Academics are increasingly required to balance the expectations of the ‘old’ academy with a future model of universities as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ‘problem solvers’. This paper highlights changing expectations of academics in producing alternative research outcomes in collaborative, practice‐based research. Through a series of workshops with 20 researchers, preferred research outcomes and tensions in achieving these outcomes were identified. The tensions identified are presented as three dichotomies comprising the tension between: (a) ‘I versus We’ ‐ individual versus team expectations & outcomes. (b) Disciplinary outcomes versus inter‐/transdisciplinary outcomes. (c) Learning versus research objectives for the students and academics involved. These tensions reflect the authors' experiences of working in three international sustainability projects, drawing on lessons learned from these projects, with recommendations for universities seeking to implement interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary doctoral and postdoctoral programmes. Recommendations include the need for formal and informal leadership models, strong communication skills, empathy and willingness to learn from each other. A need for more systemic changes within university administration to better reward and value the breadth and depth of collaborative work, while facilitating open learning cultures and practice‐oriented learning opportunities and curricula across faculties was also identified.
Transformational research frameworks provide understanding and guidance for fostering change towards sustainability. They comprise stages of system understanding, visioning and co-designing intervention strategies to foster change. Guidance and empirical examples for how to facilitate the process of codesigning intervention strategies in real-world contexts remain scarce, especially with regard to integrating local initiatives. We suggest three principles to facilitate the process of co-designing intervention strategies that integrate local initiatives: (1) Explore existing and envisioned initiatives fostering change towards the desired future; (2) Frame the intervention strategy to bridge the gap between the present state and desired future state(s), building on, strengthening and complementing existing initiatives; (3) Identify drivers, barriers and potential leverage points for how to accelerate progress towards sustainability. We illustrate our approach via a case study on sustainable development in Southern Transylvania. We conclude that our principles were useful in the case study, especially with regards to integrating initiatives, and could also be applied in other real-world contexts.
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