Summer School 2025

Course Description

Meeting today’s complex environmental and societal challenges requires responses that integrate a wide range of perspectives. This means integrating perspectives from academic disciplines, that’s what we call interdisciplinary integration, as well as policy and practice, which is referred to as transdisciplinary integration.

This summer school will explore the concepts, methods and tools of integration in a hands-on experiential setting. Using real-world case studies, excursions and workshops, we will dive into what it means to work across boundaries and learn how to approach sustainability challenges from diverse angles.

Learning Goals

Integration is both a core feature and a central challenge of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. It is a fundamental process when collaborating across scientific disciplines, such as natural and social sciences or across thematic fields like policy analysis. Moreover, it becomes especially relevant when working at the interface between science, policy and practice. It refers to the process of combining different types of knowledge, perspectives, insights, interests, expectations and collaborative approaches to address complex environmental and societal problems and generate potential solutions. At the same time, it also refers to the tangible output that emerges from this process, which is a shared understanding, co-created outcomes and actionable insights into possible solutions.

At the end of the summer school students are able to:

• Understand and analyse different theories, concepts, methods and tools of integration and assess their strengths and weaknesses.
• Apply methods and tools of integration to selected case studies and critically reflect on their potentials and limitations.
• Communicate and collaborate with others in different contexts and forms, bringing in own viewpoints, recognising others, and synthesising ideas.

Course Content

What do participants learn and do? This summer school offers a rich mix of learning formats, including interactive group work, collaborative workshops and excursions. The focus is on exploring both the conceptual and methodological aspects of integration, not only in theory, but also in practice.

Participants will become familiar with key theories and concepts of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary integration, including different types of integration (such as process-oriented, outcome-focused, one-sided, and mutual). These ideas are drawn from diverse scientific communities, including team science, integration and implementation science, science and technology studies, and transformative research.

In addition, the course addresses the multiple dimensions of integration (strategic, cognitive, social, emotional, spatial, and temporal) and introduces core principles for effective integration, such as designing integrative processes, forming diverse groups, fostering strong social bonds, and creating boundary objects.

Participants will work with a variety of integration methods and tools, such as Theory of Change and Problem Framing. They will also reflect on the roles researchers play at the interface between science, policy, and practice. Special attention is given to integration experts, their personal qualities (such as flexibility, creativity, humility, persistence, and patience) and their different types of expertise (contributory, interactional, and referred).

The concepts will be brought to life through real-world case studies. For example, participants will explore the external page WINGS project on innovative resource-oriented water and sanitation systems and the external page DIAMOND project, which focuses on integrated assessment models for sustainable development. These cases are designed to provide concrete examples of how integration is applied in practice.