The role of transdisciplinarity in building a decolonial bridge between science, policy, and practice

Transdisciplinary research is considered to offer contributions of science to sustainability transformations, partly because transdisciplinary approaches aim to increase the relevance, credibility, and legitimacy of scientific research by ensuring the active participation of non-academic actors in research. However, the possible impact of transdisciplinary research on decolonial sustainability science – understood as actively undoing Euro-North American centricity, dispossession, racism, and ongoing power imbalances in inequitable social-ecological systems – and simultaneous response to scientific rigor remain under debate. Thus, this article assesses the contributions of transdisciplinary research projects to decolonial sustainability science based on empirical infor ma tion. To do so, we analyze a sample of 43 development research projects of the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme) in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We found that despite significant differences in approaches, Global-North-dominated sustainability science still has far to go to achieve the decolonial potential of transdisciplinarity, enabling different actors’ participation

Rethinking research processes to strengthen co-production in low and middle income countries.

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How context affects transdisciplinary research: insights from Asia, Africa and Latin America

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) has been developed to generate knowledge that effectively fosters the capabilities of various societal actors to realize sustainability transformations. The development of TDR theories, principles, and methods has been largely governed by researchers from the global North and has reflected their contextual conditions. To enable more contextsensitive TDR framing, we sought to identify which contextual characteristics affect the design and implementation of TDR in six case studies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and what this means for TDR as a scientific approach. To this end, we distinguished four TDR process elements and identified several associated context dimensions that appeared to influence them. Our analysis showed that contextual characteristics prevalent in many Southern research sites—such as highly volatile socio-political situations and relatively weak support infrastructure—can make TDR a challenging endeavour. However, we also observed a high degree of variation in the contextual characteristics of our sites in the global South, including regarding group deliberation, research freedom, and dominant perceptions of the appropriate relationship between science, society, and policy. We argue that TDR in these contexts requires pragmatic adaptations as well as more fundamental reflection on underlying epistemological concepts around what it means to conduct “good science”, as certain contextual characteristics may influence core epistemological values of TDR

“When We Stand up, They Have to Negotiate with Us”: Power Relations in and between an Agroindustrial and an Indigenous Food System in Bolivia

Our global food system is characterized by an increasing concentration and imbalance of power, with trade-offs between hunger, inequality, unsustainable production and consumption, and profit. A systematic analysis of power imbalances in food systems is required if we are to meet the 2030 Agenda vision of promoting sustainable production and consumption patterns and ending hunger and poverty. Such an analysis, with a view to a transformation to more sustainable and just food systems, requires tools to be developed and tested in real-life case studies of food systems. To better understand the structures and mechanisms around power in food systems, this study applies a political ecology lens. We adapted the “power cube„ analysis framework that was proposed by the Institute of Development Studies for the analysis of spaces, forms, and levels of power. We apply the analysis of these three dimensions of power to two food systems in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia: one agroindustrial and one indigenous. After identifying food system actors, the food system spaces in which they interact, and what forms of power they use at what levels, we discuss some implications for an emerging scientific culture of power analyses in critical sustainability assessments. Mechanisms of hidden power undermine visible legislative power in both case studies, but in our example of an indigenous food system of the Guaraní people, visible power stays with a local community through their legally recognized and communally owned and governed territory, with important implications for the realization of the right to food

Bio-cultural diversity in South America. Overcoming agro-extractivism linked to unhealthy diets

Agro-extractivism in Latin America, as a model of large-scale monocultures of agricultural commodity export for the maximisation of profit from agricultural land, leads to the exploitation of agricultural resources including not only water, land, and soil but also human labour and animals. It often removes people from their land, erodes local culture and knowledge, involves severe deforestation, soil degradation, environmental pollution, and diminishes biodiversity and agrobiodiversity. Thus, agro-extractivism has severe implications for food security, sustainability, and equity. The inherent simplification and specialisation of whole landscapes ultimately leads to the collapse of local food systems, which limits livelihood opportunities for rural populations, and undermines healthy and sustainable diets. A potential to counterbalance this development lies in diversity throughout the whole food system with particular emphasis on bio-cultural diversity manifesting in healthy social-ecological systems and diverse, healthy diets. Cases from Bolivia and Brazil highlight how food system activities can support different types of diversity when local people jointly construct their food systems, while at the same time strengthening intra-communal links. Such initiatives serve to regain control over local food systems in places where governments fail to provide food security and fight inequality