Unlocking the potential of boundary crossing research to address sustainability challenges

Addressing societal challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, and food insecurity requires organisational and political action, as much as scientific and non-scientific knowledge and understandings. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ITD) research holds large potential to address these sustainability challenges and meet the associated sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, due to the design of the current research system (i.e. the research infrastructure, funding mechanisms, and the governance and policies involved in its institutions), most research does not seem to support innovative boundary crossing collaborations. ITD practice is like navigating a maze: ITD comes with opportunities for crafting unusual collaborations, but it is also easy to get lost due to the many pathways (and uncertainties) and hurdles. In this commen, we identify a series of hurdles faced by individual ITD researchers while navigating the winding paths of ITD research. We propose ways to overcome these hurdles and reshape the maze to strengthen its contribution to locally relevant and inclusive socio-technical and socio-ecological solutions. We build our arguments on qualitative data from workshops and interviews on boundary crossing research, supported by ongoing discussions in the ITD literature and our own experiences in the ITD field. We propose three bold actions to address these hurdles geared towards transforming the research system for individual researchers, research institutes, and funding agencies: acknowledging knowledge integration as an expertise, creating space for co-learning (beyond projects), and foregrounding collaboration.