Anne Loeber

A transdisciplinary approach serves the dual aim of delivering new knowledgeabouta situation at hand, and actually interactingwithand, hopefully, ameliorating that situation. This ‘action-orientation’ comes with many methodological and practical challenges as to the ‘how’ of transdisciplinary research, but also with a moral obligation to keenly look into the ‘who’-question: whose knowledge counts and comes to bear on dealing with a specific situation? As for those who are included, the question is how they can make their multiple identities come to bear on the issue at hand and how they can effectively use the room for maneuvering that their community of practiceor epistemic culture allows them, in contributing to the (transient) transdisciplinary collective. This chapter sets the stage for a close scrutiny of challenges and opportunities in the light of openness and ‘closures’ of knowledge co-production that the chapters collected together in Part 2 of this book deal with, offering a selection of empirical studies that illuminate pertinent conceptual and practical ways forward to inclusive and diverse forms of transdisciplinarity in a variety of contexts. The chapter gives an overview of lessons from the literature on what including diverse groups of actors in transdisciplinary work entails in practice, contemplates the questions of whom to include, when, under what conditions, and to what end, and looks into some of the challenges implied in answering these. The chapter concludes with introducing the empirical chapters collected in this second Part of the book for practical illustrations of how such challenges can be dealt with in practice.

Creating impact in labs oriented at sustainability transformations is challenging. Combining the experiences of ten projects and sharing the insights in “Labbing”, gained through engaging in various activities within transformation-oriented Labs from the fields of agriculture, food, and healthcare, the author team established a Community of Practice at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, to identify impact challenges inductively and recommend practical strategies for addressing these.While the issue of creating impact in real-world labs for experimenting with sustainability transformation has been studied, little is known about how to assess and understand impact in practice. Deciding on “what counts as impact” is challenging as problem definitions and solutions are political and contested. In our research projects for sustainability transformations in fields such as agriculture, food, and healthcare, we encountered typical questions of creating impact in real-world labs. We established a Community of Practice to explore the different challenges pertaining to these impact questions. We identified four overarching challenges related to impact: 1. measuring the impact of Labs, 2. dealing with positionality and power dynamics, 3. fostering impact within and beyond projects, and 4. ensuring impact across different contexts. This paper offers practical strategies for responding to these challenges: 1. tailor-made training for Labbing, 2. reflexively engaging with power dynamics, 3. forging rich, translocal learning and impact. Sharing learnings from our experience with Labbing may broaden the repertoire of fellow Lab practitioners in enhancing and strengthening their impact.

The European Commission’s pursuit of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) and its implementation in the European Research Area serve to investigate how ambitious policy goals can be conveyed into action. Challenging about implementing policy is the need to foster coherence in the interpretation of policy goals while coordinating their elaboration in practice. This chapter identifies the European Commission’s approach to implementing RRI as a case of New Public Management, and contrasts this with efforts at ‘bottom-up’ RRI implementation. Experiments with involving researchers and other stakeholders in designing and executing concrete RRI actions that fit their professional setting are understood as manifestations of a New Public Governance approach to implementing RRI policy. It is found that such deliberation of policy concepts and goals, and their concretization in a context-specific learning-by-doing approach practically enables the uptake of normative policy ambitions in networks of interdependent, non-hierarchically related actors across diverse substantive and administrative contexts.

Many researchers experiment with participatory settings to increase public engagement in research and innovation (R&I). Because of their temporary nature, it often remains unclear how such participatory experiments can contribute to structural change. This paper empirically explores options for bridging this gap. It analyzes how participants can be supported to act as institutional entrepreneurs to actively promote public engagement in R&I. To draw lessons, we analyze empirical material gathered on nineteen Social Labs which were set up to promote the uptake of Responsible Research and Innovation in a European R&I funding program (Horizon 2020). Involvement of motivated participants, insight in their institutional context, and specific methods and management choices that enhance a sense of agency are identified as essential for organizing change. These findings and the resulting framework of interventions may prove valuable for further (action) research into the institutionalization of public engagement in R&I.

In the last decade, the European Commission (EC) developed an ambitious strategy to promote RRI across the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (H2020). This effort resulted in a significant number of European-funded projects that substantially expanded the available knowledge of the theory, methods and implementation of RRI. However, various evaluations and studies revealed a limited and diffuse implementation of the concept. In this article, we aim to shed some light on this matter with a study covering eight programme lines of H2020 (ERC, MSCA, LEIT, FOOD, ENV, SEC, WIDENING and EURATOM). We employ an extensive policy document analysis and 112 semi-structured interviews carried out with various stakeholders. We argue that the limited implementation of RRI in H2020 is the result of conflicts with existing values, science cultures, economic objectives, restricted resources for its implementation and a lack of clarification around what RRI means.

Today’s sustainability challenges have major implications for human health and health care. At the same time, the way health care is organized and conducted has major sustainability implications. Sustainable health and sustainable health care approaches in research, which engage with health and sustainability as intertwined phenomena, feature increasingly prominently in various literatures, i.e., (i) literature based on the premise of ‘(un)healthy environments result in (un)healthy people’ (e.g., planetary health); (ii) literature on the implications of ecological change for the sustainability of healthcare systems; and (iii) literature on healthcare systems’ sustainability in view of a range of socio-economic factors. However, an integrative elaboration of the manifold relationships between health and sustainability challenges in these literatures is currently lacking. This review paper therefore maps how these three literatures represent intertwinements between health and sustainability challenges, as well as their suggestions to address these challenges. In addition, we explore which themes and questions are pertinent, meaning they have remained largely unaddressed. By performing a qualitative mapping review, we find that calls for structural attention to inequality, to in-and exclusion, and to stakeholder needs and perspectives cut across these three literatures. Furthermore, we identify three cross-cutting key questions that require future research attention. First, how do divergent ideas on what is and divergent ideas on how can that be known give rise to different health- and sustainability visions and pathways? Second, what do abstract problem statements and solutions presented in agenda-setting work look like in practice in specific and diverse empirical contexts across the globe? And third, how are diverse health and sustainability dynamics historically and spatially interconnected? Moreover, we observe that some voices have so far remained largely silent in scientific debates on health and sustainability intertwinements, namely non-expert voices such as patients and citizens, voices from a variety of social scientific and humanities disciplines, voices from relevant domains beyond (environmental) health, and voices from the global South (from non-experts, social scientific and humanities researchers and domains beyond health). We conclude that a focus on inclusive and equitable engagement with intertwined health- and sustainability challenges is imperative. This requires moving away from developing universal knowledge to address generic problems, to foregrounding plurality in terms of problem statements, knowledge, solutions, and the values embedded therein.

The COVID-19 crisis opened up discussions on using online tools and platforms for academic work, e.g. for research (management) events that were originally designed as face-to-face interactions. As social scientists working in the domain of responsible research and innovation (RRI), we draft this paper to open up a dialogue on Responsible online Research and Innovation (RoRI), and deliberate particular socioethical opportunities and challenges of the onlineification in collaborative theoretical and empirical research. An RRI-inspired ‘going online’ approach would mean, we suggest, trying to make academic events and research activities more inclusive, researchers’ attitude to their work more reflective and suggest processes that are more responsive to societal needs and ethical concerns. For such systematic reflection, we suggest using the RRI-heuristic provided by Owen et al., and applying the dimensions of ‘Anticipation, Inclusion, Reflection and Responsiveness’ (AIRR) in order to identify and reflect on the dilemmas involved in ‘going online’ in one’s research.