Solving the world’s wicked sustainability problems
Professor Dave Griggs
By Professor Dave Griggs
Cross-disciplinary research. Everyone wants to do it. Everyone agrees that it is the key to solving the complex and ‘wicked’ sustainability challenges we face in Australia and around the world. So why are so few universities around the world actually succeeding?
It is an inescapable fact that if you want to address the myriad of problems facing us in the area of sustainability, you are going to need to work across disciplines, whether you like it or not. It is also true, however, that the saying ‘easier said than done’ could very well have been written about cross-disciplinary research.
It is in fact so challenging that despite the wide-spread agreement on its necessity very few people are succeeding at it. The Monash Sustainability Institute (MSI) in Melbourne, is a rare example of where it is working. Several lessons have fallen out from our experience that are useful pointers to those wanting to embrace and overcome the challenges of cross-disciplinary research.
MSI was set up in 2007 as part of Monash University’s commitment to research into environmental sustainability. It was intended to act as a portal through to Monash’s expertise – a virtual centre – with MSI acting as a facilitator and broker of interdisciplinary research.
When I first joined the Institute as its Director, the idea was that MSI would facilitate the process of pulling together academic experts from drastically different fields to work together, and that the interdisciplinary research would just fall out naturally from that process.
Of course this didn’t work.
What we quickly discovered was that unless MSI could add intellectual value to the process, researchers had little incentive to dip their toes in the challenges of cross-disciplinary research. The alternative was to set up a large centre of expertise that could be perceived as being in competition with the University’s faculties, which also didn’t seem like a good choice.
Our breakthrough came when we realised that what we needed was a ‘mixed economy’ of internal expertise and experts from across the University. We realised that we needed to provide intellectual as well as administrative leadership. It was our single most important lesson.
So we set about bringing in excellent researchers with their own disciplinary expertise and a passion for cross-disciplinary work. We particularly sought out people that were prepared to put in the time and effort to do the hard yards of getting everyone speaking the same language. The benefit we found was that these researchers were then also able to speak the right language to bring people into the process and garner the academic respect and support needed to make the process work.
The bottom line is that unless you have excellent researchers leading the process, cross-disciplinary research doesn’t work. MSI’s reputation depends on the names and credibility our researchers have forged for themselves in their own right. We quickly discovered that there was little to be gained from putting second rate researchers in charge of those processes, even if they had great interpersonal skills.
Even with high-quality researchers at the helm, however, cross-disciplinary research comes with many challenges and road-blocks. And surprisingly, it wasn’t the challenge we expected when we began our journey. Where we had anticipated that convincing scientists to engage would be a challenge, we found instead that most scientists were excited by the intellectual challenge of applying their expertise to a bigger and more complex problem.
The real challenge is that the reward, research and administrative structures weren’t and aren’t set up to support cross-disciplinary research. Most are set up along disciplinary lines; and this is true of faculties, research funding, philanthropic grants and government bodies.
Academics get published in disciplinary journals, so doing cross-disciplinary work can be a drag on disciplinary research. Reward structures are also set up along disciplinary lines, and don’t necessarily include the metrics required to understand and value cross-disciplinary impact. Interdisciplinary work is really about having an impact in a broad, real-world way, so these structures need to be adjusted.
The way MSI deals with the challenge is to foster great relationships with researchers and research bodies, businesses, government agencies, and philanthropic trusts. We spend enough time with them so that they can understand the impact and value of the work we do. Often we work outside of normal systems so fostering relationships is more important for us than in more focused research. In our line of work, establishing an understanding with our stakeholders is absolutely crucial.
Other challenges are more narrow, but no less impactful. This includes dealing with the attitudes we sometimes find towards ‘sustainability’ in some academic and business circles. Not everyone is convinced that sustainability is important. Some even consider it a passing ‘fad’. This can be problematic when that person holds an important or influential position.
It can also be hard to find funding for new projects, which require generally more thought and effort than what is already being done. And it is very hard to trace and value the impact of what we do.
So with all the challenges of cross-disciplinary research, many have asked me what motivated me to move from the UK to Australia and away from a successful career in climate science to head up the MSI.
Over the years I discovered that by working within my discipline there was only so much I could do to warn people about the dangers and looming consequences of climate change. To actually do something about it, I needed to embrace cross-disciplinary work. That’s why setting up MSI has been such a great challenge and opportunity. It was what needed to be done and also what I needed to do. Cross-disciplinary research might hold the devil’s own challenges, but it is the key to solving our ‘wicked’ problems.
Professor Dave Griggs is the Director of the Monash Sustainability Institute