From Local Projects in the Alps to Global Change Programmes in the Mountains of the World: Milestones in Transdisciplinary Research

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s UNESCO’s worldwide Man and Biosphere Programme (MaB) provided a great stimulus to overcome the large gap between natural and social sciences. The global project number six, Man’s Impact on Mountain Ecosystems, led to the Swiss National Research Programme ‘Socio-Economic Development and Ecological Carrying Capacity in a Mountainous Region’. It had a profound effect on mountain research in general and on an interesting collaboration between different alpine countries in particular. Even though the expression transdisciplinarity was not yet known and defined, participating scientists from different disciplines were forced to develop methods and models for a true inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation, as discussed in Section 3.2.

In the 1980s and 1990s the discussion about transdisciplinarity began. In the developed world transdisciplinary research means striving for concrete problem solving in the social and political context through cooperation between science and society. In the developing world transdisciplinary research needs to concentrate on certain key processes and limiting factors in cooperation with the local population and political authorities. This concept was further developed as the so-called ‘Syndrome Mitigation Research’. This approach proposes to compare clusters of problems linked to global change in mountain areas, in order to develop adequate mitigation strategies towards sustainability, as discussed in Section 3.3.

In the 1990s and 2000s fragile mountain ecosystems became significant on a global level as sensitive indicators for ‘Global Environmental and Climate Change’, and as treasures of natural and cultural resources (water, mining, forestry and agriculture, biological and cultural diversity, recreation and tourism). Therefore, the ‘Mountain Research Initiative’ (MRI), a project of the ‘Global Change Programmes’, was founded. In mountain areas natural and human processes are especially closely connected and this means that inter- and transdisciplinarity have a very special significance for mountain research and development, as discussed in Section 3.4.

The similarities between Fig. 3.2 as a first approach in 1978 and Fig. 3.5 as the current global approach in 2005 is an impressive testimony to the enduring significance of the MaB research concept that, from the beginning, called for an integration of natural and social sciences in a problem oriented perspective.