Making transdisciplinary funding more effective: lessons from a literature review and focus group interviews

Policy makers increasingly push for addressing wicked societal problems in a transdisciplinary way, emphasizing interdisciplinarity and stakeholder involvement. We performed a literature review that shows that European consortia funding schemes aim to broadly afford this type of co-creation science. We then performed focus group sessions with researchers in the medical and natural sciences, however, that indicate that such affordances might not always work out as intended. Researchers generally perceive such schemes as overambitious and as having unintended side effects. They rather value other types of European grants fostering collaborative efforts to address big issues, namely ERC grants. In this paper, we analyze why this is so, and what we could learn from this to provide funding conditions that are more likely to afford transdisciplinary research. Our findings show that the type of collaboration emphasized in ERC-type funding may better align with how scientists perceive that collaborative research should be conducted to maximize epistemic and societal returns. They suggest that smaller-scale, bottom-up and disciplined collaborations, as emphasized in the ERC, seem most promising for delivering realistic epistemic and societal impact of a transdisciplinary nature. Integrating such aspects into current consortia funding thus might afford transdisciplinary research as envisioned while reducing side effects, and we provide some first ideas for how to do so in practice.