1 Introduction

While the potential of transdisciplinary approaches to stimulate transformation and face society’s grand challenges has been the subject of much debate, a crucial question deserves attention: How plannable are these processes, really? This is worth asking in a knowledge economy where practising transdisciplinarity is fragmented both in relation to time (tied to specific projects or initiatives with fixed lifetimes and attendant [fundable] predefined plans and objectives), and to space (tending to include knowledge actors and stakeholders who are separate from each other, both in terms of disciplines and also physically and organizationally). Combined with probing the indeterminacy that stands at the heart of transformation efforts concerned with research and innovation (R&I) and its impacts—the acknowledgement in Science & Technology Studies and elsewhere that things could be otherwise having prompted descriptions and interventions into versions of this otherwise via knowledge-symmetrical, dialogical, and participatory approaches—much can be said for the unplannability of the situations where meaningful opportunities for change arise.

There might be a case for carving out more space for the unstructured and unexpected in transdisciplinarity. In this chapter, we take a modest step in that direction by problematizing the project-based nature of transdisciplinarity for transformation. We seek to identify ways in which initial funding, organizational, and other logics tend to set up cycles of promises that may direct transformative attention in less-than-constructive directions and discourage the seizing of opportunities for meaningful interventions that may occur along the way. On this basis, we propose some ‘rules of thumb’ to guide the development of promises in relation to impact, transdisciplinarity, and transformation with integrity, coupled with principles by which the delivery on such promises might be evaluated. At the same time, understanding how project ‘planning’ results in path dependencies for ‘doing’ might also open avenues for project designs that encourage and help facilitate promising and meaningful new directions during project practice.

The chapter is based on our collective reflections on our experiences of working in several projects. These past and ongoing projects in different ways operationalize transdisciplinarity and transformation. Thematically, the projects focus on systemic interventions pertaining to R&I landscapes on food and agriculture, areas where systemic approaches are widely used (Klerkx et al., 2010; Springmann et al., 2018), between which productive synergies are sought (Kok et al., 2019), and where insights are thought to be transferable to many other areas where social-technical complexities lie at the heart of efforts to produce positive change—such as climate and energy, mobility, public health, and digitalization, to name a few. While, in keeping with a long tradition of neat reporting on scientific activity that excludes the seemingly mundane and un-methodologically standardized practices (Latour & Woolgar, 1979), such project accomplishments are generally published without much critical attention to their own funding context. Breaking from this tradition in this chapter, we describe how considerations relating to fundability, together with the realities imposed by bureaucratic accountability structures and project-based research funding, influenced project formulations and path dependencies, ultimately affecting the transformation trajectories that were, or were not, pursued.

The projects we report on were funded by the European Union (EU) and national funding agencies. Most prominently they include FIT4FOOD2030Footnote 1 (2017–2020), an EU coordination and support action project (a project category in Horizon 2020 which emphasizes stakeholder integration and dissemination over goals for disciplinary research outputs) coordinated by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) with partners across Europe. The project worked towards EU food system transformation by engaging a wide variety of stakeholders in 25 diverse transformation-oriented Labs, which were embedded in schools, universities, science centres, and national ministries, and supported and monitored by a project consortium intended to work in a transdisciplinary manner. SYNAGRIFootnote 2 (2021–2024) is a three-year research project funded by the Research Council of Norway coordinated by Ruralis—Institute for Rural and Regional Research in Norway. The project’s point of departure is the acknowledgement that there are distinct promissory discourses around what can be respectively termed eco- and bio-economic food systems (Marsden & Farioli, 2015), with contrasting emphases on technology, localness, ecological principles, optimization, land use, consumption, and farming infrastructure. In addition, we also draw on experiences from other system- and stakeholder-focused projects.

There are many important differences between these projects, both in terms of funding stipulations, and in terms of researchers’ choices about how to frame and operationalize key concepts. We do not claim to offer an exhaustive view of what is or is not transdisciplinary, but rather consider family resemblance to be implied when calls for projects include requirements for participatory co-creation by researchers and societal groups, or when a project consortium claims to integrate disciplinary and other forms of knowledge and experience. This means that we admittedly compromise on clarity of conceptual distinctions between transdisciplinarity (moving beyond disciplinary knowledge), multidisciplinarity (combining several disciplines), and interdisciplinarity (integration and exchange across disciplines) in an attempt to describe elements of transdisciplinarity practice; this approach enables us to formulate practical recommendations at the end of the chapter.

