Interdisciplinary Research and Impact

This special issue of Global Challenges brings together international, interdisciplinary sustainable development research collaborations that seek to influence policy and practice in their respective domains. The contributions to this issue cover a variety of empirical fields, geographical scopes, and disciplines.

Background:

In 2015, all countries in the world signed up to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The goals are ambitious for many reasons, not least because of the diversity of topics and challenges addressed through them. It is widely acknowledged that realizing the SDGs requires solutions-oriented, interdisciplinary research capable of bridging traditional divides between disciplines and also combines research excellence with relevant impact.1, 2 However, so far there is only limited understanding of the enabling conditions, challenges, lessons, and tools for interdisciplinary sustainable development research. Furthermore, interdisciplinary research is often considered overly difficult, time-consuming, hard to publish and challenging to get funded.

Increasing our understanding of how to effectively design and deliver interdisciplinary research is crucial to realizing the SDG agenda. This special issue is an early attempt to fill this gap by systematically bringing together and comparing experiences across six international, interdisciplinary sustainable development research collaborations that are seeking to influence policy and practice in their respective domains. We are particularly interested in understanding how such projects are set up and implemented, and then translate their findings to deliver real-world impact.