Developing, Implementing and Communicating Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research: AlpFUTUR as an Example

The recently completed research programme AlpFUTUR studied Swiss summer grazing and Alpine farming in its vast complexity in order to provide information and means to take informed decisions given internal and external developments and pressures. Though the first issues and questions were raised by researchers, these were soon complemented by involving practice and administrative bodies into the research process. This paper informs how the programme (22 projects, 80 researchers and implementation experts, and 56 sponsors) was set up and managed, how practice was involved, and how the research process was guided towards a synthesis and a broad array of products that the various stakeholder groups were able to implement. The paper shows that a successful inter- and transdisciplinary research programme needs a stringent management that ideally reflects some of the complexity of the topic, researchers that are keen on such research, good networks with practice ideally already existing for some time, and key players that get involved into the research.