We first introduce several theoretical considerations regarding the ‘planning’ and ‘doing’ transdisciplinarity for sustainable transformation, which help to place our analysis in context, and guide us in developing further insights from the cases. We then go on to describe our methods, followed by integrated empirical presentation and discussion, along with recommendations for researchers, project reviewers, and research-funding organizations.

2 Theoretical Background: Planning and Doing Transdisciplinarity

In recent decades, transdisciplinary R&I projects have rapidly emerged as means to contribute to resolving complex societal problems (Thompson Klein et al., 2001; Pohl & Hadorn, 2007) by seeking to include a wide range of societal actors, knowledge, and problem perceptions in reflexive and experimental R&I processes. These actors can be described as societal stakeholders with socio-political interests, practitioners who engage the topics discussed in practice, citizens, and other non-certified experts who have particular knowledge relevant to the transdisciplinary R&I project (see Defila & Di Giulio, 2015). In that light, transdisciplinary R&I is considered promising as it could contribute not only to normative and democratic ambitions of stakeholder inclusion in R&I (e.g. Kok et al., 2021; Nowotny et al., 2001) but also to create knowledge and innovations that are considered more legitimate and socially robust by those affected by them (e.g. Owen et al., 2012; Schmidt et al., 2020). The transformative potential of transdisciplinarity is highlighted in its potential to create ‘societal impact’ in the face of urgency (e.g. Fazey et al., 2018; Lang et al., 2012).

The ‘planning’ activities (which are continuously intertwined with and scarcely separable from ‘doing’) associated with transdisciplinary R&I projects have increasingly been the object of scholarly scrutiny (e.g. Lang et al., 2012; Lux et al., 2019; Schneider et al., 2019). ‘Projectification’ of sustainability and transformation-focused efforts are an emerging research area in their own right (cf. Ika & Munro, 2022). Questions regarding the ‘how and why’ of design and agenda-setting of R&I projects that aim to create societal ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ have also increasingly become an object of study (see Reed et al., 2021 for a recent review), and in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI, see for instance, Stahl et al., 2021). Planning for transdisciplinarity is challenging given its need for flexibility (such as anticipation and adaptation) based on context-specific and often unexpected developments, stakeholder needs or emerging insights that evolve in the practice of seeking to solve complex societal problems (cf. Lang et al., 2012). How does one plan for what kinds of strategies, activities, and impacts need to be evaluated at the end of a fuzzy, complex, and non-linear multi-year project (Reed et al., 2021; Schäfer et al., 2021)?

To aid the development of both design and evaluation, transdisciplinary projects increasingly adopt so-called Theories of Change (ToCs) (e.g. Deutsch et al., 2021; Schneider et al., 2019; cf. Earl, 2001), offering ‘guiding framework[s] for all stages of thinking, action and sense-making when a project or a program intervenes in processes of social change’ (Deutsch et al., 2021, p. 29, drawing on van Es et al., 2015, p. 12). Deutsch and colleagues (2021) argue that ToCs can be useful in ‘planning’ the activities of the project and their relations to aspired (short-term) outputs (such as concrete products) and (longer-term) societal impacts. They stress that ToCs are both an important process and an output in transdisciplinarity but also observe that the pre-set ‘planned’ impacts could become path-reinforcing instruments during the project’s ‘doing’, even when other directionalities might have been more fitting from policy or practice perspectives (Deutsch et al., 2021, p. 37).

Moreover, while planning for impact (for instance through ToCs) is an important part of ‘planning’ transdisciplinarity (alongside ‘planning the process’, and ‘planning the results’), scholars have also stressed that the impact focus of ‘planning’ can lead to ‘impact sensationalism’ and overpromising societal impacts in grant applications (e.g. Chubb & Watermeyer, 2017), an understandable consequence of competitive funding processes and of effectiveness-oriented (transdisciplinary) R&I aimed at sustainable transformation (Musch & Von Streit, 2020). In addition, the ‘projectification’ of sustainability science (Torrens & Von Wirth, 2021) with many short-term (but often large) projects that strive for impact could further lead to closing down, rather than opening up pathways for reflexive and transformative experimentation in transformation-oriented projects, given a focus on quick and quantitative deliverable outputs (Torrens & Von Wirth, 2021). These developments not only risk the development of overconfident impact narratives in project design, but also of contributing to other questionable practices such as (un)intended negative effects for participating stakeholders (Musch & Von Streit, 2020) that could even lead to reinforcing existing power relations rather than unpacking or exploring them (Turnhout et al., 2020).

