Analysis of the barriers to integration in landscape research projects

The rising number of integrative (interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary) landscape research projects means that researchers spend an increasing portion of their professional career doing integrative work. The keen interest in integrative research concepts, however, has brought to the fore the many barriers experienced by researchers in the integration process. Nonetheless, and despite the importance of the subject, there are few empirical studies on conflicts and barriers to integration in the field of integrative landscape research. In this paper, we describe a study identifying the barriers to integration of disciplines and knowledge communities as expressed by participants in integrative landscape projects. To this end, we conducted 19 qualitative semi-structured interviews and a Web survey with a total of 235 respondents from 30 countries. A correlation-matrix revealed highly significant relations among the barriers identified from the interviews and the Web survey. We undertook a factor analysis, which resulted in three factors with an eigenvalue >1. We used independent variables to test which characteristics influence participants’ perception of barriers. Our results show that participants perceive the greatest barriers to integration to be the additional time needed for integration, the difficulty of coping with different academic traditions and the lack of common terminology. Furthermore, conflicts arise from the geographical distance separating researchers working at different locations, the difficulty of agreeing on a common problem formulation and the fact that participants tend to start in projects at different points in time. Additional barriers relate to the academic merit system, publishing and the role of personal chemistry. We identified the three factors extracted from the factor analysis as ‘interpersonal & organizational barriers’, ‘time demands & external barriers’ and ‘academic traditions & epistemological barriers’. The independent variables that had significant influence on these factors were project characteristics such as size, budget and duration, as well as whether a project was interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. We conclude that larger projects, projects with higher budgets, projects with longer duration as well as transdisciplinary projects are more likely to face barriers to integration. We recommend future projects take account of the potential sources of conflicts from the outset and plan to minimize barriers to integration.