This paper reports on a scoping study, ‘Understanding Loweswater’, funded under the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme. It highlights the research and policy context supporting the need for this kind of interdisciplinary, stakeholder-inclusive research and explains the way that the research was carried out in practice. The scoping study identified some of the challenges of the interdisciplinary approach taken, as well as highlighted its potential for solving environmental problems that do not fit within the frame of a single discipline.