In their analysis of power dynamics in five transdisciplinary projects, Fritz and Binder (2020) elaborate on how actors (researchers, practitioners, and funders) influence the planning phase (or: agenda-setting phase) of transdisciplinarity. They argue that researchers are powerfulFootnote 3 in shaping project design ‘based on their authority as project leaders, their knowledge about proposal writing, and their financial/time resources’ (Fritz & Binder, 2020, p. 12). Meanwhile, funding bodies ‘exercise structural power by means of its material sources and discursively frames the nature of research agendas worthy of funding’ (p. 10).

3 Methodological Approach and Limitations

This chapter builds on the authors’ engagement with two projects—FIT4FOOD2030 and SYNAGRI—and reflections on these and other projects from their perspectives as permanent employees at research institutes reliant on project-based extramural funding (MDG, RH), and a fixed-term doctoral candidate at a major research university (KK).

The work, undertaken within the two main projects we consider here, was as follows. In FIT4FOOD2030, one co-author (MDG) contributed to a designated work package aimed at monitoring and facilitating learning for transformation, a variant of accompanying research (see Schäpke, this volume) where activities included documenting various forms of stakeholder engagement and impact and stimulating learning and reflection among the coordinators of 25 City, Food and Policy Labs, the main venues for participatory activities in the project. Another co-author (KK) supported the project coordination, including facilitating interactions between project activities. In SYNAGRI, one co-author (RH) led the application submission and currently serves as Principal Investigator, after also being involved in the preparation of an earlier unsuccessful grant application for a previous iteration of the project. Another co-author (MDG) temporarily led a work package on food systems and planning. Project documents and notes from scholarly and administrative meetings constitute a rich source of empirical data on which we draw to illustrate key points.

In addition to this work, and specifically for this chapter, we also draw on repeated conversations and reflections among the authors, using elements of autoethnography (Holman Jones, 2007) and of heuristic inquiry (Djuraskovic & Arthur, 2010). In this chapter, we are concerned less with our individual positionality in terms of dimensions such as race or class or with our own interpretative process, but more with what we take to be the normative ambitions of our academic fields and our own agency in realizing these from within the institutional structures that project-based research funding and implementation provide. These concerns were recurrent themes in our discussions, which followed Moustakas’ stages of heuristic research (1990, cf. Wall, 2006).

Our methodological approach has limitations both in terms of partiality of perspective and in terms of potential selectiveness and bias in reporting and analysis of events. We seek to limit these weaknesses by corroborating our own experiences with other empirical data. Accordingly, four formal qualitative interviews and informal exchanges were undertaken with initiators and grant writers involved in securing funding. We also re-examined the qualitative interviews with the coordinators of 14 labs within FIT4FOOD2030 conducted as part of its reflexive monitoring in practice approach (cf. Svare et al., 2023).

4 Empirical Findings and Discussion

Our purpose here is to explore the consequences of ‘project-basedness’—by which we mean the organization into discrete projects with fixed timeframes, resources and plans, goals and outputs for transdisciplinary transformation efforts. Specifically, we focus on the challenges for ‘planning’ and ‘doing’ transdisciplinarity within project-based work, both at the proposal stage and later, and the ways in which this ‘project-basedness’ enables and constrains the arena and processes of transdisciplinary working.

As stated above, the FIT4FOOD2030 project was funded by the EU as a so-called CSA-project, which in Horizon 2020 is understood as a project-type emphasizing dissemination, awareness-raising, network-building, learning, and policy dialogue across member states, and which expressly does not include strictly research-focused knowledge goals. FIT4FOOD2030’s consortium partners included national research-funding agencies, food industry associations, and one municipality, plus a large number of additional non-research organizations recruited later to host and coordinate two dozen City and Policy Labs. These labs would contribute to generating relevant bottom-up content as well as to societal receptiveness to European food system transformation. The FIT4FOOD2030 project description presented a ToC where the establishment and operation of such Labs (together with an EU think tank), evolving into a self-sustained platform and coupled with systemic approaches to food and R&I, would increase the impacts of European and national R&I investments. This approach addressed the Horizon 2020 call for projects to support the policy framework FOOD 2030 and its aim of ‘underpin[ning] the transformation of food systems in Europe so as to make them “future proof”’; projects were expected to be based on ‘multi-actor engagement and awareness-raising in support of the initiative and its action plan’ (European Commission, 2017).

