Responding to complex societal challenges: A decade of Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) interdisciplinary research

Prospects of environmental governance in addressing sustainability challenges of seawater desalination industry in the Arabian Gulf

“…The authors found the DPSIR model very helpful as it enabled them to identify and categorise issues relating to the prospective role of environmental governance in analysing the Gulf's seawater desalination industry. Some scholars argued that sustainability in the 21st century is all about seeking solutions through science and policy (Ignaciuk et al, 2012), but this would be difficult without a salient and critical understanding of the interconnecting issues within a particular problem. In line with the objective of this study, we adapted the five analytic themes of the Earth System Governance Project as a template from which some intervention strategies for addressing the problems identified through the DPSIR model can be achieved.…”

Interdisciplinarity as an Emergent Property: The Research Project “CINTERA” and the Study of Marine Eutrophication

“…This terminology is not meant to trivialize the challenges that researchers in either the natural or social sciences may face in working with their supposedly closely-related kin: even sub-disciplines within a given academic discipline may not communicate or work well with each other. The terminology does reflect the view popular within the sustainability field that the combined social-natural science work, required to understand the coupling of the socio-ecological system [28,34], is more difficult and elusive still [4,28]. Transdisciplinary research is a different level of integration altogether.…”

“…Despite the title of the CINTERA project ("A Cross-Disciplinary ... Approach"), a review [2][3][4][5]7,12,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] of the growing literature on building collaborative projects that transcend academic disciplines reveals that the term "cross-disciplinary" is not much used and is, at best, vaguely defined (For example, Nenseth et al 2010 [7] define "cross-disciplinary" as the borrowing of methods and perspectives by one discipline by another). As it turned out, this term actually fit our project as it was originally conceived, having as it did the goal of bringing together some very different disciplines but leaving the nature of the collaboration a bit open and underspecified.…”

“…How the research question is framed and the choice of methodology are essential [4,34]. This is the mark of the truly interdisciplinary project: the integration of theoretical frameworks, models, and methodology and the statement of the problem in a discipline-neutral way [2][3][4]30]. As researchers in the Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (CECAFS) project, put it, "you can't just 'bolt on' social science" [4] to research frameworks anchored firmly in natural science disciplines.…”

“…Large research projects tackling issues of sustainability have taken many years, a multitude of researchers and, sometimes, a substantial budget, with the explicit goal of transcending such boundaries and we still find genuine interdisciplinarity to be a substantial challenge [4]. Researchers from such projects as the Earth Science Partnership (ESSP), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and its outgrowth, the Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) have described these challenges [4][5][6]. However, the meta-project of research integration should ideally take place on several levels.…”