Interdisciplinary Working: Co-producing a New Toolkit | Anita Lateano

Published on 6 March 2026

Anita Lateano profile picAnita Lateano is a Knowledge Exchange Fellow, working on the ACCESS/IES Environmental Social Science in Interdisciplinary Working project, which aims to strengthen interdisciplinary working between environmental and social scientists. Here she describes the outcomes from the project’s second roundtable, held in February 2026.

 

Last month, ACCESS and project partners the Institution of Environmental Sciences (IES) hosted the second in a series of roundtables for the Environmental Social Science in Interdisciplinary Working project.

Whereas the first roundtable focused on sharing experiences and identifying enablers and barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration which includes environmental social sciences, this latest session moved from ideas to practice.

The workshop set out to:

  • Understand how to address barriers  of interdisciplinary working using a proposed tool to aid collaborative working across different projects.
  • Gather practical feedback on how the toolkit needs to evolve so that it feels useful, realistic and adaptable across different sectors and organisational cultures.
Building on themes from the first event; such as disciplinary language, time pressures and the need for mutual respect, the ACCESS team presented a draft toolkit and resources developed from that initial analysis. Participants from across disciplines and sectors, including practitioners, policymakers, researchers and consultants then tested these resources against real interdisciplinary projects, to see how they would perform in practice.
Working through the toolkit surfaced three strong messages:
  • Who poses the initial question, and with what assumptions, has a powerful influence on how problems are framed; the toolkit therefore needs an explicit stage to interrogate this.
  • Team composition and stakeholder involvement remain challenging, reinforcing the need for clearer guidance on roles, power dynamics and facilitation.
  • Interdisciplinary work is inherently iterative, so the toolkit should be used as a flexible set of components that teams can revisit as their understanding, vision and indicators evolve.

Insights from this roundtable will now feed into a revised version of the toolkit and survey, ahead of piloting with interdisciplinary teams across sectors.

Read about the project here, or for more information, contact Anita Lateano: a.lateano@surrey.ac.uk

 

Notes taken at the roundtable Notes taken at the roundtable