Bridging Disciplines to Enhance Human and Environmental Well-Being
A new transdisciplinary project led by Professor Maurice Mittelmark at the University of Bergen has received funding from the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN).
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In December WUN announced the outcomes of the 2012 Research Development Fund. Together with 24 other projects, “Bridging health promotion and sustainability science: Transition to the green economy” was awarded funding from 2013.
The project is led by Professor Mittelmark, head of the Department of Health Promotion and Development, in collaboration with Professor Gro Th. Lie, academic coordinator at UiB Global, and Alberto Cimadamore, head of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP). There are also a number of partner institutions, in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK.
Connecting disciplines to effect change
The research project is a collaboration to bridge two research arenas; human development and sustainability science. The question driving this project is,
How can we better connect social and environmental sciences, to enhance the well-being of people and their environments, especially in the context of poverty?
Sustainable development of people and their environments are so inextricably intertwined that it is almost meaningless to work for improvement of the one without working to improve the other. Yet society is poorly organised for the challenge.
Structural obstacles to development
Those who are working for development are trapped in ‘compartments’: government ministries and Directorates with narrow portfolios, specialized NGO’s and interest groups that compete for scarce resources rather than collaborate, and academic disciplines and institutes that are so specialised that their ‘cultures’ barely interact, even if they share the same campus.
That is the problem in academia that the project addresses: how can diverse academic specialties learn to cross their cultural bounds sufficiently to work together -- synergistically -- for development? This is a hard nut to crack. There are good reasons why academic specialties develop their own ‘languages’, models and theories and concepts, and specialised research methods. Such specialisation is the key to scientific progress.
An unfortunate consequence is that academic specialities often find it difficult to simply communicate with another, let alone collaborate to take aim at complex social challenges.
A project in three parts
A promising approach to overcome the structural problems is ‘transdisciplinary research’ (TDR), and the TDR strategy is the model for this WUN project. The project has three parts, (1) a Workshop in May 2013, from which a book will be developed, (2) an analysis of the participating institutions’ experience with transdisciplinary research (TDR), and (3) revitalise the WUN Critical Global Poverty Network.
The plan is to make this WUN project the basis for a long term research collaboration connecting social and environmental sciences, through these three components.
The workshop in May constitutes the first phase. Click here to learn more.
