As many of the chapters in this volume have illustrated, there are no single or easy answers to the question of ‘what is transdisciplinarity?’ and ‘how can I, through research or everyday inquiry, contribute to transformation?’. Everyone who was involved in this book project went on their own quest, their own journey, sometimes together with others, sometimes alone. And it is all of us, as individuals and collectives, who together create momentum for transformation. Let’s therefore start this concluding chapter by means of an example of an individual; it concerns the experience of a NALAM worker in Southern India. NALAM means ‘well-being’ in Tamil, and NALAM workers are lay mental healthcare workers, trained by The Banyan, a non-government organization (NGO) to offer community-based services. The NALAM worker narrated the following story (Dijkxhoorn, 2020, p. 187):

A 21-year-old woman’s husband committed suicide, leaving her a widow with three young children. She developed depression and suicidal tendencies, which she shared in a community support group meeting. Instead of referring her to the clinic, I spent time with her and discovered that she had grave financial issues due to a loan her husband had taken on a motorbike. The lenders harassed her frequently and her sister-in-law had taken possession of the motorbike. She did not have money to feed herself and her children. I decided to speak to the panchayat leader, who was very supportive. He spoke to the lenders, who waived the loan amount, and to the sister-in-law, who agreed to return the motorbike, so it could be sold. We enrolled the children in school. After solving these issues, she was doing much better and did not need any medication.Footnote 1

The actions the community mental health worker took seem very logical—spending time with the woman in order to gain a deeper understanding of the immediate and underlying issues and taking steps to address these. However, in highly specialized, and often fragmented, public-sector systems that are commonplace in many western countries, this course of action would be highly exceptional. First, because she works for a mental health NGO, but also because she does not approach the woman with a set of mental health interventions. Rather, she takes a holistic, problem-oriented approach. Second, she spent time with the woman to work out what was going on. In highly specialized work settings, especially when the question of financing treatments is a concern, spending this kind of time upfront is not possible. Third, her intervention is highly tailored to the specific situation. No protocol, blueprint or specific standards are applicable. She needs to be creative and brave rather than working from specific (mental health) knowledge.

We could see the approach taken by the NALAM worker as privileging her attachment (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to a real-world problem over her attachments to her professional or epistemic community, with a commitment to making a positive change for the woman involved, and those around her. One could argue that this is what transdisciplinarity is all about; it is about gearing knowledge production to problems of the life-world, rather than disciplinary boundaries (Mittelstraβ, 1992, cited in Pohl & Hadorn, 2008). This implies putting our normative commitments—to our epistemic community, to our professional context—at risk (Moats & Seaver, 2019; Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015). Transdisciplinarity is about a commitment to making a change, to contributing to transformation to ‘develop knowledge and practices to promote what is perceived to be the common good’ (Pohl & Hadorn, 2008, p. 112), while recognizing that both ‘the problem’ and ‘the common good’ are negotiated time and again.

The example of the NALAM worker might not be considered representative of a transdisciplinary research practice, but it does bring to the fore what we might call a spirit of ‘purpose-ledness’ (again, notwithstanding the diverse perceptions of ‘purpose’ that are inherently part of each transdisciplinary endeavour); an orientation, not so much towards ‘what is’, but towards ‘what ought to be’, that pervades the thinking and doing (while, again, putting that normative commitment at risk). The past decades of increasing engagement with transdisciplinary research have led to multiple epistemological, methodological and ethical advances. There are tested methodologies to organize meaningful knowledge integration; principles and heuristics to guide multi-actor innovation processes; strategies to address power dynamics and to overcome systemic barriers; and approaches to sustain and upscale processes and outcomes. However, the increasingly urgent need to create impact in view of ever more devastating health and sustainability challenges points towards a gap in the current focus of the literature on knowledge co-creation. The apparent need for a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies associated with multi-actor innovation processes introduces the potential danger of perceiving collaborative efforts, co-creation, social learning and reflexivity, along with their political and power dimensions, as an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end. Or, otherwise stated, the (undeniably important) focus on these process criteria tends to blur the ‘purpose-ledness’ of the endeavour. Bringing purpose back to the centre is what we call Transdisciplinarity for Transformation.

1 Agenda for Action, Learning and Research

In this final chapter, we will draw up an agenda for action, learning and research for transdisciplinarity for transformation. Upon reflection of the broad spectrum of experiences and profound insights shared by our colleagues in their diverse engagements with transdisciplinarity for transformation, we have identified what we consider to be key items on this agenda. We elaborate on each of these and formulate concrete questions. A thread throughout these reflections is how to keep the focus on the envisaged transformative change—the purpose of transdisciplinarity—while juggling the many complexities and challenges in the transdisciplinary research process.

