Transdisciplinary Approaches for Market Intelligence Research: Theory, Practice, and Implications for Designing Product Profiles in Crop Breeding

Abstract

Feeding the world’s poor within sustainable limits remains one of the lingering global challenges that necessitate urgent attention (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2022). Addressing universal challenges such as food insecurity and climate change calls for wide-ranging perspectives and collaborative solutions at both international and global scales (McBean, 2021). Such a complex problem transcends geographical, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries, making it imperative for researchers, scientists, and development practitioners to draw upon a diverse array of expertise and knowledge from various disciplines (De Grandis & Efstathiou, 2016). Transdisciplinary research (TDR), which hinges on knowledge co-production, context-specificity, pluralism, goal orientation, and interactivity (Norström et al., 2020), has gained traction in the last three decades in both science and policy and is increasingly deployed to address crucial challenges, including those in agri-food domains. This research lens captures the social, cultural, and biophysical complexities of agrarian environments (De Grandis & Efstathiou, 2016; von Wehrden et al., 2019). Academic and non-academic actors alike are essential to advancing this process, through the sharing of insights to improve methodologies and strategies. Crop breeding is one area of research that has the potential to improve livelihoods and stimulate social change in the face of burgeoning climatic stressors (He & Li, 2020). Since the start of the 21st century, crop breeding has experienced remarkable transformations. Amid rising food insecurity and climate change, seeds well adapted to climatic stressors are seen as a pathway to climate resilience and development (Marimo et al., 2021). Many initiatives and programs corresponding to large-scale seed breeding have failed to include the needs, preferences, and selection criteria of women (Tarjem et al., 2023). The systematic exclusion of women and other minority voices may be linked in part to their limited representation in agri-food systems governance (Amoak et al., 2022), as well as programs bereft of research designs that embrace a plurality of views. Moreover, concerns arise that such a lack of diverse perspectives could cause “discourse inertia,” whereby ideas become stale and constantly reproduced (Méndez et al., 2022), which in turn could hamper CGIAR’s breeding targets1 .