Climate change is considered to be an interdisciplinary field of research (Hadorn et al. 2008), i.e. it is viewed as being dependent on the knowledge and skills of people from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds. Researchers of climate change are increasingly organising themselves into interdisciplinary centres and networks, while research evaluators (RCN, 2012) are calling for more and better collaboration between scientists and social scientists. The recent Norwegian evaluation recommends that, “new mechanisms should be put in place to build on the excellent disciplinary research to address new scientific challenges of linked Earth and human systems” (ibid: 119). These recent developments make climate research an ideal place to study interdisciplinary collaboration and develop concepts for the effective organisation of interdisciplinary research.

This preliminary project aims to take a first step towards gaining an overview of existing studies on interdisciplinary research and grouping them in relation to their relevance to climate change research. We intend to do this by including researchers with experience on climate change and environmental research, some with experience on interdisciplinary knowledge production and some with expertise on effective organisation of collaborative research. We will supplement our literature study with interviews with climate research scientists.

Our theoretical approach is based upon the idea of scientific practice being a collaborative process; we see inter- or transdisciplinary research as a form of research collaboration. We assume that climate change research consists of multi-layered collaborations including business, academia, policymakers and the public. Our focus will be the collaboration between different disciplines wherever they occur.