The RAMONS project: Enhancing the structuring of interdisciplinary climate-related knowledge, and the interface between sciences and society

The RAMONS project explores the implementation of interdisciplinarity for climate change, and the interface between climate sciences and society. Since September 2008, the RAMONS project has been funded by the Parisian Scientific Consortium for Climate, E nvironment and Society (GIS). The GIS has the mission of fostering interdisciplinary dynamics among climate change related research projects. Within this context, the RAMONS project has the double objective of helping the GIS projects in (a) implementing interdisciplinarity in an efficient and long-lasting way, and (b) anchoring their interdisciplinary research within the social and political realities of climate change. The working hypothesis of the project is that both of these challenges may be explore d through the concept of reflexivity. Through interaction with GIS researchers and their projects (via focus groups, workshops and semi-directed interviews), the RAMONS project has fostered a participatory analysis of the representations and practices of interdisciplinarity within the GIS. This forms the basis for the co-construction of tools to implement interdisciplinarity. To this point, two main tools have been proposed to improve reflexivity as a step to better implementing interdisciplinarity: inaug ural contracts and writing breaks. These are currently being tested over three GIS projects, and their effectiveness monitored. Where successful, these tools have the potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research, both within the GIS, and more broadly in terms of research for global environmental crisis. The final, imperative step of the RAMONS project will be to analyse the empirical results arising from the GIS case studies. This analysis will be undertaken in Norway , both in terms of the theory and literature through the support and supervision of the SVT, and in terms of a cross-cultural comparison with the practices of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research.