The complexity of global challenges on social, economic, and environmental level require new forms of knowledge production and new ways of doing research. In the search for sustainability of socioecological systems, sustainability science emerged as a transdisciplinary field aiming to generate actionable knowledge and evidence-supported solution options for complexity, uncertainty, and sociopolitical controversy. Sustainability scientists seek to go beyond descriptive-analytical approaches and enter into dialogue and mutual learning processes with societal stakeholders, because a transition towards more sustainable societies should be undertaken collaboratively. While pursuing societal transformation together with scientific breakthroughs, researchers are testing new forms of engagement in science-society interfaces.
Universities have a fundamental role to promote sustainability and started to engage in sustainability science, a transdisciplinary field of mutual learning processes in science-society interfaces. While interand transdisciplinary research approaches are required, usually with a participatory dimension, there are several gaps experienced, e.g. little knowledge how to conduct effectively these research processes and the necessity for more empirical knowledge about their effectiveness and impact on sustainability transitions. This paper addresses the methodological approach of a postdoctoral research project targeting capacity building in science-society interfaces with the objective to discuss in particular the transdisciplinary research design to tackle the gaps mentioned above.
The project development was guided by the TRANSFORM framework for transformational sustainability research from Wiek and Lang (2016) and integrates foresight and backcasting as well as systemic constellations to inform intervention research strategies.
The research process is divided into three phases and uses a Portuguese and a German faculty/university as cases to investigate their interactions with local communities, addressing a main guiding research questions in each phase: (Phase I) What have been the approaches in moving forward towards participatory sustainability research between science and society? (Phase 2) How to overcome experienced difficulties/gaps in inter-and transdisciplinary research and make collaborative efforts more effective? (Phase 3) How to improve science-society interfaces for sustainability on a long-term perspective?
First results from phase 1 will be presented and interlinked with the next research steps according to the TRANSFORM framework used for this project. Conference participants are invited to discuss the research methodology and to contribute to the preliminary conclusions.
Keywords: Transformational Sustainability Research, Higher Education for Sustainable Development, Capacity Building, systemic constellations, collaborative methods.
Literature:
Wiek, A., and Lang, D.J. (2016). Transformational Sustainability Research Methodology. in Harald Heinrichs, Pim Martens, Gerd Michelsen & Arnim Wiek (Eds.), Sustainability Science: An Introduction (pp. 31-41). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7242-6_3
1b. Research methods and methodologies (including the role of academia, policy engagement
