The Discipline in Interdisciplinarity: Flagging a Blind-Spot in Sustainability Science

In the last few decades, sustainability science has developed into a formidable field of interdisciplinary scholarship aimed broadly at contributing to the global sustainability agenda. As a problem-driven science, sustainability science is necessarily interdisciplinary, though the field’s practitioners generally lack an explicit justification for the procedure of interdisciplinary research performed. In this commentary, we want to flag what we see as a significant blind-spot in the way interdisciplinarity is conducted in sustainability science currently, namely the necessity of following a systematic procedure in interdisciplinary research.