Dena Fam is Associate Professor and Research Director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. She has a decade of experience developing transdisciplinary programs and projects with an interest in negotiating the challenges of cross sectoral integration of knowledge.

Michael O'Rourke is Professor of Philosophy and faculty member in AgBioResearch and Environmental Science and Policy at Michigan State University. He is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinarity and Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, an NSF-sponsored research initiative that investigates philosophical approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary research.

1. Theoretical and empirical perspectives on failure: an introduction
2. Rethinking failure: using design science theory and methods, including design thinking, for successful transdisciplinary health and social interventions

Part 1: Institutional environments associated with failure

3. Stem cells and serendipity: unburdening social scientists' feelings of failure
4. A fragile existence: a transdisciplinary food systems research program cut short
5. Over-promising and under-delivering: institutional and social networks influencing the emergence of urine diversion systems in Queensland, Australia

Part 2: Failures and responses associated with collaboration and stakeholder engagement

6. Failure and what to do next: lessons from the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative
7. Failure to consider local political processes and power relations in the development of a transdisciplinary research project plan: learning lessons from a stormy start
8. A week in the life of a transdisciplinary researcher: failures in research to support policy for water quality management in New Zealand's South Island

Part 3: Personal reflection on failed initiatives through an autoethnographic lens

9. Reframing failure and the Indigenous doctoral journey
10. Transdisciplinary research: challenges, excessive demands, and a story of disquiet

Part 4: Failure in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary educational programs

11. The challenges of studying place: learning from failures of an experimental interdisciplinary and community-engaged environmental studies course
12. Transdisciplinary learning within tertiary institutions: a space to skin your knees
13. Learning to fail forward: operationalizing productive failure for tackling complex environmental problems
14. Failing and the perception of failure in student-driven transdisciplinary projects

Coda

15. Failure is an option: lessons for success

Unlike other volumes in the current literature, this book provides insight for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners on what doesn't work. Documenting detailed case studies of project failure matters, not only as an illustration of experienced challenges but also as projects do not always follow step-by-step protocols of preconceived and theorised processes.
Bookended by a framing introduction by the editors and a conclusion written by Julie Thompson Klein, each chapter ends with a reflexive section that synthesizes lessons learned and key take-away points for the reader. Drawing on a wide range of international case studies and with a strong environmental thread throughout, the book reveals a range of failure scenarios for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects, including:
¿ Projects that did not get off the ground;
¿ Projects that did not have the correct personnel for specified objectives;
¿ Projects that did not reach their original objectives but met other objectives;
¿ Projects that failed to anticipate important differences among collaborators.
Illustrating causal links in real life projects, this volume will be of significant relevance to scholars and practitioners looking to overcome the challenges of conducting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.