The role of transdisciplinarity in research and education for sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainability problems are widely recognised as wicked problems. The scientific expertise needed to deal with multifaceted and complex sustainability problems requires innovation, creative thinking, action-orientated and transdisciplinary approaches. This chapter explores the transdisciplinary approach with sustainability lenses and highlights the need of transdisciplinary practice as one of the guiding principles of education for sustainability by bringing about mutual learning, collaborative research, and problem solving processes among academia, business, government and civil society. The concept of linking knowledge to action for sustainability requires a very different type of education to generate the knowledge that matters to people’s decisions and education. From analysing the principles and different implications of the transdisciplinary approaches on both sustainability research and education and revising some implementation experiences on transdisciplinary education approaches for sustainability it is concluded, that transdisciplinarity has the potential to break the dominant fragmentary disciplinary thinking. Some of the assessments of transdisciplinary experiences suggest that there is a need to focus on education professionals training and on the revision of the best practices.