Transdisciplinary Action Research in Landscape Architecture and Planning: Prospects and Challenges

reconciling local plural design projects with the exigen-cies of the regional and global contexts in which they are embedded are often substantial (Deming and Palmer 2005; Thering and Chanse 2011). As the geographical and organizational scope of action- oriented research expands, the complexities of facilitating participation and coordinating efforts among multiple stakeholders representing different community and societal sectors increase; as does the potential for encountering diver-gent and confl icting perceptions about alternative land uses and values (Bowns 2011; Doble and King 2011; McNally 2011). Furthermore, the challenges of estab-lishing and sustaining effective cross- disciplinary com-munication among scholars and practitioners trained in diverse fi elds, and working across different sectors and at different scales of the community, become more daunting as the focus of their work shifts from locally delimited