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Two Ph.D. Journeys in Transdisciplinary Research

Since TD research is an ambitious undertaking, should scholars consider using it for degree purposes?  This chapter looks at the personal experiences of the two authors applying a TD approach in their Ph.D. studies. Both authors wanted to use a TD approach for Ph.D. studies because of its applied, problem-oriented, and transformative value, and because of a desire to strengthen their ability to act as change agents. By examining the individual experiences, insights about the competencies required for conducting TD research and the institutional enabling conditions for supporting these competencies at the postgraduate level were developed. These insights may aid in developing stronger TD training programs.

Petra Holden: Navigating Trade-offs between Disciplinary Rigor and the Ideal Transdisciplinary Process

My Ph.D. involved using a transdisciplinary (TD) approach to investigate the impact of mountain protection on ecosystem services in relation to broader socio-economic and ecological drivers of landscape change (Holden, 2018). Prior to my Ph.D., my postgraduate studies limited me to hypothetico-deductive research. In contrast, my undergraduate studies were referred to as a management degree, including three years of “theory” (what I would call pragmatic theory) and one year of full-time experiential work. I did not pursue a professional career in conservation management after my undergraduate program because I felt that, to fully engage science in management, I had to be exposed to and gain experience in “the research process.” However, during my postgraduate years at a formal university, I experienced challenges linked to disciplinary differences and perceptions on facts, rigor, causal explanation, and research goals, which I struggled to align with the necessity of doing applied research.

It was largely in response to these limitations that my desire for building a place for socially relevant research at research institutions grew. I was interested in understanding interconnections and feedbacks between systems. I valued a range of methods and knowledge sources, but I wanted to tackle problems that were meaningful outside of academia. I was frustrated with academia, therefore I left for a while to work in the field of climate change adaptation.

In this work, I noted the need for research information at multiple scales. For example, I needed information at both a water basin (larger catchment) and community or landscape (sub-catchment) levels to guide policy and implementation. I once again was frustrated because I felt that the projects within which I was working were not fully engaging with the complexity of the problems they were attempting to address. Therefore, when I started Ph.D. studies, I looked for funding that would support TD research and supervisors from various disciplinary backgrounds. I found a project with an ecologist, climate scientist/hydrologist, geographer, geomorphologist, economist, and a remote sensing expert (from five departments and three faculties at the University of Cape Town). My supervisors allowed me room to steer the project. At the outset, I engaged with landowners and managers to understand the situation and define the research focus.

Operationalizing TD research. Before writing my research proposal, I had interviews and informal discussions with conservation and fire managers, as well as local landowners. I matched their areas of concern, which were around land use, fire, and water, with appropriate literature, methods, and tools. I reviewed existing frameworks and concepts for understanding social-ecological change (Rissman & Gillon, 2017) including systems thinking (Kim, 1995; Meadows, 2008; Richmond, 1993), resilience thinking and theory (Folke, 2016; Folke et al., 2010), the Social-Ecological Systems Framework (Ostrom, 2009), and others (see reviews in Binder, Hinkel, Bots, & Pahl-Wostl (2013), Scholz (2013), and Cox et al., 2016).

I looked for a framework from sustainability science to integrate the different disciplinary results, however, none proved suitable (Shahadu, 2016). I, therefore, used the concept of pluralism (Isgren, Jerneck, & O’Byrne, 2017; Miller et al., 2008) to justify the use of various disciplinary aspects and to integrate the concepts of social-ecological systems, land use transitions, and ecosystem services into an overarching framework for protected area impact evaluation. Throughout the process, I engaged supervisors on a one-on-one basis regarding their specific areas of expertise. I also hosted three “workshops” that all the supervisors attended. Here, they focused on providing advice on how to reduce the workload to complete the Ph.D. within the expected time frame; there was almost no engagement of a TD nature. There was a concern that the Ph.D. program included too many approaches and aspects to fit into the expected Ph.D. time frame (three years). In these supervisor “workshops,” I presented detailed disciplinary methodologies and findings for all disciplines in the Ph.D. program and received detailed disciplinary insights from the supervisor who was a disciplinary expert in the respective field. In hindsight, I should have only focused on the TD aspects of the Ph.D. during these workshops and on how to integrate disciplinary aspects towards the central concerns in the landscape. It is likely that doing this would have required a focused methodology and efficient facilitation skills to bridge disciplinary epistemological differences.

Challenges to TD research. It was challenging to do all aspects of TD research (i.e., interdisciplinarity, co-creation, and knowledge integration) justice. I found it difficult to address all disciplinary requirements within the time and funding constraints, while also focusing on overarching applied research questions of a TD nature. I had to make trade-offs between achieving disciplinary rigor and achieving the “ideal” TD process.

