One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Joël Baraka Akilimali, Université catholique de Louvain / Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural de Bukavu (ISDR‐Bukavu) and the SecTenSusPeace project.

It’s impossible to talk about sustainability in conflict and post-conflict areas without unraveling complex questions of land security.

“(It’s) a trap to see nature as an island, an insulated space,” says Joël Baraka Akilimali, a researcher with the Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace? project (SecTenSusPeace).

“We can’t talk about environmental sustainability in Congo and the Great Lakes Region of Africa without talking about social sustainability, economic sustainability – it’s interconnected,” says Akilimali.

Those issues are in turn tied to land security – a key challenge in the region, where the SecTenSusPeace project is looking at innovative ways to deal with often complicated land title issues that arise when people are forced to flee their homes in conflict areas.

A jurist focused on environmental law who has written extensively about colonialism in the context of agriculture and land use, Akilimali recently earned his doctorate in political science at the University of Louvain.

Focusing on Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the SecTenSusPeace team is exploring how land security affects people and communities in conflict, across all facets of their lives.

To answer these questions, Akilimali and the SecTenSusPeace team conducted extensive qualitative research in the two countries. In addition to classic research methods, the project also brought in an innovative theatrical interviewing technique: researchers asked people to imagine themselves as actors dramatizing problems and situations they’ve encountered.

It’s a technique his thesis supervisor, An Ansoms, used in Rwanda, where she found it helped people to talk about emotionally difficult subjects while obscuring details of their own experiences which they preferred not to share.

“It allowed us, through this theatrical method, to have access to some crucial pieces of information that wouldn’t normally be discussed,” Akilimali explains.

“For me, there’s a feeling of satisfaction and pride in being a member of this large community of researchers,” he says. “I’m very satisfied and impressed by the ability to create dialogue between so many researchers from many disciplines, united by the questions of social change and transformations to sustainability.”

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Hind Ftouhi, CRESC‐ Centre de Recherche et d’Etudes sur les sociétés Contemporaines, Morocco, and the T2SGS project.

For researcher Hind Ftouhi, a T2S project in Morocco was an opportunity not just to dig into the complexities of groundwater sustainability, but also to share interdisciplinary know-how.

“The project was not just about producing knowledge, but also passing it on. This was very important,” says Hind Ftouhi, a doctoral researcher with the Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability project.

Using a combination of engineering, hydrogeology and social science methods, the project looks at local innovations related to groundwater, aiming to share ideas and inspire new initiatives around the world.

Ftouhi’s research focuses on the gendered impact of intensified agriculture in the Drâa Valley region of Morocco, home to six oases and the longest river in the country, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Atlas Mountains.

The T2GS team includes researchers in seven countries on four continents, from a wide variety of disciplines – irrigation specialists to environmental studies, economics and urban planning.

“We learned from each other and exchanged between the studies to see the similarities and differences,” Ftouhi says. “It was really a strong dynamic.”

The Morocco team also brought on university students to work in the field. Many came from cities and had never experienced the region’s remarkable environment first-hand, Ftouhi says.

“You bring them out into the oasis, and for them, it was a revelation,” she says. “It was formative not only for them but also for us. We learned with them, because they asked questions we had sometimes missed.”

Ftouhi trained as an agricultural engineer before earning her doctorate in rural sociology: “It was a bit difficult, going from a technical background – where you have trees, you have animals and above all you have problems you have to solve – to social sciences, where there are paradigms, theories and a whole world to think about in terms of how to reflect on things, to analyse, to develop your critical sense.”

But that deep technical background and knack for social science research proved useful in the field, she says. “You have both the agronomist’s hat and the sociologist’s hat – on the ground, you’re more comfortable with people and how to approach them, how to conduct interviews.”

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

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Header photo: Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Shibaji Bose of the TAPESTRY project.

To get a comprehensive picture of grassroots responses to climate change threats, the TAPESTRY project in India and Bangladesh wanted communities to take the lead.

“We wanted the researchers to let go of their control. Why not flip the lens, reverse the gaze and look from the perception of the community?” explains Shibaji Bose, a visual methods researcher with the TAPESTRY project.

