Introduction

This diverse collection of empirical, methodological and theoretical chapters concerning the practice of interdisciplinary research is intended to give the reader a glimpse at the state of the art and the main challenges facing researchers, research institutions and communities that aspire to carry out and develop non-reductive, interdisciplinary investigations of social ecological systems. The topics addressed within its pages may be assigned labels such as social-ecological systems research, sustainability science or ecological economics – all of which, of course, somehow describe what the contributing authors aim to address, both here and elsewhere in their work. However, as the name of this collection, which we borrow from Koestler and Smythies (1969), would suggest, we prefer to think of this text and its contributions in a broader context, as part of the more general work of discovering what it means to be doing science well in the twenty-first century.