Mobilizing transdisciplinary collaborations: collective reflections on decentering academia in knowledge production

Non-technical summary

Global sustainability challenges and their impact on society have been well-documented in recent years, such as more intense extreme weather events, environmental degradation, as well as ecosystem and biodiversity loss. These challenges require a united effort of scientists from multiple disciplines with stakeholders, including government, non-government organizations, corporate industry, and members of the general public, with the aim to generate integrated knowledge with real-world applicability. Yet, there continues to be challenges for these types of collaboration. In this commentary, we describe processes of collective unlearning that serve to decenter academia in collaborations leading to a more equitable positioning of practitioners engaged in collaborative global sustainability research.

Technical summary

Increasing attention to transdisciplinary (TD) sustainability science has shaped the joint work of researchers and practitioners currently addressing pressing global sustainability problems. In this short commentary, we describe and discuss an international TD collaboration and draw upon the authors’ experiences after 5 years of ongoing collaborative work in the realm of global sustainability research in the Americas. Our collective experience illustrates that processes of unlearning serve to decenter academia in TD collaborations leading to a more equitable positioning of practitioners engaged in TD research. Participating in social unlearning practices that aim to deconstruct and disrupt institutionalized scientific norms and challenge entrenched institutional structures may hold the key to mobilizing TD research for solution-oriented placed-based social-ecological research.