Transdisciplinary public administration research: developing and testing a model for transdisciplinary knowledge integration in the public sector

Abstract

While transdisciplinarity-a combination of interdisciplinary work and coproduction of knowledge with practitioners-has become increasingly popular in various disciplines as a research approach to investigate and tackle wicked problems, its application in public administration research is still limited. Transdisciplinary research contains elements of well-known approaches for impactful research in our field. The notion of transdisciplinarity provides added value by explicitly addressing the combination of interdisciplinary and coproductive knowledge creation and by grounding the approach in the philosophy of science of applied research. This article discusses the value of transdisciplinarity for public administration research and illustrates what it means to do transdisciplinary work in the public sector. More specifically, we develop a conceptual model of transdisciplinary knowledge integration in the public sector with an identification of limiting factors and capacities for overcoming them. We conduct empirical research to test the value of this model: a case of science-government collaboration around datafication in regional and local government in the Netherlands. The empirical test of the conceptual model highlights its value for developing and assessing transdisciplinary research and extends our understanding of the transdisciplinary capacity of public organizations as an essential condition for knowledge integration.