In general, there was more pressure from my supervisors to obtain results separated out into their respective disciplinary domains than to obtain overarching, integrated results. A lack of all the supervisors having a mutual understanding of TD theory and methods limited the feedback that I could receive at a broader, integrated level. I struggled to consolidate the vast literature on transdisciplinarity and sustainability science into a succinct rationale for mixing methods. There were also differences between what landowners and managers viewed as interesting and relevant questions and results and what my supervisors and other academics viewed as necessary for doctoral research. Due to the emerging nature of the field, I also pre-empted that it was likely that my Ph.D. would be evaluated by disciplinary specialists rather than multi-method or TD researchers. This is because the notion of a “TD expert” is something that has not fully materialized in academia therefore individuals with these skills are often mixed in with disciplinary scientists.

In reflection, my efforts to achieve disciplinary rigor and to justify the various angles and approaches used for data, methods, and analyses side-lined other elements of the TD process. For example, although meaningful engagements with actors were achieved during the Ph.D. (e.g., co-design) and societal knowledge was integrated into the findings, there was a limited appraisal of the research findings in terms of relevance for actors in the landscape and a research management interface for driving change was absent.

Transdisciplinary research competencies. My modest positionality towards disciplines (i.e., believing that no discipline is in a better position than another to solve a problem or understand a situation (Augsburg, 2014)) enabled me to use and respect diverse disciplinary methodologies. However, I lacked insight and experience on how to trade-off disciplinary depth with integration and high-level systems thinking. I got lost in the details and struggled to integrate my empirical findings into novel and potentially transformative TD insights. I was also tied up with process-based stakeholder engagements and found it difficult to incorporate these informal processes into an examinable product (i.e., the dissertation). Although I had a supervisor with qualitative expertise, and I drew on these strengths for analyzing in-depth interview data, I was running out of time due to the magnitude of the work, as well as funding constraints.

I would have benefited from structured training opportunities in multi-method quantitative and qualitative case study research including a range of methodologies from “soft” to “hard” approaches for multiple fields. Guides to the basics of research methodology (such as epistemology, ontology, and associated methods) would have also been useful, along with guides for optimizing the use of disciplinary-specific methods for achieving transdisciplinarity and how to overcome the limits of compartmentalized research. Stronger systems thinking and exposure to the diagrammatic tools that systems thinkers use to communicate their research approaches, methods, and results would have been beneficial for me.

Jessica Cockburn: Learning-by-Relating: Discovering New Competencies for Transdisciplinary Ph.D. Research

My Ph.D. research was a transdisciplinary (TD) inquiry on environmental stewardship and collaboration in multifunctional landscapes (Cockburn, 2018). Having worked as an environmental stewardship practitioner before starting the Ph.D., I wanted to conduct research that was relevant and useful to stewardship practitioners and that addressed important sustainability challenges. Transdisciplinary research enabled me to do science with society. Also, since sustainability science is a normative field of research (Wiek et al., 2011), it enabled me to be open about my values and my positionality.

To get started, I found a team of open-minded supervisors willing to support me and a nurturing ‘TD-friendly’ environment in the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University. Since I was not enrolled in a TD research postgraduate program, my supervisors and I were experimenting and acting as ‘bricoleurs’ to design and implement a TD study within the time and funding allowances of an individual Ph.D. project. We drew on the TD literature, on colleagues with expertise in supporting TD research (see Palmer, Biggs, & Cumming (2015), and on a TD community of practice at our university (see Wolff et al. (n.d.), and Cockburn & Cundill (2018)).

Operationalizing TD research. To guide the implementation of TD research, I drew on principles proposed by Lang et al. (2012) and on methodologies and theories across a wide range of disciplines and fields including natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, social-ecological systems and resilience, environmental governance, rural development, critical social theory, and environmental history. Guided by Price (2014), I used critical realism as a philosophical underlaborer and an analytical lens to strengthen and deepen knowledge integration across disciplines and contexts.

Transdisciplinary research requires building relationships with “societal actors” (van Breda et al., 2016, p. 156). I partnered with nongovernmental organizations that are facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration for stewardship in rural landscapes. Through an opportunistic and iterative process (over ±1 year), I developed three distinct TD teams (i.e., communities of practitioners working at different levels and in different areas on stewardship and integrated landscape management).

