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Research that focuses on changing problems of poverty, inequality, and food security may not always listen to what people who live in areas with sustainability problems need in order to make those changes. In our analysis of development research projects, we reflect on the challenges of participation faced by different actors in transdisciplinary science. For a decolonial turn, people need to be involved in making decisions about resources, research topics, and how to use knowledge.Transdisciplinary research is considered to offer contributions of science to sustainability transformations, partly because transdisciplinary approaches aim to increase the relevance, credibility, and legitimacy of scientific research by ensuring the active participation of non-academic actors in research. However, the possible impact of transdisciplinary research on decolonial sustainability science ‐ understood as actively undoing Euro-North American centricity, dispossession, racism, and ongoing power imbalances in inequitable social-ecological systems ‐ and simultaneous response to scientific rigor remain under debate. Thus, this article assesses the contributions of transdisciplinary research projects to decolonial sustainability science based on empirical information. To do so, we analyze a sample of 43 development research projects of the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme) in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We found that despite significant differences in approaches, Global-North-dominated sustainability science still has far to go to achieve the decolonial potential of transdisciplinarity, enabling different actors’ participation.

La soberanía alimentaria es una concepción integral y sistémica de implementación y análisis de las dinámicas productivo-alimentarias. Sus postulados se resumieron en diez parámetros con los que se analizaron cualitativamente tres sistemas alimentarios del Departamento de Santa Cruz en Bolivia: agroindustrial, indígena y agroecológico. El sistema agroindustrial reveló las menores contribuciones a la soberanía alimentaria, mientras que en el agroecológico, los aportes son más claros y avanzados. A pesar de estas diferencias, el sistema agroindustrial es el más dominante y expansivo, particularmente sobre el indígena. Los hallazgos levantan preguntas sobre los conflictos entre los sistemas alimentarios agroindustrial e  indígena con la soberanía alimentaria en las condiciones actuales.

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