Navigating local relevance in transdisciplinary research: Exploring climate and environmental change in the Tasiilaq region, East Greenland

Transdisciplinary research aims to produce knowledge relevant to scientists and non-academic stakeholders alike, a challenging task given the parties’ divergent epistemologies and the attendant time and resource constraints. In Tasiilaq, East Greenland, our group of climate scientists and anthropologists set out to study climate and environmental change and the impact on the local community of changes in precipitation from less snow to more rain. We describe how our project team tried to make the project relevant to our collaborators, and the tension that arose between scientific and local relevance, which proved difficult to resolve. Our experience also points to some fundamental frictions in transdisciplinary research and limitations of conventional project and funding schemes. We recommend that transdisciplinary projects should be co-created by all partners from the outset to ensure equal participation and to avoid the difficult, sometimes intractable task, of rebalancing scientific and local relevance at a later stage.