Abstract
•Transdisciplinary research is key to addressing community needs.•Accounting for the intention-behavior gap optimizes research outcomes.•Researchers’ familiarity with cultural differences facilitates co-creation.•The socio-political context dictates the Project’s design and implementation phases.•Nine steps form the basis of a collaborative university-community framework.
This paper presents a case study of a transdisciplinary research based on an ex-post assessment of the environmental and socio-behavioral contexts of solid waste management in Lebanese peri-urban communities. Lessons learned are compiled into the Transdisciplinary Interventions for Environmental Sustainability conceptual framework. The approach starts with building a team of researchers and non-academic partners, continues with co-creating solution-oriented knowledge, and ends by integrating and applying the produced knowledge. The co-created knowledge includes the environmental and socio-behavioral ex-post assessment’s results. The former reveals low air pollution levels, evidence of waste-related water contamination, and higher self-reported frequencies of ill-health symptoms and diseases closer to the landfill. The latter indicates that the community’s perception about waste production differs from the real accounting of generated waste. Nine lessons are identified: (1) inherent common interest between the researchers and the community, (2) flexible interdisciplinary research team, (3) representative citizen committee, (4) contextually-informed outreach coordinator, (5) iterative research process accounting for the shifting socio-political context, (6) common expectations of the research process, (7) boundary objects leading to spin-off activities in the same setting, (8) effective communication strategy, and (9) ex-post assessment of subsequent societal and scientific impacts. The non-phased framework links all nine pointers in a logical order to ease scalability. The study answers a global need for a unified, clear, broadly adopted framework for transdisciplinarity and a deeper understanding of factors ensuring full-circle knowledge co-creation in waste-related contexts in the global South. The study offers managerial and research implications and suggests avenues for further research.