Abstract

HIDALGO, Cecilia; NATENZON, Claudia E.  and  PODESTA, Guillermo. Interdisciplina: Construcción de conocimiento en un proyecto internacional sobre variabilidad climática y agricultura. Rev. iberoam. cienc. tecnol. soc. [online]. 2007, vol.3, n.9, pp.53-68. ISSN 1850-0013.

The growing need to address complex environmentally and socially relevant problems has led to a renewed focus on interdisciplinary teams as producers of knowledge. This paper reports results from a case study of this emerging model for organizing scientific and technological research. Preliminary findings explore the factors that foster or impede interdisciplinary knowledge production, including the participation of stakeholders. The case study focuses on a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research team convened to understand and model adaptive management of agricultural ecosystems in the Pampas of central-eastern Argentina in response to climate variability and other sources of risk and uncertainty. The team tended to show two kinds of structures which can prevail at different moments: (a) researchers that formed highly-productive teams with frequent and intensive interactions, and (b) individual researchers or units that organized themselves around the project coordinator. This dual structure -which may have responded to a tight project schedule- may have contributed to reducing team integration and effectiveness.

Keywords : Interdisciplinary teams; Interdisciplinary knowledge production.

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