Transdisciplinarity from principles to practice: insights from EU Horizon research projects on sustainability

Abstract

Transdisciplinary research (TD) is widely invoked to tackle complex sustainable-development challenges by integrating scientific and societal knowledge and fostering collaboration among researchers, decision-makers, practitioners and affected publics. Yet we still lack a refined understanding of the conditions that enable TD to succeed in EU research settings. We address this gap by analysing in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Horizon project coordinators working on sustainability topics. Our results reaffirm established enablers—broad and inclusive participation, robust knowledge integration, and balanced, adaptive governance—and surface additional, actionable levers: structured feedback and iterative learning, methodological flexibility, pathways for post-project continuity, and effective use of digital collaboration tools. We synthesise these insights into a practice-proximate framework that prioritises power-sharing, equitable dialogue and shared decision-making, thereby strengthening the credibility, salience and legitimacy of TD outputs. The article refines existing TD and joint-knowledge-production perspectives and offers concrete guidance for researchers, funders and policymakers seeking to design and steward more successful TD processes in future Horizon programmes.