-Summary:

• Background and rationale:

Interdisciplinarity is a practical research necessity in cases of complex aggregation. This is particularly true when adopting a public policy perspective. One of the peculiarities of public policies is that they often combine different dimensions of the natural (or environmental) and the social, so that it is impossible to analyze the situations they address, or to propose ways of mitigating or avoiding their drawbacks, without recourse to several fields of knowledge. These fields must necessarily engage in dialogue. Such a dialogue cannot be fruitful simply by adopting a "practical stance", because it is already not certain that this stance will be easily adopted. In fact, our practical attitude is deployed first and foremost within our disciplinary traditions. Take an object like the Great Green Wall: an economist can very well demonstrate that, for every dollar invested, it leads to an increase in the resources of the populations concerned of the order of 1.2 dollars. However, this answer in no way validates the project's value in terms of reforestation. To understand the latter, we need to be able to measure the increase in green mass (using satellite data). However, to determine whether or not this increase is attributable to reforestation, we also need to look at rainfall data over a certain period. In fact, it is possible that an increase in rainfall is concurrently responsible for the increase in green mass. The phenomenon I'm interested in thus appears to articulate different sectors of socio-environmental reality, none of which is conclusive in isolation.
The fact that our phenomena are multidimensional calls for an interdisciplinary approach. But first, we need to give an adequate description of the interdisciplinary approach. This necessarily implies an "epistemological" perception of our own disciplines, which operate on methodologies that we have lost the habit of questioning from the point of view of how they treat reality. It is probably at the level of this treatment and not of the conclusions that the interdisciplinary approach must position itself. Secondly, we need to adopt a common language, a koinè. How does this happen? If we start from the fact that scientific communities are first and foremost professional epistemic communities, we need to understand how scientific communities function internally and, secondly, how exchanges between members of different communities take place in situation and context. This involves both a conceptual investigation (the logic of language games in context) and a sociological investigation of the interactions between the professionals involved.
Contextual deployment of epistems, situated interactions: interdisciplinarity cannot be dealt with outside of application cases, since it is a practice. An increase in generality or logorrhea on complexity would not help us understand "how it happens", since "discourse on" is not "practice of". We therefore need to observe both intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary epistemic practices. 
Considering the specific aims of IPORA, we would, however, like to add a third epistemic component, which also comes under the heading of interdisciplinarity: transactions between the various professional epistemic communities and public policy decision-makers. As in the interdisciplinary approach, we are also dealing with a koinè, i.e. the search for a common language between two categories of actors, scientists and public actors, who are probably interested in the useful effects of interdisciplinarity, since from their point of view, a public policy involves observations (linked to scientific disciplines), a priori solutions (always linked to scientific disciplines), normative production (the use of law), foresight (statistical models), anticipation of social acceptability (coming under anthropology and sociology) and political risks (coming under political science).

• Objectives:

The first aim is to produce concrete analyses of interdisciplinarity as a practice that articulates epistemic communities, and to understand the reasons behind their conditions of felicity. 
The second objective is to understand how these articulations produce an "object" (standardized characteristics, procedures, etc.) that can be assimilated by public players, in other words, how they produce a public policy prescription.
The third objective is to pave the way for a praxeological analysis of the reception of scientific statements by the public, too often limited to cognitivist approaches focusing on the biases and scientific illiteracy of ordinary members of society. 
The fourth objective is to communicate with stakeholders on the mechanisms for making interdisciplinarity work and for linking scientific work with public policy. This communication will aim to disseminate "best practices".

