Sweden despite years of initiatives targeting their resolution. Such ‘wicked’ problems are characterized by causal complexity often with broad temporal and spatial reach, a high degree of politization and uncertainty, and the involvement of multiple agencies and societal actors. One approach to handling such problems is through discrete platforms and arenas that are designed to enable different forms of collaboration. Given that these arenas are situated between different organizations and decision-making levels, we refer to them here as boundary spaces since they have no one organizational base, but work at the boundaries between different organizations. If boundary spaces are promoted as a viable solution to wicked problems, then we need a better understanding of how they work, especially regarding the dilemmas and tensions that such spaces face. This paper presents a transdisciplinary investigation of the dilemmas that arise in four examples of boundary spaces dealing with wicked problems in Swedish planning on sustainable urban development, safe communities (2 cases), and transport infrastructure. The overall aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how boundary spaces can contribute to sustainable transitions, using an innovative method which we call Learning Dialogues (LD). Through a transdisciplinary analysis of the interview material, the practitioners involved in the cases together reflected with an interdisciplinary team of researchers on the challenges that arose in the boundary spaces as well how they could be addressed. Four LDs were organized around four themes. These include dilemmas arising (1) in the context including places outside and before the boundary room is staged, i.e. in society at large and within the organizations that want to collaborate; (2-3) in the boundary space itself in their relations and processes; and (4) in the zone between the boundary space and the home organization and the surrounding society, where transformation and influence take place. Each LD discussed dilemmas which arose in the boundary spaces within these four themes and, through a variety of workshop methods, reflected upon and exchanged experiences across these four cases. This paper presents the TD design of the overall project, the results of the LD and preliminary results regarding how the LD results can be transformed into different types of pedagogical material that can be used by the participating agencies to increase the effectiveness of their work with wicked problems in different collaborative arenas.