Event Details

Transdisciplinarity: buzz word or the hard road to ethical impact? Transdisciplinary research is tough. In all sorts of ways. Intellectually. Personally, Professionally. Ethically. So why bother? Here are narratives from TD research practice in Africa: what it cost, and what we have learned.

The presentation recounts the journey of a natural scientist learning to practice transdisciplinary (TD) research. TD research is necessarily undertaken by teams – so the journey has been collective.

Transdisciplinary research has evolved to mean research that actively and inclusively brings in knowledge from multiple actors and is explicitly located in complex problems - where multiple concurrent drivers are causative, no one intervention is likely to shift the problem, and multiple concurrent interventions are difficult to orchestrate. Any intervention in a complex system is likely to trigger both intended and unintended consequences, as a result of the multiple elements and feedback loops involved. This sort of problem has been designated “wicked”.

There is an argument that transdisciplinarity offers an effective pathway to gather the wide range of people affected by wicked problems together, mutually respectfully – to shift problems in an agreed direction of change. The TD research acts as a catalyst in the mix.

The journey has been mediated by a sequence of research projects (listed below), learning all the way (signposts in bold):

• A transdisciplinary (TD) approach to the question: What are the risks to maximising the environmental benefits expected from environmental flows from Avon Dam? (A water supply dam for Sydney, Australia) - Deriving principles for building TD teams and undertaking TD research
• The Akili complexity and integration initiative: building a TD research capacity in south Africa - Discovering the centrality of complexity
• Crafting a land and water research “playground”: learning to breach implementation barriers and blockages - Ethical dilemmas
• Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in South Africa: Towards Practising a New Paradigm - Key concepts and methodologies
• The Tsitsa Project: supporting sustainable livelihoods for local people through integrated landscape management that strives for resilient social-ecological systems, and fostering equity in access to ecosystem services - Governance as a mediating focus
• Unlocking resilient benefits from African water resources - Developing the Adaptive Systemic Approach. Where is the social science?

In all this – what didn’t work? Learning from failure.

Why is TD research hard? Intellectually: there is real work to be done at the interfaces between disciplines to conceptually and methodologically to achieve overall rigour. Co-supervision was the most helpful learning practice. Personally: confidence to persevere in the face of “we will have none of this TD nonsense in our Science faculty”. Professionally: TD research takes time and crosses boundaries, it’s hard to meet academic promotion and traditional publication criteria. Ethically: it is practically impossible to actually effect shifts in complex problems in the 3-5 years of a usual research project. When the active research ends collaborators are left hanging. Including governance development is a start for more ethical practice.

But… it is worth it! Working in a transdisciplinary manner is sufficiently compelling that it is likely to become “a way of being” (Rigolot 2020).

Speaker Professor Tally Palmer is Director of the Institute for Water Research (IWR) and ARUA Water Centre of Excellence at Rhodes University, South Africa. She says that her aspiration as a leader is "to undertake, supervise and collaborate in research that is used effectively, and as rapidly as possible, to advance equity and sustainability in South Africa." She is committed to "community-engaged action research that is practice based, draws on knowledge across a wide range of academic domains and from practitioners and communities, and is then used to effect behavioural change".

The chair for this session is Ana Porroche-Escudero, senior research associate working on an exciting international project “Unlocking Resilient Benefits from African Water Resources” which is funded by UKRI GCRF through the ARUA Water Centre of Excellence at Rhodes University, South Africa.

Joining the seminar

This seminar was recorded with a live online audience Wed 8th December 2021.

It is now available to view on our YouTube channel: LEC Seminar 2021-12-08 Prof Tally Palmer

Format

• 13:00 (UK time) Welcome and introduction
• 20 minute presentation from our speaker
• Speaker takes questions from our live virtual audience submitted through the text 'Chat' function

You can also join the conversation on Twitter: #LECSeminar.