Why Transdisciplinary Research Matters: Connecting Academia and Society to Address Our Most Pressing Challenges
The world’s most urgent problems (climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality…) resist traditional solutions. These are what scholars call “wicked problems”: challenges that cannot be answered in an objective way, with no single best solution. Yet although they cannot be solved definitively, they must be managed in the best possible way.[i]
Dealing with such wicked sustainability problems requires a variety of knowledge perspectives and genuine connectivity between knowledge holders who can link different viewpoints in ways that make sense and add value for everyone involved.
Transdisciplinary Research: A Different Path
The Swifft Collective was built on the following critical insight: traditional research approaches, confined within disciplinary silos and academic institutions, struggle to address this complexity adequately.
When scientists stay isolated in their disciplines, when policy researchers never engage with grassroots organisers, when technological innovations emerge without considering cultural contexts, knowledge production may be rigorous but remains disconnected from the reality where change must actually happen.
Fostering transdisciplinary research approach on pressing sustainability issues arising today, like decarbonisation, bridges this divide. It insists that those experiencing problems must help define them, and those implementing solutions must help design them. Hence, by intentionally engaging in synchronic and systems thinking, transdisciplinary research becomes not only beneficial for sustainablity transformations, but essential to it.[ii]
Simply put, this approach recognises that a community organiser’s understanding of social dynamics, a farmer’s knowledge of local ecosystems, or a policymaker’s grasp of political feasibility are not lesser forms of knowledge than scientific knowledge. This doesn’t devalue science; rather, it brings scientific knowledge—and academia more broadly—to a level playing field with other knowledge holders. It creates new connections and acknowledges perspectives without which research remains incomplete.
Islands of Hope: Living Laboratories for Change
The Swifft Collective attempts to support new approaches to knowledge production through collaborations among researchers, citizens, governments, businesses, artists, and anyone committed to transforming ideas into action. Through our seed funding programme, we set out to develop a transdisciplinary framework for sustainability transformations.
We call the outcomes Islands of Hope: places where new practices are not only imagined but tested in real-life settings. These islands may be small, but their impact is significant. They function as living laboratories—spaces that inspire others and challenge existing systems.
Collaboration as foundation
Unlike traditional seed funding projects, the programme makes collaboration a fundamental requirement from day one. Researchers from VUB and ULB must co-lead project proposals with non-academic partners (NGOs, community groups, or private sector actors) from the outset.
This structural requirement seeks to remain conscious of power dynamics and, consequently, to create a level playing field where “academics” and “non-academics” engage in the same process, with roles that are not fixed but instead part of an iterative learning journey. Non-academic partners become co-investigators who help shape research questions, methodologies, and outcomes, while academic partners engage in participatory action research that positions them as learners alongside community actors. Dedicated events—such as the Open House events organised by the House of Sustainable Transitions—spark these collaborations organically, fostering the conditions for genuine partnership rather than transactional relationships.
The programme’s framing around Islands of Hope also acknowledges an important truth: transformation emerges from multiple contexts (“islands,” if you will) simultaneously, rather than from scaling a single “best practice” (“a land”). In sum, “sustainability demands practices that will foster, prize, support, defend and generate diversity at every level”.[iii]
This effort to launch a seed funding call purposefully oriented toward transdisciplinary sustainability research gained wide recognition, resulting in 66 proposals submitted at SWIFFT. Although they differed in scope, thematic focus, and actor composition, they all shared a vision for systemic change. The seven projects that were finally selected should therefore be seen as evidence of a broader societal desire to do things differently and to shape research frameworks that reflect this aspiration.[iv]
Threading Uncharted Territories Together
In an attempt to link the Islands of Hope, empirical testbeds of systemic change, to the main land, where wicked problems are plentiful, we explored possible criteria that we deemed to be important along this journey. These criteria are not fixed metrics on which the projects were to be evaluated, they rather serve as imagnary guidelines on how to bridge the islands with the mainland.
As noted earlier, this depends first and foremost on its ability to mobilise people: bringing together a wide diversity of actors across sectors, disciplines, epistemologies, and ensuring that both academic and non-academic partners genuinely shape the work through co-creation. This mobilisation extends far beyond the project teams themselves—an ongoing, iterative process of inspiring and being inspired by the surrounding social–ecological system. I should add that this effort of mobilisation is also an ever-evolving process, continually refined through participants’ own insights, as we strive to remain conscious of the dangers of epistemic injustice and to promote collective understandings.
Given the arduous task of connecting lifeworlds that often seem very distant from each other, Islands of Hope are an attempt at facilitating research on original non-dominant approaches and methodologies in sustainablity transformation. Evidently, evaluating the originality of a project proposal is something quite subjective and it asks a certain open-mindedness of the evaluators. Yet, we believe that by embracing originality from the outset, we create an opening for experimentation and even co-creation. Project proposals might even experiment with ideas that carry a productive element of risk, opening space for new ways of thinking and acting.
Lastly, Islands of Hope are initiatives that move beyond a project-based logic by intentionally cultivating a meaningful legacy—one that continues to grow after the funding period and contributes to a broader narrative of long-term transformation. This criteria raises important questions about a project’s long-term viability and autonomy, as well as its capacity to continue inspiring others.
The polycrisis demands approaches that match the complexity of the problems themselves and it expects academia to uphold research frameworks that are “just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.”[v]
[i] Craps, M. (2019). Transdisciplinarity and sustainable development. In Encyclopedia of sustainability in higher education (pp. 1-8). Springer, Cham.
[ii] Jacobi, J., Llanque, A., Mukhovi, S. M., Birachi, E., von Groote, P., Eschen, R., … & Robledo-Abad, C. (2022). Transdisciplinary co-creation increases the utilization of knowledge from sustainable development research. Environmental Science & Policy, 129, 107-115.
[iii] Brightman, M., & Lewis, J. (2017). Introduction: the anthropology of sustainability: beyond development and progress. In The anthropology of sustainability: Beyond development and progress (pp. 1-34). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
[iv] Manuel-Navarrete, D., Grauer, C., Chilisa, B., Brundiers, K., Sanusi, Z. A., Seidel, T., … & Lang, D. J. (2025). Inclusive transdisciplinarity: embracing diverse ways of being and knowing through inner work. Ecology and Society, 30(3).
Author
Emil Rousseau, PhD researcher in the Chair of Sustainable Transformations and Wellbeing