The invisible architecture of a science that strives for change
In a world marked by interconnected environmental crises, science faces an urgent demand: to stop talking to itself and start talking to society. Transdisciplinary research has emerged as a response to this challenge, integrating diverse knowledge and multiple actors to co-produce contextualized, equitable, and transformative solutions.
But transdisciplinarity cannot be sustained by the will to collaborate alone. It requires an invisible but essential architecture: coordination. A new publication by the Transdisciplinary Academy of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI), Belmont Forum, Global Development Network (GDN) and Inclusive Innovation, with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), proposes clear and systematic mechanisms to strengthen this critical dimension.
Especially for countries where structural inequalities tend to be replicated in scientific processes, the report “Transdisciplinary Coordination: Building Bridges for the Future of Knowledge Co-production” (available for free on the IAI website) proposes three key goals for improving coordination:
- Changing the scientific culture: Promote inclusive, multilingual, and socially oriented communities, recognizing that success is not measured solely in publications, but in real transformation.
- Transforming funding: Redesign support mechanisms to include non-academic actors, make budgets more flexible, and value products such as summaries, videos, or digital platforms.
- Strengthen capacities: Train facilitators, communicators, and mediators capable of navigating the complexity of diverse teams, promoting the exchange of practices and open science with ethical sensitivity.
Beyond researchers and funders, Transdisciplinary Coordination highlights an emerging figure: transdisciplinary coordinators. These “border agents” connect different worlds (academic, community, institutional) and facilitate dialogue, planning, and evaluation. Their role, still largely unrecognized, is vital to ensuring that transdisciplinarity does not remain a mere good intention.
The report is both a technical guide and an invitation to rethink how knowledge is produced in contexts of high cultural, institutional, and political diversity. From initiatives such as the IAI's Science Technology Policy (STeP) Fellowship program, with its inter-American network, to policy laboratories in Africa, the publication offers concrete examples of how coordination can be the engine of a more just, open, and useful science.
Transdisciplinary coordination is understood as the set of non-academic processes that enable effective collaboration: participation of diverse social actors, facilitation of the interface between science and policy, communication with broad audiences, promotion of institutional partnerships, and joint development of evaluation protocols.