Governing the trade-off between the co-production of actionable knowledge and academic publishing in transdisciplinary sustainability research

Abstract

Despite their stated ambitions, the societal outputs of many transdisciplinary sustainability research projects remain at the level of research dissemination to policy makers and concerned stakeholders, rather than organizing a truly interactive knowledge co-production process. In addition, projects that organize interactive knowledge co-production often achieve either a high level of actionable knowledge outputs for the key societal stakeholders or a high level of publication outputs for the scientific community. This paper analyses this trade-off in more detail based on the survey results from a unique sample of 50 completed EU research projects that fall under the same funding requirement to combine societal impact and scientific excellence in so-called "Research and Innovation Actions". The results confirm the difficulty for many projects to achieve both goals. In fact, the results show that only about half (54 %) of the projects produced actionable knowledge outputs at the end of the project, and only 34 % achieved both a high level of actionable knowledge outputs and a high level of peer-reviewed articles. The analysis of the survey results shows that co-design of research tasks related to field work, such as social science data collection or technical experimentation in real-world environments, contributes to actionable knowledge, but also potentially leads to fewer publications. An important exception to this finding is the case of intermediate levels of field research co-design. In this case, the strengthening of relational and reflective-normative trust between scientific researchers and social actors contributes to both actionable knowledge outputs and academic publications.