Transdisciplinary Research along the Logic of Empowerment: Perspectives from Four Urban and Regional Transformation Projects

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall this is an important and worthy topic and the main thrust of the argument is an important one to make:   ‘why do people participate in transdisciplinary research if there is no financial incentive?’ Is it about empowerment and voice?

The authors also seem to be really genuinely engaged in real-world consultation and change in the four projects they describe. This is commendable.

Unfortunately there are some significant limitations to this paper - it is more a description of some projects by the authors - not a scientific paper.

I would suggest that the authors actually reflect on what methodology they have used to do this research examining whether the 'logic of empowerment' is what was underlying their transdisciplinary projects. I see no evidence from these projects in this paper - there is no quotes from participants about why they engaged - it seems to be a paper recording the opinions of the authors not showing the reader where they got those opinions.

I also note that there is no reference to any ethics approval for these studies and for using the data from the studies in any publication - this is a significant issue.

If this is to be rewritten in future I would suggest setting up some clear definitions of transdisciplinarity early - including participatory and consulting transdisciplinarity and also clearly mentioning both pragmatic and philosophical transdisciplinarity as background for this philosophical question.

The concepts of the Triple Helix and Quadruple Helix also may need definition in order for the reader to understand why they are included in this discussion.

I do encourage the authors to consider rewriting this as an opinion piece. 

Author Response

Reply to reviewer 1

Many thanks for taking the time to read our manuscript and for the valuable feedback given.

You are absolutely right in observing that the original version read more like a description or an opinion piece. We corrected this by making explicit the analysis carried out within the team to compare the findings and lessons learned from the individual projects. As made more explicitly in the new version, criticality and self-reflection are key elements in transdisciplinary projects. We worked along this reasoning, but took it too much for granted and therefore missed out on properly clarifying it in the text. This has been corrected.

This also addresses the aspect of methodology. We added a paragraph at the beginning of section 2 to explicate the cross-project analysis and make clearer how a critical self-reflection is central to the work done and described.

Also, we made more clear in the new version of the paper that the ‘logic of empowerment’ relates not to the motivation of participants (‘civil society’) to engage in these projects, but to the motivation of the researchers. We found that the logics of interdisciplinarity as described by Barry et al. do indeed play a role in motivating inter- or transdisciplinary projects, but they did not fully explain the rationale for setting up time-consuming and intense project work. This has been made more obvious in the new version.

As the core of paper was meant to reflect upon the projects and not to analyze them in detail – we do this to some degree in various sources we cited, as well as in upcoming work – we did not include quotes by the participants. However, in order to give some more detail about the projects and the work done within (commented upon by another reviewer as well), we added citations that we published in previous publications. We opted for this route also to deal with aspect of ethics. This is an important comment, many thanks for raising it. Participants were informed about the nature of the research projects and gave their consent to participation. As no personal information is recorded in the paper and no pictures are used in the publication, we do not consider this problematic. Project partners (i.e. as listed in section 2) have been informed about the paper and approve of its publication.

Many thanks, finally, for the very useful comments on definitions and the introduction of certain concepts or jargon. We have significantly re-written especially the introduction chapter to do justice to this feedback. As it too often the case, one takes certain concepts or jargon for granted if one uses them frequently. We have now revised the paper to improve its clarity and to make it accessible for a wider audience.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting manuscript, building on the results of four trans-disciplinary research projects. The manuscript is well written, with some technical defficiencies. Section 3 does not show the results of the analysis, but rather sets the research context, by describing each of the analyzed projects. I propose it to be renamed into 'Research context'. Namely, Section 4 does not contain conclusions. This is a qualitative analysis of the shared characteristics of the four projects. I propose that it should be renamed into "Qualitative analysis of trans-disciplinarity determinants" (or something similar). This section should be, also, extended and the characteristics identified among the projects analyzed should be connected to the theory, presented in Section 1. Focus should be placed on the proposed 'logic of empowerment', as the generalizable feature of the trans-disciplinary research. I propose that an additional section is included, i.e. Section 5 (Discussion), focusing on the logic of empowerment in the trans-disciplinary research. The existing Section 5, thus, becomes Section 6 and should be renamed into 'Conclusions'.

Author Response

Reply to reviewer 2

Many thanks for taking the time to read our manuscript and for the valuable feedback given.

We appreciate the, by and large, positive evaluation of our work. The main concern expressed in your review touches upon the nomenclature of the sections, which we took over almost exactly as suggested. This was a very useful comment as it makes the structure of the paper more clear, and will help the reader.

