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Interdisciplinary research within the field of sustainability studies often faces incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences. The importance of this fact is often underrated and sometimes leads to the wrong strategies. We distinguish between two broad approaches in interdisciplinarity: unificationism and pluralism. Unificationism seeks unification and perceives disciplinary boundaries as conventional, representing no long-term obstacle to progress, whereas pluralism emphasizes more ephemeral and transient interdisciplinary connections and underscores the autonomy of the disciplines with respect to one another. Both approaches have their merits and pitfalls. Unification runs the risk of scientific imperialism, while pluralism can result in insurmountable barriers between disciplines. We made a comparison of eight distinct interdisciplinary attempts at integration of knowledge across social and natural sciences. The comparison was carried out as four pairwise comparisons: environmental economics versus ecological economics, environmental history versus historical ecology, resilience theory versus political ecology, and socio-biology versus actor-network theory. We conclude by showing that none of these prominent eight interdisciplinary fields in and of itself manages to provide, in a satisfactory way, such an integrated understanding of sustainability. We argue for pluralism and advocate complex ways of articulating divergent ontological assumptions. This is not equivalent to pursuing knowledge unification either through scientific imperialism or by catering to the requirements of narrow practical utility. It means prioritizing interdisciplinary integration by simultaneously acknowledging the role of societal and natural factors in accounting for sustainability issues.

The calls for evidence-based public policy making have increased dramatically in the last decades, and so has the interest in evidence-based sustainability studies. But questions remain about what "evidence" actually means in different contexts and if the concept travels well between different domains of application. Some of the most relevant questions asked by sustainability studies are not, and in some cases cannot be, directly answered by relying on research evidence of the kinds favored by the evidence-based movement. Therefore, sustainability studies must also harness other forms of knowledge, based on forms of practical experience. How to integrate these two sources of knowledge is one of the most fundamental epistemological and practical problems society is facing. Identifying what kind of practical experience and research evidence we need to integrate is another challenging question. We draw on examples from our research in the Global South and suggest an efficient principle, problem-feeding, for harnessing practical experience within an adapted version of evidence-based sustainability studies.

Sustainability science is a wide and integrative scientific field. It embraces both complementary and contradictory approaches and perspectives for dealing with newer sustainability challenges in the context of old and persistent social problems. In this article we suggest a combined approach called social fields and natural systems. It builds on field theory and systems thinking and can assist sustainability scientists and others in integrating the best available knowledge from the natural sciences with that from the social sciences. The approach is preferable, we argue, to the various scientific efforts to integrate theories and frameworks that are rooted in incompatible ontologies and epistemologies. In that respect, this article is a critique of approaches that take the integration of the social and natural sciences for granted. At the same time it is an attempt to build a promising alternative. The theoretical and methodological pluralism that we suggest here, holistic pluralism, is one way to overcome incommensurability between the natural and the social sciences while avoiding functionalism, technological and environmental determinism, and over-reliance on rational choice theory. In addition, it is a basis for generating better understandings and problem solving capacity for sustainability challenges. We make three contributions. First, we identify important reasons for the incommensurability between the social and natural sciences, and propose remedies for overcoming some of the difficulties in integrative research. Second, we show how sustainability science will benefit from drawing more deeply on - and thus more adequately incorporate - social science understandings of society and the social, including field theory. Third, we illustrate the suggested approach of social fields and natural systems in two examples that are highly relevant for both sustainability science and sustainability itself, one on climate change adaptation and one on geoengineering.

Interdisciplinary research in the fields of forestry and sustainability studies often encounters seemingly incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences. The perceived incompatibilities might emerge from the epistemological and ontological claims of the theories or models directly employed in the interdisciplinary collaboration, or they might be created by other epistemological and ontological assumptions that these interdisciplinary researchers find no reason to question. In this paper we discuss the benefits and risks of two possible approaches, Popperian optimism and Kuhnian pessimism, to interdisciplinary knowledge integration where epistemological and ontological differences between the sciences involved can be expected.

In recent years, a strong natural science hegemony has predominantly framed our understanding of sustainability challenges and, as a result, the production of solution strategies. In countering this, some academic centers have sought to promote interdisciplinary research, starting from the recognition that the scale and complexity of sustainability challenges necessitates a plurality of different social science perspectives to be incorporated in research. In this article, we analyze the process and outcomes of one of these centers, namely, the Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of the Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability (LUCID), maintaining a heavy emphasis on incorporating social sciences into interdisciplinary sustainability research from its inception. First, we identify and motivate the selection of a consistent set of criteria for evaluating interdisciplinary research processes and outcomes. Second, we apply these criteria in an analysis of a selection of scholarly work produced at LUCID. Third, we evaluate the impacts of LUCID's institutional settings on the process of interdisciplinary research. Finally, we assess to what degree the outcomes of LUCID research have managed to produce the synthetic integrated knowledge required to analyze and address complex sustainability challenges. Although the LUCID work in aggregate represents a plurality of social science perspectives, our analysis suggests that a meaningful synthetic integration of knowledge was accomplished in cases where researchers employed retroductive logic and adhered to the principles of methodological pluralism. In highlighting the need to systematically incorporate these essential elements into the research process, we stress the importance of institutional settings in terms of finance, administration, and providing a conducive intellectual environment wherein authentic interdisciplinarity can emerge. Maintaining the kinds of horizontal and vertical institutional integration characteristic of such conducive settings, however, poses a major challenge in light of current trends, at least in Sweden, toward more compartmentalized, disciplinary university structures.