Nurturing interdisciplinarity in Agricultural research through capacity-building: a case study of ZEF's Uzbekistan Project

The study finds that the process of designing the research proposal and devising a contextually appropriate capacity building model and the model for conducting interdisciplinary research itself became a sociological process of negotiation amongst ZEF scientists discharged with the task of designing research proposal. The power imbalances inherent in ZEF’s departmentalized structure mirrored during the research design and implementation phases. The innovative capacity building model, which was tailored to buildthe capacity of ZEF’s staff were able to assist team members in overcoming their disciplinary epistemologies after some struggle. At the initial stages of the process, some of the research team members showed dual epistemologies: the fundamental and the superficial. The latter appeared to be more a socially desirable response to their team membership. The research process dynamics identified a number of challenges and barriers that could potentially disrupt and frustrate interdisciplinarity, but many of those challenges were gradually overcome by the teams themselves, or with assistance from project managers and the facilitator. The study finds that the conditionality that ZEF faces from its research donors and its parent university determine what kind of and how much of interdisciplinarity can be achieved at ZEF. As the main vehicles to undertake interdisciplinary research at ZEF are donor funded research projects, sustaining the capacity for interdisciplinary research will remain the key challenge for ZEF. Key implications for theory, methodology and practice of interdisciplinary research are also spelled out.

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