Crossing disciplinary boundaries in environmental research: Interdisciplinary engagement across the Slovene research community

Romina Rodela; Dušan Alašević

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.144

Crossing disciplinary boundaries in environmental research: Interdisciplinary engagement across the Slovene research community

Sci Total Environ. 2017 Jan 1:574:1492-1501. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.144. Epub 2016 Aug 30.

Authors

Romina Rodela¹, Dušan Alašević²

Affiliations

¹ Södertörn University, School of Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies, Alfred Nobels alle 7, 141 89 Huddinge, Sweden; Wageningen University, Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, 6700 EW Wageningen The Netherlands. Electronic address: rominarodela@hotmail.com.
² University of Nova Gorica, School of Environmental Sciences, Vipavska 13, 5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia.

PMID: 27586165
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.144

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to environmental research are calling for a type of scientific inquiry that is able to bring together the natural and social sciences. This with the aim to advance our understanding of environmental issues and produce synthetic and actionable knowledge meant to address these. Yet, interdisciplinarity research of this type is a demanding and challenging pursuit; many have shown that in certain thematic areas and geographic regions practice falls behind discourse. We bring together ideas about interdisciplinary research collaborations (after Patricia L. Rosenfield) and interdisciplinary epistemic synthesis (after Julie T. Klein) that are used to analyse a sample of research projects funded (from 2006 to 2013) by the Slovene Research Agency. We triangulated interview data (with principal investigators) with document analysis and integrated these with other secondary data. Our results suggest for the sample of environmental projects to be interdisciplinary in a narrow sense, this prevalently within natural and life sciences with little input from the humanities and social sciences. Also, the results obtained suggest that environmental research with unambiguous problem solving objectives is preferred over research with a high degree of abstraction, as involved in theoretical and conceptual work.

Keywords: Environmental change processes; Interdisciplinary; Multidisciplinary; Science policy interface; Slovene research agency; Slovenia; Transdisciplinary.