Abstract
The landscape of complex global challenges drives the need for transdisciplinary research projects. It is a collaborative approach that goes beyond academic integration by actively engaging external stakeholders to solve relevant problems. Transdisciplinary teams involve more dialogue, broader conceptual integration, and a focus on socially relevant problems. They go beyond integrating academic themes. Even though transdisciplinarity has been widely recognized for its potential to drive disciplinary innovation and social and scientific progress, its implementation poses significant challenges, including coordination, interest alignment, and power asymmetries. Additionally, large-scale projects in developing countries remain understudied in the literature, while there are no studies on integration and collaboration among different actors in transdisciplinary research projects, from a management and stakeholder-engagement perspective focused on value creation. Stakeholder engagement offers a promising analytical framework for understanding and structuring the management of transdisciplinary research projects. Thus, to address these issues, this research project aims to map and characterize the stakeholders involved in transdisciplinary research by applying the stakeholder engagement perspective analysis. It focuses on the levels of involvement, interests, expectations, and power relations. In doing so, we will conduct a systematic literature review to identify stakeholders involved in transdisciplinary research project contexts. In-depth interviews with participants from a transdisciplinary research center will help us validate the previously identified stakeholders in the literature. As a result, we expect to develop a framework that considers the stakeholders involved in transdisciplinary research projects, their power relations, and the different levels of engagement in the research. Our theoretical contribution is to integrate the stakeholder perspective into transdisciplinary project management by offering a novel analysis of research project management. In practice, the framework proposal will help engage stakeholders by considering transdisciplinary projects, leading to more effective outcomes and greater value creation for all involved.