TAPESTRY examines sustainable development and transformation in coastal areas facing the imminent threat of climate change. The project relies heavily on visual methods, including photography, video and painting.

Researchers started by using the Photovoice method – giving cameras to research participants and asking them to document whatever they felt was important, then identifying themes from those images.

“We won’t tell them what to do and what not to do. We want to know their worldview, their perception and their way of looking at things. It’s not important whether it’s right or wrong. There’s no right or wrong; it’s their lens,” Bose explains. “They are basically co-researchers in the process. We are basically facilitators.”

To make sure they were hearing from a representative sample of communities, including precarious workers underrepresented in the Photovoice group, researchers used images from the group to guide further interviews with additional people.

And when COVID started, researchers also asked people to keep a photo diary of their lives, taking pictures of moments that felt important – an effort they kept up until the pandemic began to recede, providing an incredible wealth of data.

“It gave us a longitudinal narrative of how and when things are getting better, and things are not getting better,” Bose explains. The visual diaries also helped researchers to visualize how the region is increasingly affected by climate-change-linked “twin uncertainties,” as floods and droughts alternately ravage the coast.

“We always tend to hear what the media is told by policymakers, by the government or ministers,” Bose says. “And then we have these daily rhythms shared from the village. We set up this democratic space, where plurality of knowledge is something that we’re trying to do. So having different streams – the scientific knowledge, the indigenous knowledge – can come together and talk to each other.”

The project brought in researchers with a range of expertise, from sociology to forest science – but Bose says he sees the community-guided research as an additional interdisciplinary dimension: “They all come together and generate some kind of new knowledge, new perspectives, new narrative.”

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Taís Sonetti‐González, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and the AGENTS project.

When sustainability researchers in the Amazon uncovered a disturbing phenomenon – the disappearance of small communities around the region – conversations with local women were the key to understanding what was happening.

Combining geospatial analysis and extensive fieldwork, the AGENTS project documents innovative ways people in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru sustainably use the region’s forests and surrounding environment, with the goal of informing environmental policy in the region and around the world.

“We are going to look at local-based initiatives, but what about women? What’s the role of women in these initiatives for forest conservation and for the transformation of the Amazon and governance?” asks Taís Sonetti‐González, a PhD candidate at the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Many of the AGENTS researchers had already been working in the region for years, including Sonetti‐González, whose master’s thesis work focused on women and conservation in the Amazon.

She brought that expertise to the interdisciplinary project, opening a new line of inquiry focusing on gender.

The team’s fieldwork shed light on the disappearance of small communities in the Amazon since the early 2000s, with crucial details uncovered in interviews with women in the region. “The contact with them and the dialogue we promoted – this was the way to implement their thoughts into the project and guide us,” Sonetti‐González says.

Among the many other initiatives AGENTS has documented are women’s cooperatives that improve financial independence and encourage sustainable farming, as well as the key role of women’s groups in sharing knowledge throughout the region.

It was also important to highlight the diversity of the vast region, Sonetti‐González says: “We can’t have this idea of the Amazon as just one homogenous place, because it’s not.”

From deep rainforests to big cities and the spaces where those environments collide, all innervated by an immense river system, everything in the Amazon is connected – but at the same time, individual communities are often isolated by difficult terrain and long distances, Sonetti‐González explains.

“It was quite a challenging project. The way that we approached it was to work together, and to work with local partners and bring their knowledge. We didn’t see it as a participatory project but as a collaborative project, so they really guided us through these issues,” she says.

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Patient Polepole, Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural de Bukavu (ISDR‐Bukavu) ‐ Angaza Institute, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the SecTenSusPeace project.

“When we talk about land security, it’s more than a question of land. It’s a question of identity; it’s a question of food security; it’s a question of human dignity,” says Patient Polepole, a researcher with the Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace? project (SecTenSusPeace).

“The earth nourishes people in the countryside. It’s what gives them the means to send their children to school, to pay for health care — it’s what allows them to exist,” says Polepole, a researcher at l’Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural de Bukavu with a diverse background in development, ecology and human rights and governance – among other specialties.

When conflict forces people to flee their homes, they’re often not able to return for years – if ever – and when they do, their land has often been taken over by someone else, who may by that point have some legal claim to the land.