The SYNAGRI project, by contrast, was originally submitted as a proposal for a Collaborative and Knowledge-building Project, where the emphasis is on usable knowledge and project outputs with relevance to non-research actors, who are obliged to contribute actively to projects via self-funded work. That submission was desk-rejected for insufficient involvement of non-research partners and revised into a research project the following year. The research project call was for projects concerned with sustainable food systems, and emphasized the need for food system transformation to address economic, social, health, climate, and environmental concerns. The call stressed that projects should adopt systems thinking. In response, the SYNAGRI project proposal argued that there are potential conflicts between regional and bio-economic food systems (each of which is a topic of policy support), and proposed to combine system mapping and modelling, using participatory methods to develop strategies for promoting integrated and sustainable food systems. While the emphasis on transdisciplinarity and transformation was less explicit in the proposal than in the call text, the project design sought to integrate stakeholders from across the value chain to inform project definitions, framings, strategies, and policy recommendations.

In what follows, we discuss instances where aspects of ‘project-basedness’ served to constrain or determine courses of action with respect to stakeholder integration and transdisciplinarity. We pay particular attention to instances where the project architecture derived from proposal writing determined courses of action, and on challenges to project coordination, before transitioning to lessons and to a conclusion that offers practical recommendations for funders and researchers in the field.

4.1 The Role of Funding Schemes and Structures

The two funding mechanisms defined certain parameters for the form that transdisciplinarity could take in either project. The EU’s CSA call encompassed two potentially conflicting imperatives for how non-research actors should contribute to the project, as both a source of special insights and creative impulses for generating solutions and content, and as audiences to be targeted by project outputs intended to reach large and diverse societal groups. On the one hand, including stakeholders might yield unique insights, increase the chances of uptake, and lend necessary legitimacy to investigations. On the other hand, the co-existence of two different imperatives for non-researcher involvement also casts a certain ambiguity over stakeholder interactions during the project, where stakeholders may be approached (or interpreted) as either an audience, collaborators, or both, at different times, and where researchers’ and stakeholders’ expectations and interpretations of situation framings may not necessarily align. While the FIT4FOOD2030 proposal included participatory activities and monitoring routines that were intended to support these goals separately, there were also instances during the project where stakeholder interactions could be seen as serving both ends at the same time, or where project participants (especially Lab coordinators) found the imperatives to be pulling them in different directions, as when one coordinator reflected on the trade-offs they experienced between focus and diversity in stimulating stakeholder exchanges:

…if you want to have people learn from their ideas, so that they understand each other’s [perspective] and how it iterates their own life, then I guess usually low diversity is good, as they will be more relatable to each other. But if you have high officials and grocery shop keepers, and waiters and researchers all at the same table, then… they might have their interest in bits and pieces to share with each other, but it could be very difficult for them to build upon each other’s ideas to generate something… (Lab coordinator)

In SYNAGRI, conversely, the attempt to move from an initial highly transdisciplinary design towards a more multidisciplinary direction, retaining aspects of stakeholder engagement in the second, sparked reflections on the ramifications of the first call’s self-financing requirement.

…many organizations are potentially contractually committed to ongoing projects which shrinks the opportunity/desire for more spontaneous engagements and means that stakeholders are conscious that more ‘promising’ projects might come up in future which they want to be involved in. The contractual basis means that clearly defined activities at the application stage are more important. (Helliwell reflection notes)

With stakeholders contractually obliged to fulfil certain tasks, there is a desire for well-defined activities at the start so that they know what these obligations will be. This is to allow them to assess the opportunity cost of joining one project and not another. But the requirements for a clear definition of activities involving stakeholders at the proposal stage conflicts with the researchers’ strategic desire to maintain flexibility and openness regarding the actual direction of the project. The researcher, who led the initial SYNAGRI application and took on a mentoring role at the coordinating institution in the revised submission, expressed concerns about funders’ requirement that stakeholders’ commitment to specific activities, timelines, and project designs should be secured at the application stage. At the time of the first application, applicants were required to quantify non-research partners’ work in monetary terms and secure letters of intention from each before they could submit a project application, a mechanism intended to ensure that collaboration is substantial and meaningful. In the researchers’ view, this requirement might dissuade non-research actors from participating, while also having methodological implications. Project designs that involve a high number of small-time engagements, including interviews, short meetings and one-on-one discussions with key stakeholders, are dissuaded in favour of a smaller number of choreographed all-day events involving the full group. These are administratively, contractually, and practically easier to quantify and coordinate, both for stakeholders and the project researchers (SYNAGRI co-applicant, interview).

