Wageningen, 3 October 2002
Dear colleagues:
We would like to announce an international seminar on “Potential and
limitations of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary landscape studies”
to be held on November 11-12, 2002, at Alterra Green World Research,
Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Motivation
Since the 1990s, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity have gathered
increasing importance in European landscape studies. Funding bodies and
policy-makers are asking for integrated research and high demands are
placed on it from policy, funding bodies, stakeholders, and end-users.
Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches are, however,
in a pioneer state. Landscape studies face difficulties with the demands of
integration of disciplinary knowledge, meeting the expectations placed on
them and reaching their project goals. At Alterra Green World Research and
Wageningen University, a strategic research program was established to
foster interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in landscape studies:
the DELTA program (http://www.wageningen-ur.nl/delta). Several research
projects run under the DELTA program to develop theories, tools and methods
for integrated research or to apply the DELTA approach in case studies. One
of these, the INTELS project (http://www.intels.cc), aims to improve
interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in European landscape studies.
This seminar is a joint venture of the DELTA program and the INTELS
project.
Objective
The seminar will facilitate an exchange of information and experiences on
the expectations and practice of interdisciplinarity and
transdisciplinarity in Europe. Representatives from research, education,
policy and funding bodies are invited to discuss the potential and
limitations of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in landscape
research. The exchange is needed to review the expectations from policy and
end-users and to improve the quality of the research outputs. The seminar
will focus on the following themes:
Theme 1: Expectations of policy-makers, funding bodies and end-users
towards interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research. What are the
expectations of these different groups?
Theme 2: Expectations of scientists towards
interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research. What are benefit and
expectations for academia?
Theme 3: Successes and problems when conducting interdisciplinary/
transdisciplinary research. What can we learn from the experiences of past
projects? What worked, what did not work? How to make integration across
disciplinary boundaries successful? What can we advice for future projects?
Theme 4: Needs for training of professionals (research and policy).
Theme 5: Evaluation criteria for inter- and transdisciplinarity. What
are the specific criteria by which inter- and transdisciplinarity can be
evaluated?
We would be happy to welcome you as one of the participants in the seminar.
Please find more information on the seminar at http://www.wageningen-
ur.nl/delta/seminar2002.html .
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Best regards,
Bärbel Tress & Gunther Tress
|