Dominant approaches to research quality rest on the assumption that academic peers are the only relevant stakeholders in its assessment. In contrast, impact assessment frameworks recognize a large and heterogeneous set of actors as stakeholders.

In many sectors and in many respects, interdisciplinarity has made progress in recent decades, but less so when it comes to evaluating interdisciplinary work. Challenges remain, especially regarding what counts as ‘good’ interdisciplinarity.

Current programme evaluations do not adequately measure the skills and characteristics of individuals and collectives doing transdisciplinary research.