In FIT4FOOD2030, stakeholder engagement was integral to the project particularly via the Labs and Lab coordinators. Learning session notes reveal that the topic of stakeholder engagement remained a significant challenge for Lab facilitators well into the project. As one coordinator described it:

…it was difficult mainly because it was too general and they [stakeholders targeted for participation] didn't understand it, what we are doing or aiming, and even network building wasn't good enough for them because they say: ‘Okay, we will become a part of the network, but why?’. […] while working on the [educational] modules, it was much easier because they were able to have something tangible as a result. (Lab coordinator, interview)

In SYNAGRI, co-author RH recalled worrying about exhausting networks of relevant stakeholders or jeopardizing long-standing collaborations as the team applying for grant funding sought to recruit collaborators to meet the RCN’s threshold for self-funded non-research collaborators. After SYNAGRIs initial desk rejection, the emphasis on stakeholders was curtailed as the project proposal was adapted to a new call that no longer stipulated a stakeholder participation threshold. Nevertheless, and somewhat to the coordinators’ surprise, those stakeholders who had agreed to take part in the first version remained interested in the second version, since they recognized the urgency and necessity of the project (SYNAGRI co-applicant, interview). Paradoxically then, the project concept and societal interests appeared to push towards transdisciplinarity, even though the funding structure discouraged such a project architecture by emphasizing conventional disciplinary and interdisciplinary research plans over mechanisms for wider stakeholder involvement and inclusion.

4.2 Are We Trapped in Our Project Architectures?

Whereas projects in general find themselves confronted with emerging needs that could not be planned for in the ‘planning phase’, this is even more the case with transdisciplinary projects aimed at catalysing societal transformation. These projects in particular deal with large diversities of stakeholders who might see different needs emerging during the project in response to changing dynamics in local contexts. Thus, if they aim to create meaningful impact, projects need to find ways of planning for the unplanned in order to seize opportunities to create impact, or to mitigate challenges that have emerged, during project implementation, while also meeting funders’ expectations for credible and accountable planning. The question is when and under which circumstances such expectations and their corresponding institutional and bureaucratic approaches and logics might conflict with the indeterminacies and unplannabilities of transdisciplinarity.

In FIT4FOOD2030, coordinators and project partners felt that the implementation of the project required collective reflection on its ambitions and discourses, requiring more frequent consortium-wide meetings than originally planned. In addition, to better share lessons and insights, the project developed ‘impact narratives’ and seized opportunities to disseminate Lab work in novel ways (such as in EC, 2021). Many steps were taken throughout and during certain parts of the project that could be instructive for other transdisciplinary projects. These include efforts to organize consortium-wide meetings around the ToC rather than around discrete work packages, task-, or milestone-specific updates, and establishing a ‘taskforce for impact’ with representation from partner institutions and work packages to seize on impact opportunities towards the end of the project. While sensible, the unplanned elements of these various efforts also needed the investment of resources and were at times tediously difficult to implement or to enrol the whole consortium in, especially when they conflicted with the carefully planned allocation of working hours across very specific tasks (a general feature of EU projects, which varies by funding body). When changes were instituted, they were made possible because partners found it sufficiently important to spend time on and incorporate the new activities.

Furthermore, in accordance with recommendations for reflexive monitoring, the FIT4FOOD2030 project included accompanying research in the form of a Dynamic Learning Agenda (DLA, van Mierlo et al., 2010), and a training programme addressing certain predefined topics while remaining adaptive to incorporate training according on changing needs. Thus, the project was able to create a structure for supporting a degree of ‘planning while doing’ during the project lifetime. As DLA records show, this space was useful partly for containing a range of different approaches adopted by the various Labs, and for enabling coordinators to learn about contrasting ways of addressing their shared overarching objectives (Svare et al., 2023). While affording coordinators flexibility and autonomy, there were also limits to the project’s ability to support diverging approaches:

I remember sensing that certain labs went above and beyond in terms of the scope and ambition of their activities, and that they did so because of what they understood to be the overall ‘spirit’ of the project, namely to stimulate new and improved interactions between the R&I and the food system. But at the same time the project design did not expect the labs to do so, or to do it quite so ambitiously, and the consortium was not able to support or stimulate the more pioneering labs quite as much as we would have liked, because we were more focused on helping the labs who were struggling. The pioneering labs might have experienced it as the project holding them back somewhat. So I had the feeling we did not do as much as we could have, there. (Gjefsen reflection notes)

This begs reflection from researchers and evaluators on when and where activities need to be ‘planned’ and where there might be space for more serendipitous engagements that can be signalled in a project design/proposal, and about the need to maintain flexibility in distributing (or re-distributing) resources in the face of different strands of stakeholder-driven work proving more or less ambitious and/or impactful over the course of a project.

