Creating relevant knowledge in transdisciplinary research projects - Coping with inherent tensions

Abstract

Transdisciplinarity aims to address ‘grand societal challenges’ especially in the sustainability area through realizing ‘alternative’ ways of knowledge production which integrate societal actors into research. Yet, despite considerable political and scholarly effort and support, the numerous initiatives and programs devoted to produce ‘societally relevant knowledge’ often yield rather conventional scientific output. For understanding why this is the case, this research investigates how researchers who were engaged in the Austrian research program proVISION made sense of ‘societal relevance’ and how they made it do-able in practice. The findings suggest rather uniform coping practices for dealing with inherent tensions between different kinds of relevance. Alignment between them could almost exclusively be achieved through quantification and computer modelling, which reinforced a positivistic understanding of relevance. The scarcity of more diverse collective coping strategies is taken as a starting point for developing conclusions for research funding.