How interdisciplinarity contributes to sustainable development
This page aims to clarify how interdisciplinarity contributes to sustainable development by stating its values and goals.
Values of interdisciplinary practices[edit | edit source]
Interdisciplinary practices can contribute to sustainable development in three dimesions: societal, academic, and personal.[1]
Societal impact[edit | edit source]
- Goal-oriented: societal problems
- Relevant to policy making
- Cooperation between different disciplines
Academic innovation[edit | edit source]
- producing new concepts, models, and methods
- providing interdisciplinary perspectives
- questioning the existed disciplines
- triggering spin-off research
- emergence of new disciplines
Personal development[edit | edit source]
- Demanding but fruitful
- Progress with strong experience
- Enhanced competence: research skills, social skills, communicative skills.
Goals of interdisciplinarity in sustainable sciences[edit | edit source]
The significance of interdisciplinary is examplified by the absoluteness of this sentence: "all science proper is interdisciplinary."[2] Interdisciplinarity is meaningful in achieving the goals as listed:
- promoting disciplinary transitions towards sustainability and boosting sustainable academic development.
- promoting innovation, synthesis and intellectual progress through collaborative projects.
- making full use of existing knowledge to tackle societally relevant issues.
- arranging various disciplines consciously to make sustainable science robust.
- conducting goal-oriented interdisciplinary research to efficiently solve global issues.
Sustainable development goals[edit | edit source]
Driving sustainability transformation - HELSUS[edit | edit source]
Introduction: In order to promote sustainable transformations, HELSUS is an interdisciplinary unit in University of Helsinki to boost cross-faculty cooperation. HELSUS accelerates sustainability transitions through researching in Consumption and Production, Global South, Arctic, Urban and Theory and Methodology, exerting impact by “acting in a knowledge brokering role, providing synthesized knowledge for the society, mobilizing the research community into active dialogue with society using multiple forms of communication, and by advocating the significance of science-based knowledge in society"[3].
- ↑ Crabbé, A. (2019). Interdisciplinarity and Sustainable Development. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_215
- ↑ Thorén, H., M. Nagatsu and P. Schönach. 2021. ‘Interdisciplinarity’. In Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts, edited by C. P. Krieg and R. Toivanen, 21–37. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-14-2.
- ↑ ‘Impact’. Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. DOI: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-institute-sustainability-science/impact
