As climate change action requires participation from multiple actors across different sectors in society, so does the research that can help drive this action. That is the main aim of the pan-European Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) “Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe”. This case studied explored how one of the program lines, SOLSTICE: Enabling Societal Transformation in the Face of Climate Change, designed and implemented a funding program targeting Social Science and Humanities (SSH) fields on the topic of climate change. The aim was to provide opportunity for transformational research with societally relevant knowledge that is co-created with stakeholders in the project context. With close collaboration with societal stakeholders, project results are more likely to be taken up and used beyond the research community and ultimately contribute towards actionable in the face of climate change.
The case study revealed that funding transdisciplinarity research as a pathway to achieving close collaboration with stakeholders is difficult to operationalise. Research programmes, and subsequently the projects which stem from them, have entrenched ways of “doing research”. The SOLSTICE funding program provides opportunity for research projects to be bolder in their collaboration with citizens and stakeholders compared to traditional funding programs that fall back on scientific excellence. However, these scientific practices are slow to change. For example, despite the call for interdisciplinary research, the disciplinary collaborations often remained within the domain of neighbouring social sciences rather than between social and natural sciences.
Understanding scientific impact in interdisciplinary research contexts, as well as societal impact in contexts where diverse teams are working on complex challenges, are important and difficult tasks. SOLSTICE demonstrated that developing a common understanding and language for these tasks is necessary in order to share learnings across projects and scale these learnings at the program and funding agency level.
This case provides insight into transdisciplinarity as a pathway for engaging researchers in new constellations of public and stakeholder engagement. This pathway involves a diverse group of institutions, researchers, national funding agencies, notions of interdisciplinarity and stakeholder engagement – all requiring translations to work together. These translations achieve a lot in their implementation. From grand ideas about transformative research, to eligibility criteria and proposal evaluations, to project activities and reporting, this provides valuable insights to experimenting with research funding to help in the face of climate change. You can find the full case study here.