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In this interview first posted by ZO’ mag, Christophe Sawadogo, who is part of the Gold Matters project team, explores how art can reflect the social world, bear witness to transformations under way, and catalyse new conversations…

Il arrive que la toile soit une rencontre. Au sens physique du mot, qu’elle mette dans le cadre, celui qui la peint et ceux qu’il peint, la terre qui les porte et l’air qu’ils respirent. Christophe Sawadogo explore l’intersection de ces regards. Sa représentation est à la fois un témoignage et une invitation à la parole. Elle ne s’arrête pas au captage d’une information, elle incite la population à dire aussi. A cet instant là, l’art est totalement contemporain, dans cet instant qui construit de la conscience, de la liberté, de la mémoire et des perspectives pour après. Rencontre.

On vient de voir des toiles réalisées au Mali et au nord du Burkina, des toiles sur la route. Tu peux nous expliquer ce rapport que tu as avec le déplacement ?

Pour partie, je dirai mes origines. Je suis du Nord du Burkina, une zone qui voit progresser le désert, où le climat et les saisons ont une incidence sur nos vies et le mouvement de la population. Mes parents ont dû migrer en Côte d’Ivoire voisine, « où l’herbe est plus verte ». Comme la plupart de mes camarades, je faisais chaque [jour] beaucoup de kilomètres. Cela resurgit dans mon travail. Et peut expliquer les bouts de papier que je dépose sur les routes dans mon quartier, sur les sentiers des mines. De la même façon, certaines parties du Nord sont affectées par le terrorisme et des milliers de personnes quittent leurs zones d’habitation. Et j’en fais le constat avec mes petits moyens d’artiste, avec la terre, mes crayons, l’encre et le carbone.

L’œuvre d’art doit rester un miroir social, le reflet, la géographie, l’histoire d’un monde qui l’a générée. Il n’a rien à voir avec (…) la pâle copie de l’Occident, avec ses codes dominants. Christophe Sawadogo

Des portraits, en croisant les récits de leur quotidien et des articles de la Déclaration des droits de l’Homme.

Ta création est très ancrée dans le social. Très en phase avec le quotidien des gens.

Je travaille souvent avec des groupes de personnes. Aujourd’hui, la sécheresse, la précarité touche des pans entiers de la société. Je ne tombe pas dans le moralisme ; mais je reviens souvent à la DUDH( Déclaration Universelle des droits de l’homme). Par exemple, avec les filles du Centre Bianchi Couture, nous avons réalisé des portraits, en croisant les récits de leur quotidien et des articles de la DUDH. L’exposition a été montrée à Ouagadougou et aux Pays Bas il y a deux ans.

On vient de voir également un travail également « communautaire », à propos de l’or…

A Guibaré (Nord Burkina) et au Ghana (Tarkwa, Kejetia, Takoradi) nous avons travaillé avec des femmes, des enfants, des miniers en association avec des professeurs, des étudiants de Gold Matters. Ensemble, on a monté des ateliers de création autour du développement durable. Nous avons fait une exposition dans ce village minier de Kejetja, l’an passé. Comment une communauté perçoit-elle l’activité ? Et comment elle va l’exprimer ?

Il y a des expériences artistiques dont tu te sens proches? Parenté d’émotion, de raison et de choix plastiques…

J’aime beaucoup les recherches des artistes du « Vohou Vohou », en Côte d’Ivoire dans les années 80 orientées vers l’intégration de l’objet local dans la construction de l’œuvre. Au Ghana, avec mon ami Nii Obodai, nous avons créé un musée africain dans ce village minier de Kejetia. Nous y avons exposé nos photos, notre peinture collective ( un mémorial), des objets divers issus de l’exploitation auriez comme les sacs, les casques, les vêtements usés le matériel à peser l’or… Oui, ce sont des pistes qui sont intéressantes, très émouvantes aussi. Ce sont des vies.

“J’ai la conviction qu’un art vous touche si vous y avez votre propre empreinte. Si on se reconnaît.”

De travailler ensemble, avec des gens qui ne sont pas dans ce type d’expression, ça génère quel sentiment.

Personnellement une grande émotion. C’est beaucoup de choses, et une liberté nouvelle qu’ils prennent. Pour ma part, j’apprends beaucoup avec des personnes qui utilisent mes moyens d’expression pour la première fois, ils m’apprennent des choses inattendues sur la spontanéité….sur moi et ma façon de voir le monde ou de le rendre.

Tu travailles beaucoup sur cette proximité sociale. Comment l’art contemporain peut être perçu par les populations ? Finalement on a souvent l’impression avec les œuvres, assez hermétiques, que ça leur est un peu étranger…

J’ai la conviction qu’un art vous touche si vous y avez votre propre empreinte. Si on se reconnaît. Des acheteurs locaux sont concernés par nos créations et nous le font bien savoir. Maintenant quand je regarde les artistes, je pense à des gens comme Siriki Ky. Je suis allé le voir plusieurs fois dans son atelier. Sa vision d’initier un symposium de sculpture en pleine brousse à une quarantaine de km de Ouagadougou, m’a convaincu que l’art avait quelque chose à voir avec la main mais aussi avec le cœur. Son initiative a été traitée de folle au départ. Aujourd’hui elle est reconnue et saluée par tous. Des artistes du monde entier viennent se mesurer à cette roche du Sahel.

