Award winning solution to tackling complex problems
From 1990 to 1997 Gabriele Bammer was a mid-career researcher leading an endeavour that still seems daring today: investigating the feasibility of a prescription heroin trial for intravenous drug users. When the Commonwealth Government decided not to proceed with the trial, Bammer took the opportunity to review how her team had tackled this complex problem.
“I discovered that there was a lot that could have helped us, had we known about it,” recalls Bammer.
“Also, that no single existing approach—not systems thinking or transdisciplinarity or others such as action research—could have provided all the tools we needed.”
Thus the concept of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) was born. It took shape as a new discipline to conduct research that aims to better understand—and bring about change in—complex societal and environmental problems.
Bammer describes i2S as the ‘plumbing’ that brings together various approaches to bridging disciplinary differences. It also considers the expertise of communities, professional groups and decision makers, all with the aim of finding better ways of dealing with real-world problems.
“There’s nothing else that seeks to make it possible for researchers to draw on the most effective tools from transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, implementation science, the science of team science, and more,” says Bammer.
This work has led to international recognition of Bammer as a theorist, methodologist and hands-on researcher.
With the aim of forming a global community of researchers who address these real-world problems, Bammer and Peter Deane, also from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, founded the Integration and Implementation Insights forum, (i2Inisghts) in 2015.
“i2Inisghts is a forum where researchers tackling diverse problems using any of the approaches are invited to share useful tools,” says Bammer.
The platform has been hugely successful in brokering a research community, with more than 700 contributors from 60 countries, and has garnered in excess of 1.5 million views from almost every corner of the world.
This world-leading compendium of tools constitutes a public good for integration and implementation scientists globally.
“It’s a true inspiration to see the wealth of knowledge that you share on the latest on inter- and transdisciplinary research, systems thinking and implementation sciences,” said one blog user.
Bammer’s commitment and success in forging this new field of integration and implementation sciences was a major contributor in earning her the 2024 Peter Baume Award, the University’s most prestigious accolade, which is awarded for ‘eminent achievement and merit of the highest order’.
“Professor Bammer is a rare academic who combines courage, persistence, innovation and foresight,” says Professor Hilary Bambrick, Director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health.
“She has almost single-handedly developed the architecture for i2S and transdisciplinary sciences in Australia, and has been involved in every major step in this field internationally.”
Through decades of labour across fields of health, criminal justice, policy, climate change and sustainability, Bammer has forged a stellar reputation in integration and implementation sciences.
“I am very honoured by the award, which came as a complete surprise, and I am very grateful to those who nominated me,” says Bammer.
Bammer says the award is a sign of the growing importance of tackling complex societal and environmental problems.
“For the first time in my career, I feel that the field globally has the wind at our backs rather than battling against headwinds,” she says.
“My work is a small part of the global leadership of ANU in embedding transdisciplinarity, systems thinking and other approaches into academic education and research.”
The award has additional significance to Bammer, as it comes full-circle from the event that precipitated her i2S work.
“The prize also means a lot because I had the privilege of interacting with Peter Baume during the heroin trial research and subsequently, when he gave me invaluable advice, especially about political perspectives on complex problems,” says Bammer.