Re-imagining interdisciplinary research for biodiversity renewal

The necessity of working across disciplines and beyond academia to address urgent challenges such as biodiversity loss is now a well-established research and policy imperative, but there remain few detailed accounts of how collaborative research works in practice. Ongoing discussions of interdisciplinarity continue to be dominated by a combination of rhetorical, ‘top-down’ exhortations, and practical, experience-based ‘rules of thumb,’ alongside a growing number of extended, embedded STS accounts. These literatures rarely seem to be carried forward in practice to tackle repeated difficulties of collaboration, such as disciplinary hierarchies that cast social sciences in ‘service’ roles. However, recent developments within the UK environmental science policy and research landscape towards greater emphasis on interdisciplinary, solutions-oriented research and capacity-building signal the possibility of genuine re-imaginings of interdisciplinarity. Emerging findings from our embedded STS study of a UK biodiversity renewal research project, ‘RENEW,’ suggest that, despite challenges of scale, disciplinary and institutional cultures, non-epistemic differences, integration and contingency/control, experiential learning both in funding policy contexts and ‘on the ground’ in research is enabling long-standing problems of interdisciplinarity to be addressed. However, detrimental logics are also reproduced, and active attempts to effect change have unintended consequences linked to wider research cultures. This demonstrates the need to consider how everyday experiential learning relates to the long-durée of epistemic, cultural and institutional change.