Designing for flexibility is especially important as projects that aim to both serve emerging needs of the stakeholders involved, as well as being relevant in the policy context, need to deal with an ever-changing world, in which unforeseen opportunities and threats emerge along the way. During FIT4FOOD2030, the European Commission slowly changed its policy focus from four R&I priority areas towards 10 R&I pathways, in turn requiring the project to adapt its activities (for instance by designing new multi-stakeholder workshops based on these pathways) to retain relevance for the EU policy processes that were unfolding. While FIT4FOOD2030 included stakeholder integration via City and Policy Labs from the beginning of the project, additional stakeholders were also enrolled about halfway into the project period in the form of new labs. This allowed the project to build and improve on initial lab experiences, drawing lessons and exploring upscaling of promising efforts, while partly also addressing changes in the policy landscape. From the perspective of fundability, the inclusion of initial labs at the application stage also served to demonstrate stakeholder commitment from the very beginning.

4.3 What Challenges Arise in Project Coordination?

One particular dynamic we observed is the challenge in (collectively) deciding which priorities matter most, especially when trade-offs became evident between planned ambitions (such as key performance indicators in the project proposal), (new) needs of funders during the project, and emerging needs of stakeholders. Expectation management can be challenging both internally, among partners, and externally, among funders and audiences. In FIT4FOOD2030, a considerable amount of time and energy was spent on drafting the project’s mid-term review. From a project management perspective, it was desirable to receive positive reviews from reviewers and funders, and while the mid-term reporting process helped sharpen internal alignment and project coherence, it also placed considerable pressure on partners and Labs to provide both new and existing qualitative and quantitative indicators, fulfilling initial application promises, and demonstrating the project’s seizing of unplanned opportunities to achieve greater impact. The pressures were further exacerbated by the European Commission’s ad hoc requests for concrete and generalizable lessons and findings from the ‘ground’ (the Labs and stakeholders). Another related challenge involved diverging views within the consortium on whether the primacy regarding impact accountability should be put on emphasizing KPI attainment or less tangible but substantive qualitative impact indicators.

Funded as a Researcher Project (a project category where the Research Council of Norway places the main emphasis on research content and outputs, and which does not include specific requirements for stakeholder participation), the prioritization of impact in SYNAGRI is tilted towards quantifiable scientific outputs, the number of which is stipulated in the proposal. The initial challenge facing SYNAGRI was in establishing the necessary groundwork and alignment required for realizing these outputs in the context of its multidisciplinary and integrative aspirations, while stakeholder impact accountability is much more vaguely defined. The absence of planned engagement activities in the project proposal in favour of looser aspirations has raised recurrent questions about when and how to engage most constructively with stakeholders, and about what it even means to demonstrate qualitative, project-linked impacts in the context of saturated food system research with numerous projects simultaneously vying for and engaging with regional and national stakeholders’ attention.

As such, diverging interpretations on which indicators ‘matter most’ remain an intrinsically political, yet important and ongoing, effort during project implementation. To avoid the trap of focusing only on numerical outputs, and neglecting capacities for change that are built through project activities, projects might benefit from mechanisms to foster a focus on substantive ambitions, such as activities to align work package leaders about substantive goals or prioritization.

As experienced by both projects, there was a constant churn of people. People take maternity and sick leave, are promoted into new roles, or change jobs completely. The obvious problem is that adjusting to this churn is time-consuming and disruptive. Finding the right expertise to replace losses can be challenging or simply impossible. Research is an embodied process. Its aims, objectives, and project-specific ways of working are collectively developed and negotiated over time and ‘onboarding’ someone into an ongoing and emergent process of research is challenging. ‘Handovers’ of ongoing work, if they can happen at all, are a poor attempt to bridge the gap and embed someone in a network of already established relationships and collaborative and concurrent research activities. In practice, dealing with turnover might mean redefining the research questions and focus of a particular work package to meet different expertise and interests of new personnel—a need that arose early on in SYNAGRI. In FIT4FOOD2030, coordinators were struck by how long it took to integrate new staff members into the project, attributing this to its unusually high degree of complexity as well as to the project’s emergent design, which rendered much of the wording in the initial proposal insufficiently specific about subsequent project choices to fully serve as a reference guide for incoming staff (FIT4FOOD2030 co-applicant A, interview).

