Bridging Worlds: The Story of a Transdisciplinary Coordination Initiative

Dec 17, 2025
6 min read

Updated: Jan 26

Over the past decades, the global science community has increasingly realized that tackling complex environmental and societal challenges requires more than just strong disciplinary research – it needs collaboration built across institutions, cultures, and communities. This was the insight behind a Transdisciplinary (TD) Coordination Initiative, launched jointly by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) and the Belmont Forum, with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). The aim: to make collaboration not only possible, but effective, inclusive, and sustainable. Inclusive Innovation (II) has been proud to participate in and facilitate parts of this journey.

At the heart of the initiative lies a simple but powerful ambition: strengthen how collaboration happens: across disciplines, countries, sectors, funders, and ways of knowing. It seeks to sharpen what “coordination” means in TD research – all the non-academic activities that enable complex collaborations and meaningful co-production among different disciplines and with non-academic knowledge holders – and to professionalize it, resource it, and ensure that the relationships and processes underpinning collaboration are well organized to amplify impact.

Why Coordination Matters

The seed of this initiative was planted several years ago when the Belmont Forum completed an external evaluation of its Collaborative Research Actions (CRAs), large international funding calls that unite research agencies from around the world. The evaluation highlighted the Forum’s success in fostering global collaboration but also uncovered a challenge: while the Forum was excellent at launching multinational transdisciplinary research projects, there was no consistent mechanism to coordinate them once they were underway.

“Some CRAs could afford a post-award coordination team, others couldn’t.” said Fany Ramos Quispe, a Belmont Forum officer who led the coordination assessment during 2023-2024. “We realized we didn’t even have a shared language for what coordination meant.”

At the same time, the IAI was experimenting with new ways to bridge science and society. “We were trying to make transdisciplinarity real,” says Laila Sandroni, who was leading several TD initiatives for IAI, “not just in theory, but in how calls were designed, how teams were formed, and how knowledge was co-produced.”

Recognizing that many researchers and teams lacked the bandwidth – the time, institutional support, facilitation skills – to coordinate effectively, IAI and Belmont Forum began exploring ways to support this in-between work.

The TD Coordination Working Group

At the 2023 SRI Conference in Panama, these threads came together. Maria Uhle from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), who also served as Co-Chair of the Belmont Forum, created a small TD Coordination working group to explore how funders, research institutions, and practitioners could strengthen coordination across all stages of collaborative research, from scoping to synthesis.

“We wanted to get away from the typical approach where a funded project just goes and does its thing,” says Uhle, “We wanted more of a community, a critical mass of people who can work internationally on transdisciplinary research.”

The group that formed – drawing members from the IAI, Belmont Forum, the Global Development Network (GDN), and others – met virtually over 2023 to design a shared process. In June of 2024, following the SRI Conference in Helsinki, Inclusive Innovation facilitated an in-person co-creation workshop, during which the group mapped an exhaustive list of jobs to be done: the practical tasks, structures, and relationships needed to make TD coordination work across institutions. Together we identified shared and individual responsibilities, from building training programs to reforming funding frameworks.

The group itself became a living lab for the very practices it was trying to advance: listening deeply, naming tensions, and creating space for diverse perspectives and power dynamics. As Sandroni puts it, “We’re systematizing standards of good collaboration through good collaboration.”

From that Helsinki convening emerged the blueprint for a new mode of working, one deeply attentive to coordination as infrastructure. With the analysis, reflections, and proposals generated there, the working group co-authored a report: Transdisciplinary Coordination: Building Bridges for the Future of Knowledge Co-production. The report was published by the IAI in late 2024, marking a milestone in recognizing coordination not as optional, but as foundational for TD research.

A Roadmap for Better Coordination

The report outlines three core goals:

Shift culture: strengthen TD communities, promote multicultural and multilingual practice, empower communities as equal partners, and lift up stories of success across contexts.
Transform funding: adapt funding mechanisms to support coordination, include capacity building in calls, extend monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and recognize the non-research work that enables TD practice.
Build capacity: invest in facilitation skills, communication, conflict navigation, co-production, impact orientation, and participatory methods.