• Main methods:

   

Several methods will be used: ethnographic methods (community observation), propaedeutic interviews (gathering information on activities), semi-directive interviews (positioning of players in relation to activities) and bibliometrics (necessary for drawing up a balance sheet of interdisciplinary publications).
Our work is essentially part of an ethnomethodological approach to conversation analysis, for which the meaning of statements is inseparable from their contextualization and structuring into "turns of speech", i.e. the fact that they are necessarily "addressed" to, and interact with, persons or collectives present or represented. This dynamic can be extended - as in our case - beyond conversational situations and verbal exchanges, to dialogues at a distance, as in the case of "dialogic networks". These are structured by a thematized, mediated exchange between several people at a distance from each other. For example, A says "p" in a press statement, B repeats "p(A)" in a speech (modifying it, criticizing it, approving it, downplaying it, etc.), C quotes p(B) about p(A) in an interview, and the number of participants can, of course, increase. The dynamics of "p" are at the heart of the analysis, as they define both (a) the semantic field of "p" and the terms used to form "p", and (b) a negative community based on the non-consensual sharing of "p" and the terms used to form it. The dialogic network approach has been reformulated to analyze parliamentary debates, which involve controversial repetitions of the same statements and absent audiences, as parliamentarians often address their remarks made in session, not to assistants, but to different segments of the population (Dupret and Ferrié, 2014). In the present case, we will be interested in discourses held between members of distinct disciplinary epistemic communities interacting to form an interdisciplinary epistemic community. We will therefore be particularly attentive to the methods used, not only to show "one's" discipline, but to convince, which implies both rhetoric and pedagogy. 
The ethnographic method at the heart of our approach will involve monitoring interactions, considering in particular their linguistic content. Ethnomethodology establishes a clear distinction between interviews and verbal exchanges between interactants, the latter only being a possible field, insofar as they are not occasioned by an investigative relationship and therefore oriented towards responding to the investigator, who sets up a different contextualization. The IPORA team's scientific meetings, colloquia, seminars and workshops will therefore constitute the main field of investigation. Whenever possible, and with the participants' consent, the exchanges will be recorded and transcribed.  Attendance (in the sense of participant observation) at public and working meetings will be one of our main field activities.  We will also work on the methodological parts of articles adopting an interdisciplinary approach. This approach is not bibliometric, but ethnomethodological, which also allows us to work in scriptural fields. A scientific article can, in fact, be seen as establishing a dialogical relationship with two distinct audiences/interlocutors: (a) the authors referred to, and (b) the disciplinary audience represented by the referees. The relationship is, in each case, retrospective and prospective, i.e. one refers to authors and projects oneself as a reference in scientific debates. From this point of view, the justification of the interdisciplinary approach in the methodological section of the article is of the utmost interest. Indeed, it implies a selection of potentially admissible reasons in one discipline for including another or others. These reasons must be technically convincing to a disciplinary audience. Unlike the interaction situation prevalent in a community seeking interdisciplinarity, where the recruitment condition is acceptance of the principle, technical justification within an anonymous evaluation situation does not presuppose agreement but, on the contrary, a disagreement that needs to be resolved. While in an interdisciplinary community, the principle of etiquette also implies recourse to the "charity of interpretation", this is not the case when it comes to evaluating an article from a disciplinary perspective. Ideally, negative feedback from reviewers should also be considered. 
In our approach, semi-structured interviews have only a propaedeutic interest: to gain access to technical information and possibly to general principles or ideas concerning interdisciplinarity. We use the term "general ideas" because it is not a question of considering a practice, but of gaining an idea of the conceptions and perceptions of interdisciplinarity available to a researcher, outside of any specific application. From this point of view, it can only be a complementary point of view, the consultation of the mental library of a member of the community.  The interviews will be exhaustive: they will be conducted with all researchers directly involved in IPORA activities. However, it may be necessary to rely more on semi-structured interviews as regards relations between researchers and public policy promoters, as interactions between the former and the latter are more difficult to observe. The use of reports and project evaluations could, however, provide additional observation, as well as media coverage of politicians' positions on recommendations or risks identified by scientists. This would provide an opportunity to use dialogical networks, which enable us to observe and analyze a series of mediatized exchanges.
Bibliometrics makes it possible to objectify the difficulties of an interdisciplinary approach, by focusing on journals. Publication opportunities and journal criteria are powerful driving forces in the epistemological disciplinization of researchers. We will select the journals in which IPORA team members may consider publishing. This approach will be quantitative.