1.1 Making Frameworks Actionable

The first item on the agenda builds on Chapter 3 (Regeer et al.; this volume), in which we argue that accompanying transdisciplinary practices with deliberate and repeated cycles of action and reflection can help to keep purpose centre stage. As Gjefsen et al. (this volume, Chapter 4, p. 125) put it: transdisciplinary projects with transformative ambitions might not be ‘a matter of “planning then doing”, but rather a matter of “planning by doing”’. Sophisticated generic frameworks for designing and evaluating transdisciplinary research (see Chapter 3) have been developed in recent decades: they can be seen as disembodied and decontextualized sets of knowledges and mindsets, i.e. years of highly situated experiences went into these frameworks, in different empirical domains and in different countries across the globe. The decontextualization and disembodiment that took place in constructing these frameworks allow for them to travel into different (academic or transdisciplinary) spaces. A question on the agenda for transdisciplinarity for transformation concerns the ‘landing’ of these frameworks in transdisciplinary spaces:

How can these knowledge-rich frameworks become recontextualized and re-embodied in situated transdisciplinary spaces, where they can guide practitioners/participants in keeping purpose centre stage and addressing challenges as they come along?

We already gave some pointers in Chapter 3, where we argued that these frameworks become an asset for ‘planning by doing’ by becoming themselves one of the actors in the messy entanglements that characterize transdisciplinary practices—they become part of the conversation. The Dynamic Learning Agenda (in itself yet another materiality) can be used to foster the embodiment (‘How can I …’) and contextualization (‘while…?’) of the more generic guiding questions that accompany frameworks for transdisciplinary research,Footnote 2 where and when issues, to which the questions pertain, arise (see also Regeer et al., Chapter 1, this volume). Frameworks thus become actionable in the guiding of transdisciplinary practice. The second pointer we gave in Chapter 3 is the use, and further development, of approaches, such as Reflexive Monitoring in Action (Van Mierlo et al., 2010) and accompanying research (Defila & Di Giulio, 2018; Schäpke, this volume, Chapter 6), but also, from the field of STS, situated interventions (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015), to support reflection-in and reflection-on action (Schön, 1983), to keep purpose centre change (or address the challenge that often ‘ambitions are diluted because […] people are distracted by everyday details’ (Van Mierlo et al., 2010, p. 17)), as well as to help understand the diverse associations (Grijseels et al., under review, Latour, 1986) and commitments that come with bringing a diversity of people into spaces for transformation—spaces in which there is still a need for work on putting in place conditions conducive to transformation (Holle, Ponzoni & Ghorashi, Chapter 11, this volume). Given the often-significant power differentials between people from highly diverse backgrounds, and the fact that transdisciplinary research can be seen as an attempt to breach existing power structures more widely, continuous reflection is crucially important to prevent perpetuating prevailing ‘hierarchical, academic, postcolonial knowledge orders’ (Schmidt & Neuburger, 2017, p. 65) in the practice of transdisciplinary research (see also Strumińska-Kurta & Scholl, 2022).

1.2 Dealing with Institutional Settings

A second item on the agenda for transdisciplinarity for transformation concerns dealing with (un)conducive institutional settings. Professionals (practitioners, academics) are not risk-free if they privilege occupying a problem and action space that seems remote, in terms of routines, values and discourse from their institutional home. As Holle, Ponzoni and Ghorashi (Chapter 11, this volume, p. 319) describe in their reflection on a co-creative research collaboration with queer refugees, artists and academics: ‘acts of decentring make scholars vulnerable in the process of knowledge production’. In some cases, professionals’ transdisciplinary mode of doing and thinking might align very well with the institutional culture and structure, but this is rare. The organization of the NALAM worker at The Banyan (a mental health care NGO in Southern India) does provide an example; its evolution over 25 years demonstrates the careful emergence of a responsive mental health system with both a user-centred and a service-integration focus (Narasimhan et al., 2019), which optimally supports the purpose-led approach of NALAM workers. The case of child mental health and the law described in Ramaswamy, Seshadri and Bunders (Chapter 10, this volume) arguably shows something similar—if only in relation to the success of realizing transformation as a result of consistent and concerted efforts at multiple levels and spread out over several years. In most other cases, however, professionals experience a greater tension between institutionalized ways of thinking and doing and what is required for transformation. For instance, Gunn, Hoffmann, Sager, Wittmayer and Zuiderent-Jerak (Chapter 15, this volume, p. 427) explore tensions between academic home-bases and doing transdisciplinary work, and ask ‘What sort of institutional spaces or frameworks enable all actors involved to adapt, learn and transform?' In the scholarly literature on transdisciplinary research, this is reflected in a growing ambition for contributing to systemic change, beyond individual project outputs or outcomes (e.g. Clark et al., 2016, Marshall et al., 2018, Van Breda & Swilling, 2019, see also literature on system innovation, transition studies and sustainability transformations research: Geels, 2005, Grin, 2020, Lam et al., 2020, Pereira et al., 2015). Institutional settings that are more conducive to a transdisciplinary mode of thinking and doing—embracing epistemological plurality, facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration across boundaries (whether they are disciplinary, sectoral or multi-level), and purpose-oriented governance—can be argued to be better equipped to respond to (super)wicked problems. So, the question for transdisciplinarity for transformation could be:

