A Better understanding of Interdisciplinary research in Climate Change

This pre-project aims to develop existing theory on research collaboration by gaining a better understanding of interdisciplinary climate change research. The project will also contribute to finding new ways of organising efficient interdisciplinary colla boration within the dynamic field of climate change research. Existing policy instruments designed to encourage interdisciplinary research collaboration, we find that they are broadly based on the idea of connecting researchers, stimulating collaborative networks and research centres and creating shared arenas for presenting research results. There is little attention to the possible need to develop common knowledge or to transform knowledge rather than simply transfer it from one discipline to another. The current "one size fits all" way of carrying out interdisciplinary research may function in some fields, but it leaves no room for different requirements from collaboration and will not, for example, ensure that researchers are able to utilise knowledg e from other fields (a requirement in certain phases of climate change research. The research challenge of this project is to link existing knowledge on the organisation of research collaboration with a deeper understanding of the particular conditions and the actual content of climate change research. In order to do this we are bringing together researchers who of the sociology of knowledge and those who are more used to working with the organisation of efficient research collaboration. All the researc hers have an interest either in interdisciplinarity or in sustainability, or both. Within the framework of a pre-project we can only take the first step and develop our ideas in such a way that we can produce a position paper with a "doable" proposal fo r a more comprehensive and systematic study of this theme. We view the possibility to work closely with climate change research as a unique opportunity to develop our understanding of interdisciplinary research.