The SecTenSusPeace project looks into new approaches to this problem being explored in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which have been affected by a long-running, deadly regional conflict.

Land security is critical to stability in the region, and in turn to sustainability, Polepole says: “We talk about transformations to sustainability, but how can we talk about sustainability with such uncertainty in relation to identity, to food, to access to the resources we need?”

It’s a question that invites many more, he says. How does shifting access to agricultural land affect a region’s economy? How do security questions affect agricultural practices – even the crops people choose to plant? And how do people understand their own identity when they’re forced to leave their land?

“It’s not possible to come with one single discipline and understand,” Polepole says, noting the project contributors’ wide array of research backgrounds.

Research from the project has already helped to inform land reform in the DRC, and by sharing data and lessons from the region, the researchers aim to offer insight for other conflict-affected areas around the world.

“Over the long term, local knowledge and decision-making on a decentralized, community-based, local level, could allow us to better understand the problem and propose sustainable solutions,” Polepole says.

Building on the project’s deep body of research, Polepole is now looking forward to digging further into dozens of new avenues of inquiry raised by the fieldwork. “It’s possible to go further, to deepen many questions, continuing in this multidisciplinary context,” he says.

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Daiana Monteiro Tourne, State University of Campinas, Brazil, and the AGENTS project.

Using geospatial analysis and on-the-ground research spanning thousands of kilometres, researchers in the Amazon are uncovering innovative ideas to help nature conservation around the world.

The international AGENTS project looks at how people in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru use the region’s forests and rivers in a sustainable way.

“People think Amazonia is just the forest,” says Daiana Monteiro Tourne, a researcher with the AGENTS project. “It’s not just land – it’s a history, it’s a community, an environment.”

As a forest engineer, doctor of applied ecology and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Campinas, Tourne’s current focus is sustainable land use in the Brazilian Amazon.

Tourne and AGENTS researchers have documented dozens of local initiatives including innovative farming and tree-planting systems, micro-industries like vegetable leather and medicinal oils, as well as projects like co-ops and community fishing agreements.

By sharing these sustainable land use innovations, the team aims to inform policymakers in the region and worldwide.

“We’ve discovered a lot of strategies which people are doing with such few resources,” Tourne says. “Local people are so excited to participate in the research, because they really think (their initiatives) can contribute to the region and contribute to the planet.”

Tourne says it was important to share the research with the communities who participated, and show how science can be a tool for social good. “We want to collaborate, to show that science is for society,” she says.

Tourne’s work on the project was initially focused on lab-based geospatial analysis, but her methodology expanded to include on-the-ground research, including interviews and group dialogue workshops.

“We used natural and social sciences and combined both dialogues, to show what people think and what society thinks about these initiatives, and what we can do together to multiply these initiatives and make them stronger,” Tourne says.

“This was transformative for me,” she says. “Now, I work with people. I know this is important for science, combining both approaches – technologies as well as people’s opinions, traditions, history.

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

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Header image: Daniel Granja on Unsplash.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Sanna Komi, University of Helsinki, Finland, and the CON-VIVA project.

Wolves are a heated topic in Finland. They regularly prey on hunting dogs, livestock and pets – and although it’s been more than a century since the last recorded attack on a human, living alongside these apex predators challenges the comfortable idea that humans are at the top of the natural world.

“If there was a hungry wolf and you were alone … you’re kind of equals there,” says Sanna Komi, a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki whose research focuses on how people in Finland relate to wolves.

Her research is part of the CON-VIVA project, which explores whether humans can fundamentally change how we think about apex predators and reshape our world to meld wild and human spaces. It’s based on the concept of convivial conservation, which rejects the traditional doctrine that the best way to preserve nature is through walled-off protected areas.

CON-VIVA includes three other teams: studying lions in Tanzania, jaguars in Brazil and bears in the U.S.

In Finland, wolves were previously hunted almost to extinction, but hunters have been banned from killing them freely since the country joined the EU in 1995. With the wolf population now at a century high, the government recently proposed a controversial cull.

Komi’s initial studies were in political ecology, focusing on extractive industries, but she was interested in looking at the wolf question from a larger scale – not just how to manage the population, but how people relate to these animals.

