Glossary

This Glossary lists terms and words that are relevant to this Wiki.

• For each entry, you will find a list of Wiki articles that prominently contain this term.
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• The Glossary is work in progress and continuously amended.

Term	Explanation	Mentions
Accountability	Being responsible for one’s actions, performance, behaviours, decisions and more, both on an individual and an institutional level, including the responsibility for negative outcomes and consequences.
Adaptation	Adaptation is both an adjustment to actual or expected change and the adjustments required to achieve change, and is most prominently used on climate change research, yet can be valuable way beyond that. The adjustments aim to moderate, mitigate or altogether avoid harm and to exploit beneficial opportunities and may require on-going flexibility where there is continuous change.
Advocacy	Activity by an individual or group that aims to influence decisions in a particular way.
Agency	The capacity of an individual to act intentionally with the assumption of a causal outcome based on this action.	1
Analogy	A cognitive process useful in problem solving. It involves reasoning by transferring information or meaning from a particular problem to another problem to develop solutions. There is also a more common use of the term ‘analogy’ which is a linguistic expression comparing things with similar features to help explain an idea.
Art	The expression of creativity in objects, environments and experiences which are beautiful or have emotional power, allowing our senses to be at their fullest. Includes painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, film, dance, literature.
Assumptions	For individuals, assumptions are essentially mental models that consist of a prerequisite that is considered to be true or false without immediate evidence. For theories, methods and models, assumptions are often simplifications that are an important element that allow for their construction and that affect how useful they are.
Bias	The action of supporting or opposing a particular person or thing in an unfair way, because of allowing personal opinions to influence your judgement.	1, 2
Change	Various aspects of altering reality as we perceive it, which may range from minor to transformational and which include, but do not necessarily lead to, improvement. Concrete considerations include modifying policy and/or practice in government, business or civil society, as well as planning for the future.
Change resistance	Opposing alterations or suggested alterations to the status quo. This can be by, for example, individuals, groups or organisations. Resistance to change also occurs in natural and social systems.
Collective intelligence	The shared wisdom and knowledge that emerges out of a group’s collective efforts, that is more than an individual can produce, allowing for consensus decisions. Such knowledge is often more than the sum of the parts of knowledge of all individuals, thereby enabling novel solutions.
Communication	Sharing information, by various means, especially to increase understanding between individuals or groups.
Concept	Abstract mental representation of our world.	1
Context	The specific settings and circumstances of any given system or group of people. These context specific factors can include historical, political, cultural and other circumstances, as well as the structure and culture of the research and/or stakeholder organisations involved.
Creativity	Forming something novel and valuable, including ideas, theories, inventions and art.
Credibility	The believability of a person, source or message based on trustworthiness and expertise, and also often-shared experience and/or identity.
Cultural Models	Cultural models are taken-for-granted understandings of the world that are shared by groups of people. Like a mental model (on an individual scale), a cultural model is a group’s implicit representations of, and thought processes about their perceived reality.
Culture	Behaviours and norms shared by groups of people. When the group is a society, culture includes language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. When the group is an organisation, culture includes shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices.
Culture Shift	The process of changing beliefs, behaviours and outcomes, usually in an organisation or other constructed institutions.
Data	Quantitative or qualitative units of information that can be used for analysis.	1, 2
Decision context	The circumstances under which a decision is made and which influence the decision.
Decision-making	Selecting a course of action among several alternate possibilities.
Decision support	Use of analytical tools, which may be computerized, to assist individuals and groups in decision making. Decision support includes various kinds of modelling and mapping.
Deductive reasoning	Deductive reasoning builds on statements or theories that are confirmed by observation or can be confirmed by logic.	1
Emergence	The incurrence of a characteristic or behaviour of two or more entities that could not be anticipated based on the individual parts.	1
Framework	A real or conceptual basic structure that supports or guides practical applications.	1
Hypothesis	A preconceived idea about the world that guides the research process and is to be falsified by it.	1
Inductive reasoning	Inductive reasoning draws conclusions based on data or observations.	1
Paradigm	A universally recognized scientific achievement that provides theoretical and practical foundations for a specific scientific community.	1
Qualitative research	Qualitative research focuses on the human dimensions of the observable or conceptual reality, often linking observational data or interpretation of existing data directly to theory or concepts.	1
Quantitative research	Quantitative research focuses on the statistical and mathematical analysis of data, as well as the general analysis and often interpretation of data that consists of numbers.	1
Researcher	Someone who works actively in research.
Scientist	Someone who has gone through a scientific education.
Scientific Method	Scientific methods create knowledge in accordance with certain principles and rigour.	1, 2
System	Any number of individuals or elements that interact.	1, 2, 3
Theory	A systematic ideational structure of broad scope, conceived by the human imagination, that encompasses a family of empirical (experiential) laws regarding regularities existing in objects and events, both observed and posited.	1
Transdisciplinarity	Transdisciplinarity is a mode of research that is based around the understanding that certain types of problems cannot be defined from a single discipline's perspective. Instead, Transdisciplinarity aims to already integrate different types of knowledge, both academic and non-academic, in the problem definition phase. These jointly defined problems are then addressed by integrating knowledge, often with the goal to develop solution strategies to these problems.	1