Related questions also concerned project coordination and administration more broadly. One of the people who contributed to drafting the FIT4FOOD2030 proposal and subsequently to the coordination of the project stated that FIT4FOOD2030 frequently needed to deviate from the project description to adapt to changing conditions, and that there was greater need for facilitating consortium discussions and clarifications than usually seen in EU projects. These were consequences, in their view, of the project’s conceptual complexity and process focus, as well as of the Commission’s framing of its own call. While project management in Horizon 2020 generally seeks to avoid change because they require formal change requests to the European Commission and increase the administrative burden on the project, in a project like FIT4FOOD2030, they said: ‘You can’t avoid it [change]. You just have to live with constant changes, because that is what the Commission asked for. […] They said we want you to be adaptive’ (FIT4FOOD2030 co-applicant A, interview).

Co-author KK recalls the experience of clarifying project proposal intentions at a project meeting:

We were trying to figure out what was ‘expected from us’ with regard to identifying drivers and barriers to potential R&I breakthroughs. Which meant we were trying to figure out what the ‘DoA’ [Description of the Action, the project proposal] had in mind […]. Of course, it was not entirely clear because it had been written ages ago, and the situation had changed by then. I remember that one partner referred to the DoA as the ‘bible’, and because I came from the coordinating institution, I also felt that all eyes were directed at me whenever the ‘bible’ was not immediately clear on what to do. In short, I felt like a priest who was to give meaning to what was written. (Kok, reflection notes)

While it is hardly unusual for the coordinating institution to be called on to clarify intentions from project descriptions, given the strict length requirements and need for brevity and thus also a degree of abstractness in all project proposals, for KK the experience was rooted partly in this project’s ambitions for system transformation, which necessitated continuous re-interpretation and clarifications within the consortium.

4.4 What Can We Learn from This?

What lessons can we draw from the above experiences? As stated in the methodology, our account is based on project immersion and reflections, where events and interactions appeared to either live up to or fall short of the ambitious and societally relevant language we had considered necessary in order to attain funding. We can formulate observations about recurring features and tensions and provide advice on how to anticipate and address these (as we do below) but must also acknowledge that more systematic research may result in other verdicts regarding the ability of current funding regimes to stimulate transdisciplinary efforts that match the normative ambitions highlighted in the literature. There is a need for more research, but also more acceptance and recognition among researchers and funding bodies alike of the risks of sensationalism and overpromising in highly competitive funding regimes.

Our modest exploration also calls into question the capacity of incumbent design and evaluation practices (e.g. the use of key performance indicators, planning the whole project in advance, and allocating resources very specifically, the absence of mechanisms to easily adapt project plans during implementation) in the context of transdisciplinary projects aimed at contributing to sustainable transformation (cf. Kok et al., 2023; Lawrence et al., 2022). In the reality of ‘doing’ transdisciplinarity with its reflexive re-evaluation of project activities; additional (un)planned activities based on Theory of Change thinking; adaptation of project ambitions based on emerging needs of stakeholders, funders and policy contexts, the ‘planning’ never really seems to end. It does seem, however, that these types of projects are not a matter of ‘planning then doing’, but rather a matter of ‘planning by doing’. The question of what one should or could do at the proposal stage, then, is not just one for transdisciplinary researchers to grapple with, but one that funders and evaluators also need to take seriously.

The shift in relationships between science and society suggested by the advent of transdisciplinary research has brought with it heady claims of a new transformative potential of research to address societal challenges. But some of the limits to its applicability and capacity to enact meaningful change might be observed precisely in the project-basedness current knowledge-economic regimes impose. As transdisciplinarity has become another funding requirement, it becomes something else to be accommodated in the research process. Necessity supersedes applicability and suitability. This raises questions about the ability of projects to resist transdisciplinary ways of working where they might not be suitable. Key stakeholders might be fundamentally committed to resisting any transformative research framing that they see as threatening to their core interests. Alternatively, stakeholders are not always already mobilized or willing to acknowledge an issue of concern.

