Introduction

To address society-wide sustainability transformations, scientific researchers and societal actors have initiated different forms of knowledge co-production and interdisciplinary socio-ecological research. However, less effort has been made in understanding the institutional conditions for moving beyond the myriad of these incipient and piecemeal efforts to a more systematic reform of social practices and institutional rules within the modern science fabric.

The introduction to this book titled Transdisciplinary Research, Sustainability and Social Transformation presents the key arguments mobilized to fill this gap.

First, this book presents an innovative theoretical framework for successfully coping with collective action challenges in transdisciplinary research based on the insights from the literature on the governance of knowledge commons. Second, to examine the practical implementation of collective action arrangements, the book employs a bottom-up empirical approach. Through a comparative assessment of a large sample of transdisciplinary research projects, the various chapters of the book analyze the conditions for successful co-production of usable knowledge on value-laden socio-ecological transformations. Finally, the results of this comparative analysis are used to propose a flexible, polycentric organizational environment for boundary-crossing knowledge exchange, the acquisition of competences for knowledge co-production, and transdisciplinary team formation beyond academia.