2026/01/21 by Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Stephanie Jahn, Jens Newig · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance #Sustainability in Higher Education
paper · doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104318
openalex publication_date 2026/01/21 · openalex created_date 2026/01/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Despite their stated ambitions, the societal outputs of many transdisciplinary sustainability research projects remain at the level of research dissemination to policy makers and concerned stakeholders, rather than organizing a truly interactive knowledge co-production process. In addition, projects that organize interactive knowledge co-production often achieve either a high level of actionable knowledge outputs for the key societal stakeholders or a high level of publication outputs for the scientific community. This paper analyses this trade-off in more detail based on the survey results from a unique sample of 50 completed EU research projects that fall under the same funding requirement to combine societal impact and scientific excellence in so-called "Research and Innovation Actions". The results confirm the difficulty for many projects to achieve both goals. In fact, the results show that only about half (54 %) of the projects produced actionable knowledge outputs at the end of the project, and only 34 % achieved both a high level of actionable knowledge outputs and a high level of peer-reviewed articles. The analysis of the survey results shows that co-design of research tasks related to field work, such as social science data collection or technical experimentation in real-world environments, contributes to actionable knowledge, but also potentially leads to fewer publications. An important exception to this finding is the case of intermediate levels of field research co-design. In this case, the strengthening of relational and reflective-normative trust between scientific researchers and social actors contributes to both actionable knowledge outputs and academic publications.