The writing starts from a central question: what are the reasons behind the distance between the suggestive interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discourses or other invitations for working the articulation of knowledge and the relative advances in its implementation in universities? Although the challenges or obstacles to achieving intertwined and pertinent knowledge are multiple, the article stops at some problems related to the formation, production and circulation of knowledge. Namely, training for X-disciplinarities, as Esteban Castro calls them; the lack of institutional and financial resources available for its promotion; the difficulties related to the constitution of teams that generate collective knowledge; the limited resources for mediation, negotiation and agreements in the generation of collective knowledge among the actors involved in the process; the lack of communication, dissemination and outreach for public advocacy; and the lack of follow-up in the observations and study of complex problems to allow adjustments to knowledge and proposals for action.