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Urgent sustainability challenges require effective leadership for inter- and trans-disciplinary (ITD) institutions. Based on the diverse experiences of 20 ITD institutional leaders and specific case studies, this article distills key lessons learned from multiple pathways to building successful programs. The lessons reflect both the successes and failures our group has experienced, to suggest how to cultivate appropriate and effective leadership, and generate the resources necessary for leading ITD programs. We present two contrasting pathways toward ITD organizations: one is to establish a new organization and the other is to merge existing organizations. We illustrate how both benefit from a real-world focus, with multiple examples of trajectories of ITD organizations. Our diverse international experiences demonstrate ways to cultivate appropriate leadership qualities and skills, especially the ability to create and foster vision beyond the status quo; collaborative leadership and partnerships; shared culture; communications to multiple audiences; appropriate monitoring and evaluation; and perseverance. We identified five kinds of resources for success: (1) intellectual resources; (2) institutional policies; (3) financial resources; (4) physical infrastructure; and (5) governing boards. We provide illustrations based on our extensive experience in supporting success and learning from failure, and provide a framework that articulates the major facets of leadership in inter- and trans-disciplinary organizations: learning, supporting, sharing, and training.

The futures of energy are cosmopolitan, dynamic, and full of contradictions. There are multiple actors and institutions with multiple aims and interests advancing the futures of energy; at the same time, these futures are envisioned differently and will, therefore, be produced and negotiated heterogeneously. This context highlights that energy futures are not free of cultural, political, and economic influence, and hence can be best-approached with cosmopolitan and plural lenses. This collection evidences plurality in terms of the disparate geographic locations, disciplinary foundations, conceptual frameworks, and methodological choices of our authors and their papers. This breadth points to the many roads of imagining the sociotechnicality of energy futures and of making these expectations real and durable. We suggest embracing plurality and reflexivity, and understanding the politics of energy futures, at the same time that we also issue a caveat on the complexity of these processes. Claiming no comprehensiveness or closure, our collective contributions should be taken as works-in-progress in the unending quest to understand, analyze, and critique the plurality of the futures of energy and the ways we imagine, navigate, and contest them.