In England, a new scheme for collating and sharing General Practitioners’ data has faced resistance from various quarters and has been deferred twice. While insufficient communication and ambiguous safeguards explain the widespread dissatisfaction expressed by the public and experts, we argue how dwindling public trust can be the most damaging variable in this picture - with implications not only for this scheme, but for any future project that aims to mobilise health data for medical research and innovation. We also highlight the indispensability of deliberative public engagement on the values being prioritised in health data initiatives, the significance of securing social license in addition to legal assurances, and the lessons in it of global pertinence.

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Problems framed as societal challenges have provided fresh impetus for transdisciplinary research. In response, funders have started programmes aimed at increasing transdisciplinary research capacity. However, current programme evaluations do not adequately measure the skills and characteristics of individuals and collectives doing this research. Addressing this gap, we propose a systematic framework for evaluating transdisciplinary research based on the Capability Approach, a set of concepts designed to assess practices, institutions, and people based on public values. The framework is operationalized through a mixed-method procedure which evaluates capabilities as they are valued and experienced by researchers themselves. The procedure is tested on a portfolio of ‘pump-priming’ research projects in the UK. We find these projects are sites of capability development in three ways: through convening cognitive capabilities required for academic practice; cultivating informal tacit capabilities; and maintaining often unacknowledged backstage capabilities over durations that extend beyond the lifetime of individual projects. Directing greater attention to these different modes of capability development in transdisciplinary research programmes may be useful formatively in identifying areas for ongoing project support, and also in steering research system capacity towards societal needs.

Research framed to address global, grand and societal challenges has brought fresh impetus to calls by funding agencies for transdisciplinary research. Yet the urgency of such calls is not matched by sufficient knowledge of how to foster and maintain the capabilities to do transdisciplinary work. Significant gaps exist in how to cultivate and maintain transdisciplinary methods, practices and the underlying capabilities required to support them. This paper employs a capability approach to construct a realist evaluative framework with which to assess such capabilities. The framework is operationalised through a novel three-stage mixed method procedure which seeks to evaluate transdisciplinary capabilities as they are valued and experienced by researchers themselves. The procedure is tested on a portfolio of five 'pump-priming' projects funded by the ESRC Nexus Network +.The paper reports a set of transdisciplinary capabilities valued by nexus research participants and found to varying degrees within each of the research projects. We find that pump-priming investments are sites of research capability development in three ways; through convening cognitive capabilities; cultivating transgressive capabilities; and maintaining backstage capabilities over durations that extend beyond the beginning and end of individual projects. Furthermore, for researchers, it is the transgressive quality of these capabilities that is most salient. Directing greater attention to these different modes of capability development in pump-priming research programmes may be useful in growing and steering research system capacity towards contemporary and future societal needs.