A New Model for Training Graduate Students to Conduct Interdisciplinary, Interorganizational, and International Research

296 BioScience • March 2012 / Vol. 62 No. 3 www.biosciencemag.org Environmental challenges transcend disciplinary, institutional, and political borders. The complex character of these challenges stems from diverse value systems, political differences, and economic and technological disparities (MA 2005, Perz et al. 2010). Solutions must come from varied disciplines, including social and natural sciences (Borrego and Newswander 2010); solutions require the engagement and collaboration of diverse collaborators, including academia, industry, government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and private citizens. Therefore, researchers working on environmental topics will need to adopt an interdisciplinary, international, and interorganizational (I3) approach. Environmental problems require solutions grounded in multiple disciplines (Klein 2004). However, crossing disciplinary borders is impeded by epistemological, communication, and methodological barriers that limit researchers’ abilities to collaborate effectively (Manathunga et al. 2006, Cummings and Kiesler 2008, Carney and Neishi 2010). Effective collaboration may require fundamentally new ways of collective thinking and training in cross-disciplinary communication (Perz et al. 2010). Many environmental issues are complex precisely because they transcend political and administrative borders (Perz et al. 2010), and their resolution therefore requires cross-border collaborations. For example, efforts to address climate change have involved the participation of hundreds of scientists, policymakers, and citizens from different cultural and political backgrounds (Solomon et al. 2007). Similarly, Chinese dams along the Mekong River are blamed for disrupting natural hydrologic cycles in Southeast Asian countries where people depend on the river for their livelihoods (Lu and Siew 2006) and solutions will involve collaborations between China and Southeast Asian countries. Individual institutions are often unable to solve complex problems on their own; instead, collaboration among multiple groups or organizations is necessary. Working across organizations provides a collaborative advantage (Huxham and Macdonald 1992) whereby complementary resources, information, and ideas compensate for the limitations of the individual organizations (Perz et al. 2010). The result is a product that could not have been achieved by any one of these organizations acting alone (Huxham and Macdonald 1992). Importantly, the term organization can encompass both formal organizations, such as government agencies and NGOs, and local partners and stakeholders whose local knowledge can enable learning, shift management practices, and improve collaborative outcomes (Velásquez Runk 2009). A New Model for Training Graduate Students to Conduct Interdisciplinary, Interorganizational, and International Research