Challenges to TD research. Along the way, I experienced four key challenges. First, I was frequently challenged by the multiple roles I had to play: researcher, facilitator, knowledge broker, mediator, and friend. I was somewhat unprepared for this and had to quickly take responsibility for my actions and everyday research ethics challenges and appreciate my shifting identity within each of these roles. Second, reconciling the, sometimes, mismatched purposes and demands of an academic research process with the expectations of practitioner partners was difficult and was compounded by time and budget constraints. Third, managing interpersonal relationships was personally and professionally challenging. I often wondered whether I had been communicating effectively with all the different partners, whether I had included all the right people in my emails, and whether I could find time and money to visit practitioners on-site and participate in their work. I often felt pulled in different directions and, at times, exhausted by the need to be everything to everyone. Fourth, I felt that I had to sacrifice depth for breadth. I worked ‘at breadth,’ across the knowledge divide between academia and practice, possibly trading off time to engage deeper in academic knowledge. I also worked across the knowledge divides between disciplines, covering a breadth of disciplinary knowledge, but not going into depth in any one discipline.

Transdisciplinary research competencies. In the process of building new relationships with practitioners, it became apparent that I needed to develop competencies and practices that conventional postgraduate research may not require. For my research to be societally relevant, I had to not only develop technical (academic) competencies related to critical thinking and systems thinking but also relational and translational competencies. This meant taking the time to build trust and manage interpersonal relationships with practitioner partners and mediate between different knowledge systems. I had to learn translational competencies by being a broker between academic and practice-based knowledge systems and by co-creating research questions with practitioner partners that were relevant in both practice and academic research. I spent time on non-research activities such as social events and practitioner meetings and workshops. I also had to manage expectations and communicate regularly with all three of my TD teams to ensure that we understood each other’s interests.

Along with developing relational and translational competencies, I also realized the importance of developing reflexive competence. I found that embedding reflexivity into my research practice helped me manage the balance between the demands of the academic system versus the often very different demands of working with practitioners. I learned reflexive habits of mind by not only reflecting (i.e., ‘looking into the mirror’ and thinking about what happened) but also considering the assumptions and conditions that underpin events and experiences (i.e., looking ‘through the mirror’ and reflecting on the nature of society and on my own value system and beliefs and responding accordingly (Bolton, 2010)). The practices that helped me embed these reflexive habits included disciplined personal journaling and connecting with others doing similar work through communities of practice (Cockburn & Cundill, 2018).

Developing new competencies to effectively practice TD research has helped me to think more carefully about what it means to be a change agent within academia that supports visions for sustainability. I have realized that we need to have a reflexive learning orientation. The world is changing quickly, and our roles, positions, and responsibilities are shifting. We need to navigate this rapidly changing world with an open mind, an open heart, and an open will (Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013).

Discussion and Recommendations

This section discusses an analysis of the two TD research journeys shared above, integrating the reflections of Cockburn and Holden with insights from the literature. First, the focus is on competencies needed for TD research using the three-part framing described in the introduction (interdisciplinarity, co-creation, and knowledge integration). Second, provisions that should be made in institutions of higher education to support Ph.D. TD scholars in enabling the development of sustainability change agents was considered.

Currently, doing TD research might be one of the best ways for scholars to develop TD competencies. The field of TD research is progressing as more scholars attempt individual TD Ph.D. studies, building an increasing understanding of the type of competencies required for doing TD research. This section reflects on the competencies that Cockburn and Holden found they needed to undertake TD research, building on similar experiences reported in the literature.

Interdisciplinarity. The first insight that scholars of TD research will need is that there is more than one way to do TD research (Mitchell et al., 2015). The approach chosen depends on the nature of the research question, interest, and scope as co-defined by the relevant stakeholders. Other features of the context include funding and time frames and the background, experience, and interests of the lead researcher (Maxwell, 2012). While there are many approaches to TD, this does not mean that ‘anything goes.’ Transdisciplinary researchers clearly need to know how to navigate and apply research methods suitable to TD studies with rigor and to an acceptable quality, a finding described elsewhere by early-career researchers following an ‘undisciplinary’ postgraduate research journey (Haider et al., 2018). For example, Holden needed to know what would be regarded as an appropriate, credible, and defensible approach to TD in her study and both scholars had to develop a coherent overarching framework within which to situate diverse theories and methodologies.

Intellectual and methodological creativity are arguably hallmarks of Ph.D. studies because of the need to make an original contribution to the field (Mullins & Kiley, 2002). However, TD presents scholars with additional demands for being intellectually and methodologically creative while still producing defensible research. The research stories reflect the vast swathe of literature that TD scholars need to engage with and the choice of what to include and what to leave out seems just as important as the ability to master the chosen content. Both scholars needed to be creative in juggling often conflicting demands and mediating how far to go into one area, whether literature or data collection or stakeholder engagement, before moving on to address another. Both Ph.D. scholars noted the challenge of mediating depth versus breadth, illustrating the importance of technical competencies, such as systems thinking (Wiek et al., 2011), to support the rigorous and coherent application of multiple and diverse methodological and theoretical approaches.