How to re-imagine organizational, cultural and systemic conditions to shape conducive ecosystems for a transdisciplinary mode of doing and thinking?

One direction that both action and research can take is that of institutionalization, or ‘normalization’ (May & Finch, 2009) of a transdisciplinary mode of thinking and doing (see also Vienni-Baptista & Klein, 2022). This can include building new institutional spaces, or infrastuctures, such as the Making and Doing programme in the STS field (Gunn et al., Chapter 15, this volume, referring to Downey & Zuiderent-Jerak 2021). But it can also build on case studies that have been undertaken in the context of research organizations (e.g. Verwoerd et al., 2023) and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) (Tijsma et al., 2023). Naturally, this is not limited to systemic change in the institutional ecosystems of academics (including research funders, see Defila & Di Giulio, Chapter 5, this volume)—the same applies to professionals in other sectors. Here we can build upon case studies on institutionalizing reflexivity (e.g. in perinatal care, medicine development, Schuitmaker-Warnaar et al., 2021), normalizing system- and client-oriented approaches in youth protection (Van Veelen et al. 2017, Bunders et al., 2023) and combining community listening with organizational listening (Zachariah et al., 2023). These and other initiatives take a purpose-led orientation to heart.

Beyond these case studies, we can take pointers from other scholars that call for explicit directionality, or purpose orientation in governance, research and innovation. Emphasizing the difference between collaborative governance and problem-oriented governance, Mayne and colleagues (2020, p. 33), for instance, state: ‘Even if multiple organizations coordinate their individual efforts, there is no guarantee that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Problem-oriented governance takes the problem rather than institutions as point of departure’. Moreover, this type of governance is ‘fundamentally outward-looking in its efforts to shape both long-term strategy and day-to-day working arrangements around problems as they manifest themselves’ (ibid., p. 34). Similarly, Van der Steen and colleagues define purpose-led working in a policy context as follows: ‘It means that the societal issue is taken as a starting point […]. In such an approach, one’s own organization and capacity is folded around the issue’ (Van der Steen et al., 2020, p. 5, authors’ translation). This tallies with the idea of mission-oriented innovation policy (Mazzucato, 2017) and the associated concept of Mission-oriented Innovation Systems (MIS, Hekkert et al., 2020). While it is recognized that studying the impact of directionality provided by a clearly defined mission is important (Hekkert et al., 2020), and that it requires from public institutions that they are willing to experiment, to change day-to-day routines and to implement processes to build dynamic organizational capabilities (Mazzucato, 2018), the focus on the research agenda (see Hekkert et al., 2020) is more on the processes involved in formulating missions and selecting and integrating possible solutions. The need to study the interplay between agents and institutions and their adaptive capacities, taking missions (purpose) as focal point, is much less articulated in this body of literature. While the research on MIS is still young, the explicit mission-oriented approach appears relevant.

In these approaches, as we have seen, purpose is taken as point of departure. Taking this seriously may imply fundamental re-imagining of ‘structuring’ in organizations; the interactional spaces available to professionals; the types of standards devised to coordinate and professionalize working routines; and the accountability mechanisms put in place to recognize quality and progress, and to monitor compliance with laws and regulations. This leads to an additional direction for the agenda for transdisciplinarity for transformation:

How can standards and accountability practices be re-imagined and (re-)materialized to serve as boundary objects with transformative powers?

