Pre-requisites to interdisciplinary research for climate change: lessons from a participatory action research process in Île-de-France

The complexity of climate change issues translates itself into a need for interdisciplinary approaches to first achieve a more comprehensive vision of climate change, and second to better inform the decision-making processes. However, it seems that willingness alone is rarely enough to implement interdisciplinarity. A participatory action research process undertaken within the Scientific Consortium for Climate, Environment and Society (GIS CES), France, has allowed to take insights into the important features for launching, facilitating and developing interdisciplinarity, as perceived by scientists working on climate change and its social, economic and environmental impacts: a) getting to know each other in the personal dimensions; b) getting to know each other in the disciplinary dimensions; c) agree upon the definition of interdisciplinary science; d) define collaboratively the purposes and means for the interdisciplinary project. The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss these four 'reflexive pre-requisites' in the context of the GIS CES, in order to start a reflection on the important features to achieve interdisciplinarity.