ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the challenges involved in managing and evaluating quality at a transdisciplinary research center such as Mistra Urban Futures, and sets out to delineate a number of principles for handling the challenges that emerged during the course of initiating and running the Mistra Urban Futures center. It identifies some relevant previous research on quality and evaluation in inter- and transdisciplinary research as well as previous work on the quality of research centers and Centers of Excellence. The chapter gives a concrete suggestion for how to continue to develop an evaluation framework for complex and diffuse research based on eliciting actors' own understandings of how their actions transform into valued effects. The evaluation of transdisciplinary or co-produced research poses a great many challenges to traditional evaluation. The complexity of the functions and goals outlined suggests that formative evaluation should evolve continuously with the development of the center.
