ИСТИНА

Transdisciplinary research is seen as a promising way to address the complex sustainability issues facing contemporary societies and is therefore at the heart of sustainability science, a recent problem-driven and solution-oriented scientific field that focuses on these issues. However, transdisciplinary research in sustainability science (TRSS) remains relatively marginal. This thesis contributes to understanding its limited diffusion by adopting a pragmatic lens and examining the practical challenges faced by research communities and actors engaged in TRSS. Based on a set of qualitative methods (interviews, documentary analysis, observations) and a semi-quantitative analysis of the data collected, it empirically examines the French network of Zones Ateliers, a national research infrastructure aimed at promoting place-based and long-term research on social-ecological systems.The thesis first focuses on the practical challenges of TRSS at the level of research communities by examining the extent to which they reorganise themselves when engaging in TRSS. It shows that research communities are research-based meta-organisations, which limits the range of organisational arrangements they can experiment with and the degree of transdisciplinarity they can achieve, particularly in their various governance bodies. The thesis then considers the practical challenges of TRSS at the level of research projects. First, it examines the actors involved in TRSS projects, the roles they perform, and the distribution of these roles between different categories of actors. It shows that, despite significant differences between categories of actors, and with the notable exception of citizens, societal actors have become major players in TRSS, and that the pluralism of societal actors tends to increase the number of roles played by different actors. Second, it examines the relationship between the approaches and methods used in TRSS projects and the wickedness of the problems these projects seek to address. It finds that projects addressing more wicked problems tend to involve more actors, use more methods, and are more constrained in their degree of methodological and collaborative pluralism.Overall, this research provides tools for analysing communities and projects involved in TRSS and for increasing the reflexivity of their members. It helps to clarify some previously neglected factors of the practical challenges of TRSS, such as the organisational arrangements available to TRSS communities or the degree of wickedness of the problems they address.