Fostering the Emergence of Transdisciplinary Projects for Transitions: Our Collaboration with PSL–TERRAE

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The first emergence forum

At Inclusive Innovation, we are often approached by organizations seeking to collaboratively generate new projects. Two motivations come up regularly:

1. Addressing systemic challenges: Some issues can only be understood and solved by bringing multiple perspectives together. Water management is a clear example of this complexity: hydrology, climatology, agriculture, biodiversity, domestic uses, and energy needs all form interconnected parts of a single system. Bringing these actors and areas of expertise around a table enables the design of coherent and sustainable solutions.

2. Bringing real-world needs to the surface: Other organizations want to imagine projects grounded in the lived reality of the people concerned. This requires listening, understanding, and co-constructing answers with local actors from the very beginning.

It is with this approach that, at the start of 2025, we began supporting PSL University’s Grand Research Programme, TERRAE (Environmental Transition for Research, Action-Research and Education). The programme carries an ambitious objective: to design pathways of transformation towards a more resilient world, both environmentally and socially.

TERRAE brings together a community of more than 150 researchers from various PSL institutions, with the goal of structuring, amplifying, and strengthening transdisciplinary research in connection with non-academic partners.

At TERRAE, we are deeply committed to driving ambitious action-research grounded in interdisciplinarity—crossing disciplinary boundaries—and in transdisciplinarity, by working with non-academic actors. To do so, we propose an original approach: enabling this action-research to emerge collectively, throughout the project, within PSL and with field actors. This allows anyone interested to join or contribute to the process. Inclusive Innovation’s support fits perfectly within this dynamic: it opened spaces for diverse exchanges and shared building across disciplines, institutions, and actors. We are delighted to work with them to develop these shared dialogues, which are essential for fostering the transformative pathways we urgently need in the face of today’s crises.

Corinne Robert, Director of the PSL TERRAE Grand Programme

Phase 1 – An Emerging Community

The first step of our support consisted of bringing together researchers interested in socio-ecological transformations. PSL is a unique ecosystem: a grouping of thirteen institutions with diverse expertise—from ENS to Dauphine, via Chimie Paris and EPHE. These researchers were not all used to collaborating.

We therefore facilitated two half-day project emergence forums in spring and summer 2025, with three objectives:

• Encourage encounters and network-building among researchers working on transitions,

• Develop a shared culture of transdisciplinarity,

• Identify cross-cutting themes across scientific disciplines to guide future projects.

These workshops combined moments of mutual acquaintance, exchanges on the concept of transdisciplinarity, and collective exercises mapping needs and emerging themes.

From this dynamic emerged six major research directions:

• Resource management and energy transition

• Health and environment

• Resource sharing, justice, and mediation

• Mitigation, adaptation, and biodiversity

• Low-impact lifestyles and work

• Urban vulnerabilities (climatic and health-related)

Phase 2 – Emerging Projects

These six themes then served as the basis for a co-creation day held in October 2025. The objective: to generate early-stage research projects with a clear transdisciplinary ambition.

Starting from the question “What if we imagined a world where…”, participants explored desirable visions, then identified barriers and levers to move toward them. This collective work led to three major research questions, now at the heart of TERRAE’s future projects:

• How can we develop new modes of environmental health protection in collaboration with citizens?

• What sustainability pathways exist for companies and behaviours?

• How can we imagine interspecies habitability that is just and sustainable across territories?

In small groups, researchers then outlined the contours of these projects—relevance, impact, levers for action—before sharing their reflections and gathering feedback from peers.

What's next ?

The next step, planned before the end of the year, will be to open these dynamics to non-academic actors—local authorities, associations, companies, networks of actors—in order to co-define and strengthen the emerging projects.

For Inclusive Innovation, this collaboration illustrates a core conviction: tomorrow’s answers emerge at the crossroads of disciplines and worlds.

The support of the Inclusive Innovation team, experts in collective intelligence, was instrumental in launching and sustaining the TERRAE programme, by creating an open and productive space for exchange. Vincent, Mathilde and Thomas helped us design the workshops, which enabled mutual understanding, listening and co-construction to flourish, leading to the emergence of genuinely interdisciplinary, cross-institutional research projects anchored in real-world challenges.

Annabel Lavigne, Head of Non-Academic Partnerships, CERES, École Normale Supérieure