Transdisciplinary and engaged scholarship: Sustainable Development Goals African Summit: advancing the scholarly, institutional and praxis dimensions of transdisciplinarity to address the SDGs

Achieving the SDGs in Africa requires new ways of generating knowledge and supporting action that recognises the complex, interconnected nature and feedbacks between multiple development challenges whilst acknowledging varying perspectives, values, needs and interests amongst different actors and groupings within society. Solutions towards addressing the SDGs need to be pluralistic, collaborative and negotiated amongst actors and make practical sense in the real world. Transdisciplinarity (TD), which includes knowledge co-production and co-design, is a promising approach that can facilitate this. Yet, despite increased attention over the past two decades, disciplinary and sector silos continue to predominate and research is rarely designed and implemented in partnership with non-academic knowledge holders. As a result, research findings are seldom taken up in policy and action. There is an urgent need to further understand how best to undertake TD/engaged scholarship and improve practice, develop capacity in the next generation and create the environment to enable this within academic and research institutions.