Over five months of fieldwork in winter 2019-2020, Komi did 83 wide-ranging interviews with people in North Karelia, a deeply forested area of Finland on the country’s eastern border with Russia.

Komi says she tried to let people take the lead in the conversations, some of which took place out in the woods.

“I’m from Helsinki, I’m from the capital … (I’m) the wolf researcher who doesn’t even eat meat. I was very aware of the different dynamics there. I really wanted to remain neutral, and also be very considerate of the people that I met with and interviewed and give them the space – I tried to balance that with being critical,” she says.

One of the key findings from her interviews, she says, is the gap between the researchers and government bodies charged with dealing with wolves, and the people who actually live alongside the animals.

“They don’t necessarily talk the same language, and they don’t talk with each other. They kind of shout at each other,” she says.

She says she was also struck in her interviews by how closely the way people talked about wolves mirrored what her CON-VIVA colleagues in Brazil found in their research on jaguars.

“It’s been super interesting, learning about the different cases in different countries and contexts,” she says.

“I’ve been really lucky to be doing my PhD in such an amazing project and group, and have the support of the group, because often a PhD can be a very solitary experience. Mine has been the opposite,” she says.

The immense trove of data she gathered will inform not only academic papers but also an album of music – Komi’s third recorded album as a solo artist.

“With music you can engage with emotions and things that you can’t necessarily write out, especially in academic texts, so it allows for a very different kind of performance or shape for this knowledge I’ve gathered in my research,” she says.

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Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Carlos Henrique Xavier Araujo of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and Gold Matters project.

When researcher Carlos Henrique Xavier Araujo first started approaching gold miners in small Brazilian Amazon towns to ask for interviews, many were suspicious.

Although gold mining is the economic basis of many Amazon communities, it’s often informal or illegal – so it was critical to build trust before asking too many questions, Araujo says.

Araujo is a PhD candidate at the University of São Paulo and a researcher with the Gold Matters project, which focuses on artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa .

The project’s goal is to better understand the political, social and economic context around ASGM, and learn from miners and communities about how they relate to their natural environment in order to explore how the industry can become more sustainable.

Araujo’s current PhD work leans heavily on methodologies from social sciences, but he’s also trained as a mining engineer. “It’s important when you’re discussing artisanal and small-scale mining to understand the perceptions of the miners,” he says.

His extensive research as part of Gold Matters’ Brazil team involved months of fieldwork, travelling 1,200 km through two states and learning from miners, community members and officials from the local and federal governments. “The basic idea is to try to avoid a top-down approach,” he says.

Gold is not only a key part of the region’s culture and history – it’s a part of Araujo’s own family: “My father was a gold miner; my grandfather was a gold miner. It’s intrinsically in my life,” he says. “It’s my passion.”

The Gold Matters project includes mining and environmental engineers, biologists, sociologists, anthropologists and artists, gathering data in seven countries. They’re constantly in touch, sharing information and ideas within the diverse group, Araujo says.

“We have different backgrounds, different research, but (we’re) trying to do the same thing, to try to promote transformations to sustainability in ASGM,” he says. “I know we have a big challenge over the next decades to improve this sector.”

Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

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Header image: Jorge Calvimontes.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. As part of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Esther van de Camp, Leiden University, the Netherlands and the Gold Matters project.

For researcher Esther van de Camp, gold is a window into an entire universe of ideas.

“Environmental problems, issues of inequality and gender, but also fascinating things in geology and what’s underground – and the fact that gold doesn’t even originate on earth; it originates from supernovae explosions,” says Esther van de Camp, a PhD candidate at Leiden University and a researcher with the Gold Matters project.

“There’s so much to say and to learn about it,” she says. “You can go in so many directions.”

Gold Matters focuses on artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in South America  and Sub-Saharan Africa.

By looking at the political, social and economic context around ASGM and learning from miners and communities about their relationship with nature, the project aims to explore how the industry can become more sustainable.

The project includes teams gathering data in seven countries. In Uganda’s Busia region, van de Camp’s research took her into the gold fields, where between interviews, researchers picked up shovels and got into the mud and rock, learning first-hand from miners.

