Insights Regarding Transdisciplinarity and Knowledge Transfer Gained from Two Case Studies on Integrated Water Resources Management in Ukraine and Mongolia

Abstract

Transdisciplinary environmental research (TD research) seeks to solve problems arising at the point of interaction between ecological systems, the economy, and society. It seeks to enhance problem-solving capacity through interdisciplinarity and knowledge transfer between scientific and non-scientific actors. The article assesses how far the prerequisites for knowledge transfer are met in transdisciplinary projects on integrated water resources management (IWRM), particularly in post-socialist transition countries. It examines two relevant case studies, in Ukraine and Mongolia, which share a similar institutional and cultural background, and use some of the same methods closely related to knowledge transfer. It is shown that, in each case, knowledge transfer was achieved more or less effectively in both directions — from science to society and vice versa, despite the additional obstacles posed by a common post-socialist legacy. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for designing and implementing similar TD research projects in the field of IWRM.

Keywords:

• capacity development
• community participation
• involvement of stakeholders
• mutual learning
• post-socialist transition countries

Acknowledgements

Financial support provided by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) is gratefully acknowledged (Funds No. 02WM1165, No. 02WM1166 and 02WM1168). Special thanks go to two anonymous referees for very useful comments which helped significantly to improve this article. Thanks are due to Kathleen Cross for language editing and the assistants and interviewees involved in the two case studies.

Notes

1 IWAS is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) between 2008 and 2013. For more information, please consult the webpage of the project at http://www.ufz.de/iwas-sachsen.

2 Interdisciplinarity is another important element of transdisciplinary environmental research but is not addressed in this paper due to lack of space, even though it plays an important role in the IWAS project.

3 The Mongolian case study builds not only on IWAS but also on MoMo-2. Like IWAS, MoMo-2 is a research project on integrated water resource­s management (IWRM) in Mongolia funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). For more information on MoMo-2, please consult the webpage of the project at http://www.iwrm-momo.de.

4 CLUES includes not only sanitation in the narrow sense but also related fields such as water supply, solid waste management and stormwater management.

5 The distance between the capital Ulaanbaatar and Darkhan is 230 km. The journey takes about 3 hours by car one-way, i.e. participants in a one-day workshop would have to stay overnight.