Scholars of transdisciplinary research have long recognized that standard academic metricsFootnote 3 do not provide a conducive ecosystem for academics to engage in transdisciplinary research (Fischer et al., 2012). The same goes for professionals in other spaces. Prevailing accountability practices are often counter-productive and ask to reduce ‘meaningful’ practices to ‘measurable’ standards, ridding these practices of engagement, lived experience and situatedness. As de Weger and colleagues (Chapter 12, this volume) show, where engagement practices are concerned there is also plenty of room for improving metrics. A key question is how such accountability practices can be upended, and then re-imagined and altered and serve as boundary objects (Star & Giesemer, 1989) between purpose-oriented micro-practices and existing regimes. And more than boundary objects, they may carry great transformative potential in relation to our systems of governing and in relation to professional practices, supporting reflective practice (Schön, 1983) in relation to purpose.

1.3 Looking Simultaneously ‘Inward’ and ‘Outward’

From within the conceptual and practical realm where we find challenges for inclusion, diversities and positionality, we can easily latch onto the case made above—i.e. the case for focusing research efforts towards developing ever-better understandings of, and ever-better tailored practices to, what is needed in order to institutionalize the orientation of transdisciplinarity towards whichever purpose (or purposes) it is (or are) most worthwhile to contribute. To be clear, this requires both of transdisciplinarians as individuals and of transdisciplinary collectives that they dedicate the necessary time and efforts to (re-)negotiation, opening up, closing down, decentring and recentring, zooming out and zooming in—all in order to not lose sight of the purpose, and to connect multiple levels of reality that are variably accessible from within different aspects of anyone’s multiple identities (be it as a trained economist, a father, a civil servant or whatever). This brings us to the following question, which we think is central to the next steps of dealing with the challenges of inclusion, diversities and positionality in transdisciplinarity for transformation:

How can we carve out the necessary space for looking inward, while looking outward —namely, space for self, space for being human, space for the beautiful and the ugly?

Let us elaborate what we mean by this. It starts by recognizing an often-overlooked boundary that demands to be crossed if transdisciplinarity is to live up to its promise; the boundary not only between Science and Society, but also the Self (including self-care and reflexivity in terms of a researcher’s own role and position); a point made by four PhD students reflecting on their experiences with using a transdisciplinary approach (Sellberg et al., 2021). This issue was exemplified by den Boer (Chapter 14, this volume) in her autoethnography. She adeptly recounted her challenges in manoeuvring through the dynamics of the science system, project logic, the imperative for societal impact and the intricacies of her own positionality, all while recognizing the importance of self-care. Chapter 15 (this volume, p. 435) gives a beautiful account of the different ways in which experienced transdisciplinary scholars reflect on ‘what [...] it mean[s] for us to be alive to the world in the research process', exemplified by the following quote ‘Sometimes it feels like I am surrounded by heroes and I then ask myself: where are the human beings, with all their failures and successes?'. Consistent with this, we argue that the focal point of future research in transdisciplinarity for transformation in dealing with challenges associated with inclusion, diversities and positionality is what we would like to call looking outward and looking inward, echoing Lloro-Bidart and Finewood (2018).

Looking inward means that transdisciplinarians working on social transformation ought to confront explicitly all sorts of challenges that come with the question of how to organize transdisciplinary work, thinking through and materially enacting what everyone’s (intersectional), and their own, positionality means for their role(s) in the transient transdisciplinary collective they are part of, and for how to collaborate within such a collective. The Frame Reflection Lab as a tool for self-reflection on views of science (See Horn and Van der Meij, Chapter 18, this volume) is one example of how looking inward can be facilitated. Pressing questions around participatory research collectives that are raised by scholars of critical Participatory Action Research are of relevance here, e.g.: ‘When does it make sense for collectives to be “participatory contact zones” (Torre, 2005) in other words, teams that bring together very differently positioned people to research together? And when might it be important to have separate spaces for marginalized and oppressed groups to research together?’ (Torre, 2014, p. 1325). This is where the Self takes centre stage, as the node connecting transdisciplinary roles and everyone’s, and one’s own, multiple identities and which is needed for tapping into purpose and navigating, or breaking away from, the rules and institutions and one’s own epistemic culture, for instance. This requires looking inward. As Fals-Borda (2013, pp. 165–166) aptly points out: ‘Let us recall that the paradigms that so far have moulded our professional training are sociocultural constructs originating in Europe. Today we try to take inspiration from our own surroundings and to construct more flexible paradigms of a holistic and participatory nature. Academic arrogance is an obstacle to achieving these goals; it should be removed from circulation’.

Looking outward means that throughout the transdisciplinary projects, transdisciplinarians can never take for granted how research questions are asked, which research questions are asked, which groups or individuals are made part of the conversation on this, who are or are not engaged in the relevant implementation of research, experimentation or exploration, and how this is done.

