It’s not all about funding: Fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in sustainability research from a European perspective

Abstract Sustainability research benefits from having an interdisciplinary orientation, as understanding and developing solutions to the grand challenges we confront is not the domain of any one discipline. Even though often falling short in practice, this ideal has undergirded the efforts of sustainability research, and promoted the increasing recognition of the relevance and unique insights that social science has to offer. Pointing to a significant imbalance in funding allocation between the natural and social sciences, Overland and Sovacool, in this Journal, recently challenge the notion that these two represent increasingly equal partners for sustainability research. Although we applaud and are in fundamental agreement with their arguments, we contend that framing of respect and recognition in terms of funding alone may be misleading, and can replicate and reproduce the exact imbalances that it seeks to redress. This Perspective aims to complement the insights of Overland and Sovacool by making an examination of the kinds of organizational and institutional factors preventing a fuller integration of social sciences within sustainability research. Writing from the perspective of social scientists involved in interdisciplinary research projects, this more bottom-up perspective sheds light on: the ongoing imbalance between the social and natural sciences, how and why the status quo is reproduced for structural and cultural reasons, and how transformation along the two dimensions can be achieved. The resulting solutions are relevant for not only other social scientists, but all concerned with developing robust and constructive answers to societally pressing questions.