Seeking alignment: reproducing and transforming impact practices in transdisciplinary research projects

Abstract

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) projects are increasingly designed and funded with the expectation that they contribute to tackling societal challenges and, consequently, generate societal impact. Yet, the relationship between TDR and societal impact remains complex and insufficiently understood. This study uses the concept of impact practices to offer a processual perspective on how societal impact creation processes unfold within TDR projects. Drawing on insights from practice theory, impact scholarship, and the TDR literature, we conceptualise impact practices as comprising three interrelated building blocks of values, strategies, and networks. Based on a real-time process study, we then identify three interrelated processes in TDR projects through which these impact practices develop: (1) emergence of proto-practices, (2) aligning of values, strategies and networks within these proto-impact practices, and (3) orienting the alignments towards transforming or reproducing societal impact. We show how project participants actively engage in these processes and align and orient a heterogeneity of impact practices within a single project, and how some become collective ways of doing for societal impact, or not. This study contributes to societal impact and TDR scholarship by providing a process model and identifying the key dynamics through which new ways of doing for societal impact creation develop in TDR projects. This is relevant for formative evaluation and management, as it makes the heterogeneous ways through which impact creation processes unfold more visible. In turn, this can contribute to stimulating reflections on impact creation in TDR projects and help make these processes more democratic.