If these two themes of looking inward and looking outward are not already hard enough in and of themselves, arguably the biggest challenge arises when attempting to combine the two. If anything, then, the above question and its supporting conceptual work constitute a call to action for transdisciplinarians to do the hard work of looking inward while looking outward.

Several chapters suggest interesting avenues for further strengthening our understanding and practices of co-creative knowledge and solution building that follow this conceptual signpost. The chapter by Brouwers, Egberts and de Hoop (this volume, Chapter 9), for instance, underscores the contextual and embodied nature of knowledge and knowledge exchange, the acknowledgement of and reflection on which constitutes one tangible way of looking inward for finding better ways of looking outward. Consistent with this, yet underscoring slightly different aspects of our embodied identities, Stark’s contribution (this volume, Chapter 16) invites us to engage with head, hand and heart to break with academia’s consistent and exclusive focus on disembodied cognition in knowledge practices (this volume, Chapter 16). As has been argued elsewhere, there is a marked affinity between such an approach and decolonialism and traditional and indigenous knowledge practices (Penna & English, 2022). For instance, a theme such as deep and generative listening (Scharmer, 2009), also prominent in the contribution to this volume by Bruhn and colleagues (this volume, Chapter 7) and Stark, runs through all such literatures and arguably constitutes a call to work on appreciating everyone’s intersecting positionalities, consistent with how we just now explained looking inward and looking outward. When considering how to develop the competencies for both looking inward and outward, Zeidan et al. (this volume, Chapter 17) argue that it is crucial to acknowledge students’ inherent values and experiences, and facilitate their ability to effectively channel these experiences, engage in critical thinking and foster meaningful interactions with fellow learners. Ultimately, looking inward and outward is very much about finding ways of making available ‘the experiences of marginalized peoples, nonhuman entities, and the environment more broadly’ (Lloro-Bidart & Finewood, 2018, p. 149).

However, we have to acknowledge that this is much easier said than done. Indeed, whoever tries to do it, immediately runs the risk of reproducing forms of inequity and (epistemic) injustice. Making the experiences of marginalized peoples, nonhuman entities and the environment available to others might well amount to forms of extractivism. For instance, if we realize that, while ‘comprising less than 5% of the world’s population, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity’ (Raygorodetsky, 2018, p. 1), it is clear the challenge is immense for those other 95% of the world’s population. This relates as much to the types of solutions to today’s complex problems to which transdisciplinarians might contribute—think of the energy transition that constitutes a direct threat to so many Indigenous peoples, because of the environmental destruction that comes with mining all sorts of minerals and metals necessary for electrifying our energy system—as to the appreciation of and practices in different forms of knowledge production. Interestingly, ‘Indigenous people and traditional knowledge keepers seem to be the ones currently leading by example in the struggle of protecting the Earth for future generations, [and] they should not only be counted as stakeholders but possibly even as guides/leaders in the development of sustainable initiatives and discourse’ (Breidlid & Krøvel, 2020, cited in Silvestru, 2023, p. 2).

That many already recognize this becomes clear in the learning questions so many of our graduate students formulate in response to their own learnings on the road to becoming transdisciplinarians working in fields like environmental sustainability or global health. This is reflected in their learning questions that express an aspiration to foster equitable and mutually beneficial partnership and an acknowledgement of their own positionality, values and normativity. Again, learning questions such as these are not so much expecting the one unique correct answer, but rather questions that remind us of the immensity of challenge confronting us, and that we need to hold up for ourselves as we muddle through, trying to make a meaningful impact while trying to co-create knowledge.

2 Concluding Remarks

If, as an early-career researcher embarking on your journey into mastering transdisciplinarity for transformation, you have made it this far, we assume you are utterly overwhelmed and confused, both conceptually and practically as well as personally. Unfortunately, there are no short-cuts, other than to start somewhere and slowly work your way through, carefully crafting your own learning questions and personal development path as Zeidan and colleagues (this volume, Chapter 17) so strongly emphasize. One specific mindset that is key in this respect is to ‘be at ease with unease’. Transdisciplinarity for transformation demands that you let go of your perfectionist tendencies; the messy reality out there will certainly make you ‘fail’ many times. Do not forget: learning by doing and learning from mistakes are the best teachers. Be a ‘true academic’ in the sense of being the innovative, creative ‘out of the box’ thinker that a scientist is supposed to be (but in reality rarely is), rather than a passive rule-follower (‘cultural dope’) (Geels & Schot, 2007, p. 403). Challenge the known and dive into the unknown with curiosity and humility, without losing your ideals to make the world a more just, sustainable and safe place for all.