Interdisciplinary Research for Ecosystem Management

Ecosystem management (EM) is a process for addressing environmental problems that involves research utilizing interdisciplinary approaches. The work presented here examines the perspectives on the interdisciplinary research process from researchers involved in generating knowledge to contribute to EM. The goal is to generate critically reflective discussions about interdisciplinary practice. We conducted a set of targeted key-informant, semi-structured interviews (n = 15). Interviews followed a general questioning guide that included: experience doing interdisciplinary research; descriptions of the interdisciplinary process; understandings on how to conduct interdisciplinary research; interest in theories of interdisciplinarity; and interest in how the interdisciplinary process takes place. We coded interview transcripts to gain an in-depth understanding of how respondents perceive interdisciplinary research practice. Results indicate that discussions about how interdisciplinary research is conducted are not currently an important part of research activity among researchers contributing to EM. Rather, participants in the study see interdisciplinary practice as under theorized, spontaneous, and mainly intuition-based. They understand interdisciplinary research as a collaborative effort to integrate insights from different disciplines, but details about how to achieve integration remain hidden inside a “black box.” Results suggest that researchers in EM would benefit from specific guidelines for integrating insights across disciplines. The work discusses how opening the “black box” and considering explicit and detailed descriptions about the integration process might benefit interdisciplinary practice in research for conservation. This study contributes to future in-depth debates on how to generate dialectical engagement between EM researchers and those studying theories of interdisciplinarity in fields such as interdisciplinary studies.