Furthermore, the theory presented in section 1 (which as per the request of several other reviewers has been expanded and somewhat revised) has been integrated more in the project descriptions. This indeed connect the sections more and enhances the readability of the paper and creates a better balance within the text. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Overall the paper is well-written and well-structured, dealing with an interesting side of research. However, I have a few comments for the authors:

1.       The authors have substantially used the word “We”. It is advised to avoid such non-academic words and replace them with academic words, such as this research, the current study, etc.

2.       After reading the whole paper I feel that the abstract does not well reflect the whole manuscript as it lacks several important pieces of information. This paper is based on 4 transdisciplinary research projects, but what is the key objective of this paper? Also, it is not advised to use any citations in the abstract.

3.       What research gap this study filled? It is not highlighted in the introduction section.

4.       The materials and Methods section is confusing, The authors just explained those 4 transdisciplinary research projects on which this paper is based. However, this section should also explain why the authors have chosen these projects and which method they used to choose these projects, etc.

5.       The Conclusion section is written before the discussion sections. I will suggest splitting the conclusion & conflicts section and placing the conclusion section after the discussion section.

6.       Lastly, add the implication and limitations of this study. 

Author Response

Reply to reviewer 3

Many thanks for taking the time to read our manuscript and for the valuable feedback given.

The papers has been extensively re-written, based on your feedback and that of the other reviewers. Firstly, you are right in advising against the use of the word ‘we’. Its use is a bit dependent on writing style and academic field, but after you’ve pointed it out, we only realized it indeed made the paper less scientific.

The abstract has been re-written to reflect better the content of the paper, more in particular by highlighting the questions the paper aims to answer. We have decided to keep the reference in the abstract. Also this perhaps a matter of disciplinary expectations or habits, but it is not totally uncommon and we believe it is relevant to mention Barry et al., as our concept of the logic of empowerment builds directly upon their work.

The research gap has been made more explicit and specific. Also, a third research question that relates more to the finding of the logic of empowerment has been added to the end of section 1 to make this clearer.

Many thanks for your comment on the selection of the projects. This was, to a large extent a pragmatic decision, this, however, is now also acknowledged and explained in the paper. Furthermore (answering more explicitly comments by other reviewers), the methods section now make clear that an important aspect to reach our conclusions was not only the projects themselves, but also cross-project reflection and analyses.

Sections 4 and 5 have been adjusted and renamed as per the suggestions of reviewer 2. We hope, and believe, that this also addressed your concern.

Many thanks for pointing out the absence of implications and limitations. This is an important issue, which we have added at the end of our paper.

Reviewer 4 Report

It would be helpful to know what the broad objectives of each project were. The authors should also provide brief descriptions of the Mode-2, Triple Helix, and the Entrepreneurial University models (41-42, 73-75) rather than assume that a typical reader of sustainability already understands them.

Abstract: Distinction between invent and innovate is fuzzy and counterintuitive.

Introduction

37: What is the difference between generating knowledge and innovation?

62: stakeholders

104: transdisciplinarity

147: Own translation should probably be within the parentheses.

154: … dissimilarities that surfaced…

Materials and Methods:

Just as you have discussed the aim of the iResilience (lines 224-229) and TUDo/sfs (291-296), it would be useful to provide a similar brief, possibly itemized, summary of the main goals of each project.

Examples of the collaboration in the various projects would help the reader understand and get a “real” sense of what transdisciplinary participatory collaboration (as opposed to consulting collaboration) looks like. So, for instance, what is an example of one of the “fields of climate change adaptation” that stakeholders had to dialogue about? 334-244 are illuminating, but it would be even more helpful to see an example, for each of the four projects, of what the deliberation looked like. I believe if your research is to influence a wider spectrum of social science research, concrete examples from the four projects would be illustrative. In the absence of examples, the process reads as ideals to follow rather than actualities.

Results:

397-398: From a humanities perspective, is it possible to have a neutral supervision from the outside? For example, if the outsider supervisor is an economist, s/he may be more interested in efficiency of the project and the collaboration rather than participatory resolution.

516: What are quadruple helix stakeholders?

3.4 is lacking the detail that the other 3 projects have. What did the researchers learn about collaboration in this framework? Please expand this section.

Conclusions:

608: What is an example of conflict between social issues and environmental concerns?

614-622: This is a very interesting problem to surface, and I would like to see the authors discuss this at length rather than in the two concluding sentences of the paragraph.

Discussion:

665: What consequences? Specificity is important.

