Assessing implementation readiness of actionable knowledge in transdisciplinary sustainability research

In spite of their stated ambition, the societal outputs of many transdisciplinary sustainability research projects often remain at the level of research dissemination to policy makers. In practice, research projects still have a difficulty to co-produce truly transepistemic actionable knowledge outputs such as common narratives, new relational networks or real-world societal innovations. In contrast, what is needed to foster co-production of usable knowledge for societal transformations is the organisation of a process of social learning on narratives and societal values between scientists and stakeholders that directly links the knowledge production processes to practical life-world problems (Herrero et al., 2019). Nevertheless, this proves to be especially challenging for participants to transdisciplinary research projects, in particular because the “intangible” social learning dimensions of the impact pathways are more difficult to document and report for purposes of communicating and organize a discussion on the projects societal impacts. This paper aims to analyse in more depth the process features allowing to address these challenges, through first-hand comparative research on impact narratives of finalized collaborative transdisciplinary research projects. In particular, the paper focuses on the following research question: what are the various governance features of successful research partnerships between scientists and societal actors that contribute to satisfying both the requirements of co-production of transformational usable knowledge outputs and the building of a common impact narrative ?