Pathways to interdisciplinarity: A technical report exploring collaborative interdisciplinary working in the Transition Pathways consortium

Some of the key issues relating to interdisciplinary research serves not only to provide some conceptual background to these issues, but also to highlight that debates about inter-disciplinarity have been firmly driven from within the social sciences. Given the institutional dominance of academic disciplines, reinforced by successive rounds of Research Assessment, interdisciplinary collaboration in research projects is unlikely to occur spontaneously. The TP consortium emerged from the Sandpit, with engineers, economists and social scientists finding common cause in understanding the dynamics of transition pathways to a low carbon economy, with an electricity focus. The goal is to build on work by UKERC for DTI, using the MARKAL model, and on that undertaken by the Supergen Futurenet project which explored plausible least-cost scenarios for achieving the UK's 60% reduction target by 2050, to develop and explore the dynamics of more detailed transition pathways towards alternative future energy systems.