Overall: I really appreciate the opportunity to provide feedback on this specific paper. I support transdisciplinary scholarship and am interested in engaging in them myself, and this paper provides a good reference for the scholarship and a blueprint for what can go wrong. My biggest concern is the clarity of the paper. Your paper is very clear in many ways, but very heavy on jargon and very, very light on jargon. This is unfortunate considering the audience of your paper. I strongly urge you to add plenty of examples for each of the projects, under all four projects. I recommend adding at least one example, and preferably even two examples for each project. The audience for Sustainability is likely not conversant with the jargon of the (sub)field. The ideas make sense to me, so do the drawbacks and things to watch out for in each of the project models, but I had to do a lot of the "imagining" myself. In the absence of examples of collaboration and joint innovation and even examples of failures in each approach, the paper reads like just theory. I strongly urge you to update your paper with examples, and to de-jargon-ify your paper (what is triple helpx or quadruple helix? I am a reader of Sustainability, and I have no idea what these terms mean.)

Author Response

Reply to reviewer 4

Many thanks for taking the time to read our manuscript and for the valuable and detailed feedback given – especially also for pointing out language errors, these have of course been corrected.

We have revised all project descriptions – also in line with comments raised by other reviewers – albeit to varying degrees. We did make sure to be more clear about the project objectives, in as far as these were not yet explicit enough for the individual projects. More examples have been given (without being able to go into too much detail in the interest of keeping the length of the text comprehensible) and some quotes by participants have been added to provide a better feel for the projects.

Your comments on jargon and the introduction of concepts such as Mode-2 and Triple Helix were spot-on. We have significantly re-written especially the introduction chapter to do justice to this feedback. As it too often the case, one takes certain concepts or jargon for granted if one uses them frequently. We have now revised the paper to improve its clarity and to make it accessible for a wider audience.

This, in a way, also relates to your comment on the distinction between invention and innovation (in the abstract) and generating knowledge and innovation. We made this clearer in the paper by stressing the knowledge generation is often basic/scientific, whereas innovation requires not only the generation of knowledge (which needs to be more applied), but also the development and implementation of the ideas to become spread and to become true innovations.

Thanks also for pointing out the issue of neutrality. This is absolutely spot-on, which is also why it was put in parenthesis. By neutral we simply mean ‘not a partner in the transdisciplinary collaboration’ as made clear in the text.

As mentioned above, all project descriptions have been revised. Section 3.4 has been re-written almost in its entirety. Thanks a lot for pointing out this imbalance.

Examples of a conflicts (that came up within the projects) have been given.

We have explicated the topics of lines 614-622. Due to limited space, we cannot develop this in full, even though it is a topic that would indeed perhaps deserve an entire paper in its own right.

Finally, the reference to the word ‘consequence’ in the discussion has been deleted. You are absolutely right in asking the question (to give a short answer, especially partners from public administration feared consequences in terms of public dissatisfaction and potentially even personal employment consequences if concerns by citizens would become so loud that their bosses would feel necessitated to interfere and respond to public dissatisfaction), but explaining it in full would again make the paper unnecessarily longer. Not much is lost by deleting it altogether at this point in the text.

Reviewer 5 Report

The authors worked on Transdisciplinary research along the logic of empowerment: Perspectives from four urban and regional transformation projects.  Major concerns have been raised over the content of your manuscript, and I have now recommended it for rejection.

Overall evaluation -----------

The abstract of the paper is poorly written

The project structure presented in Fig.1, needs to be redesigned.

The contribution of the paper to the research community is weak.

Results discussions are not clearly showing the mentioned achievement.

No Mathematical Models are designed and explained. Unable to create a link with the overall system, proposed in the paper.

References are not appropriate. Need to include more references. A few references, mentioned in the paper, are not related to the proposed scheme.

Author Response

Reply to reviewer 5

Many thanks for taking the time to read our manuscript and for the feedback given.

We have revised the abstract of the paper, also as per the comments of the other reviewers.

As for the project structure presented in figure 1, this cannot be redesigned as the project coming to an end and the very same depiction has been used throughout. Replacing the graph with another one would compromise the easy identification among those familiar with the project.

Regarding the feedback that the contribution to the community is weak, it is a pity the reviewer is not more explicit with their review. The four other reviewers expressed different concerns, but none really questioned the merits to the research community. Although we would welcome constructive feedback on how this easy could be improved, are what precisely is weak or has little added value, we therefore feel strengthened by the other reviews in that our contribution is worthwhile.

The results and conclusion sections (renamed as per suggestions by reviewer 2) have been revised to become more clear. Also, a third research question was added, doing better justice to the content of the concluding chapters and making sure the paper becomes a better readable and more logical structure.

As we are social scientists who used qualitative methods to reflect upon findings and experiences from qualitative research projects (as acknowledged in the paper), there is no intension or need to include mathematical models. We thank the reviewer for taking the time to read our paper, but should conclude on the basis of this comment that the reviewer seems to have very different disciplinary background and therefore different expectations of publications.

We included more reference to the text.

Round 2

Reviewer 5 Report

Now, it is ok from my side.