After months of preparation, NECTR was officially (and festively) launched on 3 April 2025 during the EWUU Community Day. The KIN is one of the initiators of NECTR, the Dutch Expertise Centre for Transdisciplinary Work. Twelve leading Dutch organisations have joined forces in NECTR. NECTR aims to become the centre for knowledge sharing, collaboration and anchoring transdisciplinary work in the Netherlands.
Collaborating on social breakthroughs
Transdisciplinary work – in which researchers, policymakers, professionals and citizens work together on complex issues – is essential to tackling societal challenges. Consider the transitions in the divisions of energy, health, food, mobility and circular economy. NECTR wants to strengthen this way of working by bundling knowledge, developing skills and facilitating sustainable partnerships.
Michiel van den Hout (Director of KIN):
“We believe that only by working together transdisciplinarily can we tackle the truly complex problems of the climate crisis. For that reason, we launched a community of practice last year to make transdisciplinary work more common, easy, accessible and valued. NECTR, as a national centre of excellence, grew out of this at lightning speed. It shows the enormous drive and need to share knowledge and expertise more widely and make it available. NECTR shows the power of cooperation across borders!”
From fragmentation to cohesion
Although there is a lot of experience with transdisciplinary work in the Netherlands, knowledge is currently scattered across sectors and organisations. NECTR brings this expertise together and makes it more visible and accessible, so that we can learn more from each other and work together more effectively.
NECTR Objectives
NECTR focuses primarily on four core activities:
- Developing and disseminating knowledge about transdisciplinary work
- Promoting competence development and skills
- Embedding transdisciplinary working methods in academic and professional fields
- Facilitating transdisciplinary partnerships between different organisations
Initiators
NECTR is an initiative of twelve prominent Dutch organisations:
- EWUU alliance (TU/e, WUR, UU, UMC Utrecht)
- TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research)
- DRIFT for transition
- NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
- Rathenau Institute
- Athena – Research and Education Institute
- Het Groene Brein
- Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO)
- Delft University of Technology
- Convergence (TU Delft-Erasmus MC-EUR)
- Klimaatonderzoek Initiatief Nederland (KIN)
Call for feedback on the white paper: ‘Recognising and Fostering Quality in Transdisciplinary Collaborations’
Transdisciplinary collaborations have great potential for urgent societal impact, but how do you recognise quality in these collaborations and how do you stimulate it? Join our ambition to unite practitioners and experts in the Netherlands around clarifying what is needed for high-quality transdisciplinary collaborations. We invite you to read the first draft of our white paper ‘Recognising and Fostering Quality in Transdisciplinary Collaborations’, intended to gather perspectives from the entire community that cares about TDC in the Netherlands. Please give us your feedback and examples of best practices so that we can incorporate them into a final version. We aim to distribute this joint perspective of the Dutch TDC community at the start of this summer.
About transdisciplinary work
Transdisciplinary work transcends the boundaries of scientific disciplines and explicitly involves non-academic knowledge and perspectives. This approach is essential for developing sustainable and just solutions to the complex challenges of our time.
