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

Romina Rodela*, Dušan Alašević

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

19 Citations (Scopus)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1492-1501
JournalScience of the Total Environment
Volume574
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Environmental change processes
  • Interdisciplinary
  • Multidisciplinary
  • Science policy interface
  • Slovene research agency
  • Slovenia
  • Transdisciplinary

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