Her research calls for a more nuanced idea of sustainability that considers local context and looks at not only mining’s environmental impact, but also social justice and questions of inequality.

“What’s sustainable is very localized,” van de Camp says. “You could say that miners should just find different technologies to mine, but maybe there’s no money to do it, or the reality on the ground doesn’t allow it.”

People who are sometimes shut out of the formal job market may also find work in small-scale mining – in particular women, an important part of the workforce in van de Camp’s study area.

“Sustainability transformation includes structural transformation as well as societal transformation,” she says.

These complex questions require layered approaches. Drawing on her background in anthropology and industrial ecology, van de Camp employed a variety of methods: life-cycle assessments of mining projects, scenario planning to sketch out futures for gold miners as well as ethnographic and social research to dig into the context.

“I borrow methods from each of them, and I try to use that friction – because that’s our goal, to learn how we can deal with these different types of knowledge,” she says.

“For me, as an early career researcher to be part of this interdisciplinary research group Gold Matters, within this program Transformations to Sustainability, it’s such an opportunity to learn and to share and to collaborate,” she says. “What’s next? Keep collaborating. We need this transdisciplinary knowledge and contextualized knowledge.”

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Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.

One of the aims of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme is to build capacity for international research collaboration by supporting early-career scientists. For the first of a series of posts from early-career researchers from different T2S projects, we spoke to Wilhelm Andrew Kiwango of The University of Dodoma, Tanzania, and the CON-VIVA project.

Lions are a beloved symbol of Tanzania’s natural beauty, but they’re also feared predators – is it possible for us to find a way to live alongside them?

“People used to live with wildlife, from time immemorial,” says Wilhelm Andrew Kiwango, a lecturer at Dodoma University and post-doctoral researcher with the CON-VIVA project, which focuses on the relationship between people and apex predators.

The project explores convivial conservation, a framework for nature conservation that aims to blur the lines between wild spaces and human spaces, creating a world where the needs of both can be met.

“Convivial conservation is trying to propose moving beyond ‘spectacles of nature’ – where we just go and peek at nature – and coming to realize the realities of everyday environmentalism,” Kiwango says.

His research focuses primarily on the Ruaha-Rungwa ecosystem, a 50,000-square-kilometre protected area in southwestern Tanzania where lions, elephants, hyenas and people are uneasy neighbours.

The project also includes three other teams studying wolves in Finland, jaguars in Brazil and bears in the U.S.

Convivial conservation rejects the colonial-era idea that tightly controlled conservation areas are the only way to preserve nature.

That method encourages the expansion of protected areas, but also leads to increased militarization to control poaching and expropriation of land from local people, Kiwango says. It also creates an unsustainable relationship with nature where only some – mostly foreign tourists – can enter conservation areas.

“We would like to see conservation done on our own terms … Not just taking it the way we took the Yellowstone conservation model from America and implementing it wholeheartedly in our environments,” he says. “We want to decolonize that kind of thinking and make people aware of how we can do conservation in our own way.”

But implementing the model isn’t just about re-drawing lines on a map and changing where animals and people can go – it raises political, psychological and economic questions that demand an interdisciplinary approach.

Kiwango’s research took him to the Amboseli region of southern Kenya, where he interviewed Maasai people about how they share land with apex predators.

“They accept the costs,” he says. If one cow out of a few hundred is taken by a lion, that’s normal: “For them, they don’t take that as a conflict. It’s part and parcel of the life they live.”

But extensive ethnographic research done by CON-VIVA’s Tanzania team shows that philosophy isn’t shared everywhere in the region, he notes – which raises questions about structural factors to be considered when fitting the model to different contexts.

Drawing on broad expertise from the project’s international network of researchers – plus his own varied background in wildlife management and social sciences – has been critical to taking on those questions, Kiwango says.

“Some of my colleagues are critical social scientists; some of them are political ecologists,” he says. “That contributed to enriching the methodologies, but also the results and output that we’ve had so far. Interdisciplinarity is very critical and it has been very helpful in ensuring that we achieve our objectives.”

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Find out more about the experiences of early-career researchers working on different T2S projects here.