5 Conclusion

It has been over 20 years since scholars began talking about the potential of transdisciplinary working to address pressing and escalating societal challenges. But what is the capacity of all this transdisciplinary research and what does it add up to? As the world seemingly lurches ever more rapidly towards ecological collapse, the window for action shrinking, and political institutions actively abetting, or unwilling to control the excesses of capitalist extraction and plunder, researchers working in transdisciplinarity for transformation may increasingly expect to be asked for evidence of this hopeful, transformative, transdisciplinary science leading change in the world.

These questions are important to researchers and funding agencies alike. Therefore, we seek to offer advice as a modest first step towards a more authentic and honest engagement with ‘transdisciplinarity for transformation’ within the structures afforded by project-based funding, and how to support this type of research. The advice here is limited to pragmatic adjustments to project design, engagement with stakeholders, and guidance to project funders and evaluators, and we do not seek to grapple with the more foundational conceptual underpinnings of the research fields involved, which presents a much larger task. Far greater challenges will remain in employing these lofty terms with integrity. Funders’ implicit expectation that something approximating ‘transformation’ can really occur through short-term projects—or that the ethos of ‘transdisciplinarity’ can be meaningfully realized in project after project—by and with researchers—should itself be critically questioned; even more so as tendencies within peer-reviewed research and competitive features of the academic job market also encourage researchers to envelop their various workshopping methodologies in such terms.

Based on the above experiences we suggest that the following features might be expected to arise in projects employing transdisciplinarity in pursuit of transformation, and that project coordinators and others would do well to anticipate and incorporate these issues in their work:

  • Project changes are the rule rather than the exception. Higher project management burdens and increased needs for coordination should be expected—this may result in seemingly less efficient or competitive proposals if allocated to project management work streams but might alternatively be integrated across all project activities.

  • The world also changes. While initial funding might depend on claims to social and political relevance, subsequent change in these domains may also warrant project changes; this is an argument for carving out spaces for the unstructured and unexpected in proposal writing. The establishment of a taskforce for impact and the project’s enrolment of a second round of stakeholders around the City and Policy Lab models to build on and make improvements to lessons in the initial stages of FIT4FOOD2030 offer instructive examples of this.

  • Stakeholder engagement is fraught with Catch 22s. Goals of inclusivity, diversity, and establishing cohesion and dialogue, flexibility that allows for bottom-up deliberation and prioritization, as well as formal needs for project planning and commitment to quantified work effort, will often conflict. While there is no simple solution to these trade-offs, increased openness about them can help manage expectations and ultimately improve project outcomes.

  • Critical and diverging reflections on project process can be expected. With stakeholder roles and process design being open to any number of interpretations at a given time, discussions and disagreements are to be expected; carving out spaces for dialogue not merely on topical questions, but on the very project structure and work process, can help accommodate such discussions. Efforts to focus consortium discussions in FIT4FOOD2030 on ToC ambitions rather than isolated tasks and work packages offer one way to address this.

Accordingly, we pose the following recommendations to research-funding organizations:

  • Beware of the consequences of forcing transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary in its broadest sense implies a radical co-creative process and possible tensions with regimes and processes for administrative oversight. Funding bodies should consider when this level of co-creation is preferable to other forms of actor interactivity and be open to learning about and exploring their own roles in the governance process, for instance by instilling processes of self-reflection (Regeer et al., 2016).

  • Make project changes as easy as possible to allow room for the unplanned. Support researchers in exercising judgement and seizing opportunities by reducing the administrative burdens of project changes.

  • Allow researchers to influence your expectations. Be curious about the ‘unplanned’ project lessons and remain open to adjusting own expectations and requirements according to researchers’ experiences.

Finally, we suggest the following recommendations to researchers and graduate students in the field:

  • Be prepared for turnover. Often overlooked in grant writing and project planning, turnover can be a major factor in project management, especially in complex and relationship-based transdisciplinary transformation projects. The need for time and attention to support ‘onboarding’ of new partners and explain decisions and interpretations not clearly visible in project proposals and formal planning documents should not be underestimated.

  • Listen to your intuition and consider which outcomes matter most. Project applications may require you to formulate a wide range of outputs, impacts, and performance indicators—being clear about what outcomes are the most important, to yourself and collaborators, and revisiting and repeating this throughout the project for continuous realignment across the consortium, can help maintain motivation and project substance.