Andrews, L.M., Munaretto, S., Mees, H.L.P. and Driessen, P.P.J. (2024) ‘Conceptualising boundary work activities to enhance credible, salient and legitimate knowledge in sustainability transdisciplinary research projects’, Environmental Science & Policy, 155, 103722. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103722

Andrews and colleagues convert boundary work from a descriptive concept into an explicit operational grammar for transdisciplinary research. Their framework identifies twelve activities distributed across project phases and asks how each can strengthen credibility, salience and legitimacy in processes of knowledge co-creation. The important move is methodological: interdisciplinarity is insufficient if the interfaces between actors, expectations, languages and forms of evidence remain unmanaged. Boundary work names the labour of collective problem framing, mediation, synthesis, translation, relationship building and reflexive coordination through which heterogeneous knowledge can become usable without collapsing its differences. The paper thus relocates impact from the terminal dissemination of results to the continuous organisation of relations throughout research. It also makes visible an often hidden infrastructural layer: collaboration requires designed procedures, temporal allocation, facilitation and institutional support. The work bridges sustainability science, project governance and STS by giving conceptual precision to the intermediary operations through which scientific and societal actors construct shared yet contestable spaces of inquiry.