What Shall We Call It? How Different Fields Can Help Us Think About Transdisciplinary Work

For science to be actionable it needs to be viewed as credible, legitimate, and salient (Cash et al. 2003; Lubchenco 2017). These categories are particularly relevant when considering the use of transdisciplinary approaches to address coastal challenges. One often overlooked potential hurdle is the proliferation of terms used to describe similar approaches across the different disciplinary backgrounds and training. This analysis explores those related approaches and terminologies across disciplines and then focuses in on a suite of relevant perspectives drawn from negotiation and dispute resolution fields. We often focus on what actions need to be taken by managers, industry, or the general public within coastal communities, but it is equally imperative to look within the scientific community as well to explore how our past research and engagement practices might be modified to better reflect the new social and ecological realities of the systems within which we work. Drawing on two case studies along the New England coast (groundfish management and water quality regulation), this analysis reports on perceptions of science gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with researchers, managers, and the regulated community within each case. We explore the role of credibility, legitimacy, and salience in the use of science (Cash et al. 2003) and intersect that with concepts from two related approaches to negotiation (the mutual gains approach (Susskind and Field, 1996) and principled negotiation (Fisher, Ury, & Patton, 2011)). We also explore lessons for how researchers and managers are trained, particularly in preparation for entry into work on controversial topics. Taken together, efforts to think differently about systems approaches, changes to research processes, new perspectives on stakeholder engagement, and multi-partner collaboratives might help make the jump towards real change in coastal systems.