Building Transdisciplinarity for Managing Complexity: Lessons from Indigenous Practice

Abstract

The most critical problems humanity faces today are complex problems, characterised by high levels of uncertainty, multiple perspectives and multiple interlinked processes from local to global scales. A good example of such a challenge is climate change. Traditional research inquiries with specialized experts are unable to make the connections required to manage complexity. Transdisciplinary approaches can help different stakeholder groups to share and use their knowledge and experience for problem focused inquiry. Facilitating transdisciplinarity requires good dialogue processes and the development of holistic frameworks. Through reflecting on participatory action research initiatives with the Kuna and Quechua indigenous peoples we show that indigenous societies have developed over time strong dialogue processes, and continue to link them to a holistic view of the world allowing them to manage complex societal problems. They provide opportunities for linking knowledge systems to allow innovative adaptive solutions to problems such as climate change that affect all of humanity. We offer a new approach to promoting transdisciplinarity from the Indigenous Peoples ’ Climate Change initiative, starting with frameworks that recognise complexity and can facilitate dialogue.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 85 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.