Freeing transdisciplinarity from the project straightjacket: reframing the problem

Confronting systemic problems in ecological and socio-technical systems requires transcending traditional reductionist approaches and disciplinary silos. Transdisciplinarity (TD) is frequently proposed and embraced as a way of organizing science so that it is better suited to approach wicked problems, and science funders are increasingly interested in investing in large scale integrated initiatives. Achieving effective coordination and cooperation in these types of initiatives, however, has proved notoriously challenging in practice. Here we put the focus on how TD initiatives are organized. We argue that the notions of “project” and “project management” create organizational and behavioral frameworks that are inadequate and ultimately deleterious for this kind of work. In fact, the project - understood as an institution - has permeated into many aspects of society, not just science, in a process that scholars have named “projectification”. As a deliberate reframing exercise, we explore alternative logics of organizing transdisciplinary work. We offer four major examples from different domains, which we think can help imagine better ways for ‘governing transdisciplinarity’. Transdisciplinary initiatives can contain projects, but not be projects, and, importantly, the need for these projects should emerge from transdisciplinary processes. Conceiving transdisciplinary initiatives as something other than projects would change how we run the initiatives themselves, but this cannot happen in a context where so much in science is organized around projects.