Cockburn mentioned the value of engaging with supervisors and/or other scholars who have experience with TD research. Some research decisions still need to be made by the individual, so it is significant that Cockburn mentions reflexivity, the ability to start thinking of herself as a researcher and knowledge-producer and understand how her research decisions are being shaped by wider contexts and cultures by not only looking in the mirror and noting her own decisions but also looking ‘through the mirror’ into the long history that has shaped scientists’ decisions. This reflexivity is a high level of relational and, arguably, transformational competence because it allows people to see themselves in relation to a scholarly community and recognize historical, cultural, and ideological factors that shape decisions about how research should be done and valued. This enables researchers to transcend the boundaries of disciplinary decision-making, while still making logical and defensible decisions in the interest of credible knowledge creation.

Co-creation. Since TD research is an engaged process of knowledge co-production between academic and societal actors (Lang et al., 2012), building and maintaining relationships with a team of societal actors becomes a primary task in the doctoral research process (van Breda et al., 2016). This relational competency is needed to successfully conduct a TD study and, after graduation, to successfully function as a sustainability leader and change agent, particularly since sustainability transitions almost always involve collectives rather than individuals (Wiek et al., 2011). However, both scholars found stakeholder engagement difficult for different reasons.

Cockburn engaged extensively with stakeholders in various areas outside academia. She experienced several challenges in the process: managing stakeholders’ expectations, managing the contrasting interests of stakeholders and academia (also noted by Holden), and feeling poorly prepared for the interpersonal nature of the required engagements. She learned to play multiple roles in her work, operating as a broker, translator, and mediator. If well supported and well executed, navigating such challenges can build relational competencies that will help a scholar achieve good standing both inside and outside of academia (Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013).

Holden’s research journey illustrated that when a scholar is focused on juggling the disciplines in-depth, there can be little time and funding left for engaging stakeholders, especially at the end of the Ph.D. journey. While most research projects will have funding and time constraints, here the researcher had to make a call on whether to spend the time and funding on stakeholder engagement or on gathering further technical data. Cockburn’s example of worrying whether her email communications included all relevant parties suggests that details can be significant in stakeholder engagement and illustrates the kind of skill needed by change agents who intend to “walk with others” in addressing sustainability challenges. As an African proverb notes: “S/he who wants to walk fast, walks alone; s/he who wants to walk far, walks with others.”

Is it the role of supervisors to help develop relational competencies (Wiek et al., 2011) while also supporting scholars in gaining a deeper understanding of the literature and research methodology suitable to their studies (technical competencies)? What happens if they have not had such experiences themselves? Is there time for this? What suffers if attention is given to this – generally ‘new’ – dimension of scientific studies? Fortunately, some subfields in community development studies, adult education, and other social sciences have produced guidelines for stakeholder engagement and various forms of participatory research processes (Block, 2018; Bradbury, 2015). Even with guidelines, these processes are still challenging, but scholars do not have to design them entirely from scratch. This is, however, yet another field scholars need to come to grips with, made even more difficult if none of their supervisors have related experience.

Knowledge integration. The case stories demonstrate how, in the quest to integrate and transcend disciplinary academic knowledge, scholars have to move outside their comfort zones (i.e., beyond what is familiar based on their prior studies). Doctoral scholars, as individuals, thus need to “be transdisciplinary in their own heads” (van Kerkhoff, 2014; Max-Neef, 2005).

The challenge of integration is clear from Holden’s research story. This pertains both to using multiple methods from different disciplines in an integrative manner and integrating knowledge with diverse origins. Supervised only by disciplinary specialists, and lacking a TD specialist in her supervisor team, Holden was concerned that her thesis would be examined exclusively by disciplinary experts. Because of this, she gave less attention to integrating knowledge that would span across the disciplines. A reduced focus on knowledge integration was also likely influenced by her not finding a suitable integrating framework.

In Cockburn’s case, a realist framing provided a common ontological and epistemological base where knowledge from different scientific disciplines, as well as non-scientific knowledge, could find its place in reflecting the layered nature of complex reality (Bhaskar, 2016; Sayer, 2010). Conceptual and philosophical frameworks that allow for a robust, defensible integration across different knowledge sources and knowledge forms seem essential.

Earlier it was noted that both Ph.D. scholars were challenged by trying to mediate between depth and breadth. This amounts to technical competence in one knowledge area (depth) vs. technical and relational competencies to integrate across more than one knowledge area (van Kerkhoff, 2014; Wiek et al., 2011). Rosenberg et al. (2018) and Rosenberg et al. (2016) showed that employers of scientists require both depth specialists and breadth specialists and that change agents value having in-depth knowledge about certain aspects, the ability to recognize and work with other depth specialists, and the ability to apply such specialist knowledge in contexts requiring a broad perspective. But, how should such agile, integrative, systems-thinking competencies be taught and examined at a university?