A team of experts from across the EWUU institutes has written an advice report based on a scoping study. Part of this report are the principles below, fostering meaningful transdisciplinary collaborations:

• Address (context-specific) societally relevant issues while maintaining scientific relevance;
• Embrace complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty;
• Value and harness plural ways of knowing via co-creating and co-learning;
• Involve diverse relevant actors in inclusive, fair, and equitable ways.

The aim of the scoping study was to increase CUCo’s understanding of transdisciplinary research, in order to facilitate and support transdisciplinary collaborations that are fair, inclusive and equitable. CUCo is indebted to the team, consisting of Barbara van Paassen, Nina de Roo, Jillian Student, Jonas Torrens and Annisa Triyanti.

Unusual collaborations cross boundaries and offer equal attention to all three elements of the ‘unusual trinity’: topic, team and process. In its first stage, CUCo decided to focus primarily on interdisciplinary research collaborations. CUCo, recognizes, however, that for research to be able to address complex challenges, knowledge other than academic knowledge is needed. For this,  transdisciplinary approaches are required. CUCo commissioned the scoping study in order to be able to support transdisciplinary collaborations in responsible ways.