Summary of findings of a survey on cross-disciplinary collaboration behaviour between UK National Ecosystem Assessment authors run in 2011

The UK National Ecosystem Assessment, the largest scale ecosystem valuation project undertaken at national scale, is the result of combined efforts by natural scientists, economists and other social scientists from policy, academic, private sector and non-governmental organization. It is an important case study in understanding the processes, characteristics and barriers at play in interdisciplinary research in the UK. To date, measurement of interdisciplinarity has been restricted to bibiometric analysis. In this dissertation I use web-based survey responses to measure ‘interdisciplinary’ project success through the behaviour of its authors. In addition, I analyse the importance of social capital characteristics arising from ‘interdisciplinary’ projects. I argue that analysis of project success must include post-hoc assessment of research impact, especially at the level of policy uptake. I posit that the tools used to measure disciplinary integration, in particular measurement of social capital in the form of bridging connection, can be used to measure policy impact. I find that the National Ecosystem Assessment is best categorized as ‘interdisciplinary’ rather than ‘transdisciplinary’, following Gibbons et al. mode 2 knowledge. I argue that in many cases ‘transdisciplinary’ research may introduce complexities that reduce policy interpretability and uptake. Finally, I present a tentative attempt at a meso-level measurement of knowledge sharing networks between individual project authors as a means of measuring social capital impacts on policy uptake.