Environmental psychology and people-environment studies: what kind of multidisciplinary collaboration?

Abstract

This article aims to show the existing collaborations between Environmental Psychology and the diverse people-environment studies, based on the works presented in the Congress IAPS-16 (Paris, 2000). In the relation between transdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, it understands that scientific functioning is necessarily mono-disciplinary, while intervention in people-environment relations involves a complex dynamics. As for intervention (socio-environmental handling), it distinguishes two types of functioning: interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. It concludes that only the knowledge that integrates the several disciplinary approaches into transdisciplinary approaches will provide an adequate answer to the challenges of this new century.