The project Interdisciplinary Cooperation for Sustainability is one of the 11 projects of the Sustainability Research (SusRes) initiative, which started in August 2022. It aims to study how interdisciplinary collaboration is practised in the context of research for sustainability.

Interdisciplinary cooperation is increasingly framed as necessary for grasping and addressing the environmental crisis in its complexity. But aside from the intrinsic logic of this argument, the growing traction of this mode of scientific knowledge production appears rather embedded in the current context of research politics and economics than deriving from empirical certainties about its general effectivity and potential best practices. On the other hand, the literature on the role of knowledge in environmental governance highlights hierarchical dynamics whereby specific knowledge is prioritized over others in tackling the environmental crisis. While a diversity of knowledge and perspectives are required to address wicked issues precipitated by the Anthropocene, the potential contribution of interdisciplinary collaboration to sustainability depends on which and how this diverse knowledge is integrated towards the production of new problem-solving and policy-relevant knowledge.

In this context, the project Interdisciplinary Cooperation for Sustainability studies the case of the SusRes initiative hosted by NTNU. Building on political ecology and practice theory, the PhD student analyses the framing and practice of interdisciplinarity for sustainability in this initiative on two levels and two timeframes. To this end, the project first aims to trace the implementation of the SusRes initiative, and then, to follow in-depth the collaboration process of a few selected interdisciplinary projects part of this initiative.

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