This is not a technical add-on. It is a foundation that supports meaningful, ethical, impactful TD research.

What is Coordination?

One of the major challenges is the lack of bandwidth for coordination. “Everyone is so busy,” says Uhle, “unless you have people who can catalyze the collaboration, it’ll never happen.”

Coordinators hold the 60,000-foot view, connecting dots across projects, run webinars and exchanges, synthesize learning, and create the rhythm that keeps the various actors in the projects engaged. It’s not necessarily one person who is the coordinator; several people can share this role within a research collaboration. One of the key skillsets required: being able to navigate hierarchy and facilitate people with different perspectives and lived experiences.

“The projects are already good at the science part,” says Uhle, “Coordination is the human touch, flattening the power dynamics, helping people work together.”

Uhle argues that coordination isn’t a side activity; it’s the connective tissue of effective transdisciplinary work, bridging research and real-world outcomes. And crucially, she believes it needs to be valued, professionalized and funded.

Changing the System from Within

The group’s findings quickly highlighted a paradox: everyone agrees coordination is essential, but few are allowed to fund it. Most national science agencies can only support “research,” not the relational or capacity-building work that makes research effective. That means the very people holding transdisciplinary collaborations together -– the facilitators, translators, and boundary-spanners – often can’t be paid for their work.

“It’s not that funders don’t see the value,” explains Sandroni. “It’s that legal frameworks literally don’t permit it.” Not only are most agencies unable to compensate non-academic partners, they can’t even fund the training researchers need to work transdisciplinarily. “If your supervisor was trained in the 1980s, they might not have the skills needed for TD work. But there’s no funding mechanism for them to build those skills now.”

That’s where organizations like the IAI – a Belmont Forum member and an intergovernmental body – play a unique role because they have more flexibility than national research councils and can prototype new models and influence others. As Ramos Quispe puts it, “Some of our members, like the IAI can experiment where others can’t. And once we show it works, we can help shift the system.”

Enabling Impact Research

For funders and research institutions, grounding TD calls in a robust coordination system could dramatically increase their impact. When coordination is planned from the beginning, when facilitators are resourced, when community engagement and synthesis are part of the design – research can more consistently translate into real-world change. The Belmont Forum Coodination review showed evidence of the impact of good coordination.

For researchers, especially early- and mid-career, it means being part of teams where collaboration is supported, visible, and rewarded – not something squeezed in as extra work. For communities and non-academic partners, it opens space for equal voice, respect, and benefit.

For the broader TD community, the report – and the process leading up to it – offers a model for how coordination can be done with care, humility, and honesty. And II’s role in convening, facilitating, and designing that model shows that such work need not depend solely on established research institutions; there is space for intermediaries, for facilitators, for those who bring process, design, and collaboration expertise to the table.

What Success Looks Like

For Sandroni, success means seeing transdisciplinary research become institutionalized as normal and fundable as disciplinary or interdisciplinary work. “In the 1990s, interdisciplinary research received only a fraction of global funding,” she notes. “Now it’s mainstream. We want to see TD take that same leap.”

For Ramos Quispe, good coordination in TD research is key to co-create a science to sustain life, and beyond academic papers. “I want to see science open up,” she says, “to recognize different systems of knowledge – not as local inputs, but as equal partners in research.”

In practical terms, both agree that success depends on visibility: showing that coordination is what makes the difference between well-intentioned projects that stay on paper and truly transformative partnerships that change how science serves society.

What’s Next: Sustaining the Momentum

With the report published and the ideas laid out, the focus now turns to sustaining momentum. The TD Coordination Group continues to meet regularly, exploring how to build capacity for TD Coordination across regions, by embedding coordination into future CRAs and with training and facilitation courses, like the IAI’s TD Academy, and the Belmont Forum’s Advancing Leadership Program (ALP). Inclusive Innovation has been supporting Belmont in the co-design and facilitation of this cohort program.

The vision is ambitious: a world where coordination is not an afterthought, but a standard; where TD research is designed with care for people, relationships, and impact; where science, society and communities co-produce knowledge in a way that is equitable, reflexive, and effective.

“Coordination is not overhead,” says Sandroni, “It is the heartbeat of collaboration.”