Pour ta part, l’art contemporain a des responsabilités?

En tous cas, il offre aux Africains des possibilités infinies d’ afficher leurs interrogations sociales, leurs inquiétudes existentielles. L’ engagement sociopolitique et artistique se traduit sur fond de crises identitaires, migratoires, de développement endogène. Mais il y a des raisons d’espérer, dans ce concernement. A mon sens, l’œuvre d’art doit rester un miroir social, le reflet, la géographie, l’histoire d’un monde qui l’a générée. Il n’a rien à voir avec la vision d’import-export matériel ou la pâle copie de l’Occident, avec ses codes dominants.

Propos recueillis par Roger Calmé [Interview by Roger Calmé]
Photos: C. Sawadogo

Eleanor Fisher, lead researcher for the “Gold Matters” project, reflects on change to trans-disciplinary team-working through the pandemic, underlining how we need all our energy, trans-disciplinary skills, and imaginations to capture opportunities for sustainable transformation.

Our three year, “Gold Matters” project examines the potential for transformations to sustainability in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM). The project is trans-regional, with field sites in parts of South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and trans-disciplinary, building collaboration between researchers and mining actors. To foster trans-disciplinarity, the Team includes the painter Christophe Sawadogo and the photographer Nii Obodai; it also benefits from the contribution of Margaret Tuhumwire, Director of Environmental Women in Action for Development (EWAD), which supports small-scale miners in Uganda.

Being two thirds through our project and with our plans disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, early 2021 prompts me to reflect on how our transdisciplinary team working has changed and what we can hope to achieve in the coming months. As a 19-strong team living and working across three continents, we took travel, holding face-to-face meetings and immersive ethnographic fieldwork for granted until the pandemic hit. We have had to respond to the situation in creative ways.

Sitting here at my desk in Uppsala, Sweden, I remember the project’s start in October 2018. At the time, we held a meeting and public launch at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. We each brought an object to symbolize new beginnings – a pen, notebook, gold weighing scales, painting, scan of a baby to be born, etc. The objects prompted comments and laughter, and for me they gave incidental insights into my fellow team members. Together we made enthusiastic plans for the research ahead.

At the public launch, we displayed a painting by Christopher Sawadogo. Commissioned specially, it portrays the ethereal figure of a woman holding a gold balance, with water, fire, earth and vegetation symbolizing the weighing up of sustainability issues in gold mining. During the meeting, Nii Obodai also demonstrated his own special take on slow photography – no digital camera here!

Soon after the launch, I travelled with Sabine Luning and PhD student, Esther van de Camp, to Uganda, where Margaret Tuhumwire of EWAD took us to visit miner groups in Busia District (south east). Later we rendezvoused with team member Ronald Twongyirwe of Mbarara University of Science and Technology to see mining in Buhweju District (south west). Esther later wrote about the “deep diversity” we had witnessed (see here): in southern Uganda alone, mining practices range from simple gold panning to hard-rock mining, and from processing using mercury or cyanide to non-chemical extraction of “ecological” gold. Such diversity contributes to the enormous challenge of addressing sustainability within the ASGM sector, but undaunted Esther later returned to undertake fieldwork for her PhD “Transformation and Sustainability in ASGM in Busia (Uganda)”.

Yesterday the stones were combined vein and waste. Today’s batch is mostly waste, so … this means looking for the small small gold in between the waste#goldmatters #transform2sustain #asm #Busia @Belmont_Forum @NORFACE_network @ISC https://t.co/EHka1bAEi8 pic.twitter.com/8D9IMycN8w

— Esther van de Camp (@EstherCa) February 15, 2020

The heterogeneity observed in Ugandan points to the value of comparison between localities – across countries and continents. To develop the comparative dimension, Sabine Luning and Marjo de Theije led pilot fieldwork in Northern Ghana (see here), accompanied by Alizéta Ouedraogo, a PhD student working in Burkina Faso. The expertise Marjo and Sabine have on ASGM in South America and West Africa respectively, means they were well placed to compare mining practices in Ghana with other contexts. To do this they used a socio-technical survey (previously implemented in the Amazon), combined with photos from Brazil as a discussion point with Ghanaian miners, and interviews with cross-border migrant miners from Burkina Faso.

Further west, in eastern Guinea Conakry, team members Cristiano Lanzano, Luigi Arnaldi di Balme and their colleagues, Nfaly Diama and Moussa Koné, also undertook fieldwork to advance comparative analysis of technological and social change (see here and Lanzano 2020). The development of empirically rich insight into and between mining contexts helps us to build locally situated portraits of sustainability, and to reflect on scope for potential transformation. Work led by artists contributes to this, challenging taken-for-granted ways of framing the (un)sustainability of small-scale mining.

Our blogs give insights into our research (for our academic publications see here). They include “In the Midst of #Galamstop”, where Robert Pijpers reflects on conducting fieldwork during a government campaign against illegal miners in Ghana. While Jorge Calvimontes, Raissa Resende de Moraes and Carlos Henrique Xavier Araujo, highlight their first field trip together in the Brazilian Amazon “Garimpeiros and Gold Along Highway BR-163”. Raissa later described the complex relationship that exists between indigenous people and gold miners in Tapajós: “Are Sustainable Futures Possible: Indigenous People and Gold Mining in the Brazilian Amazon”.

To reflect on our field experiences and approach to ASGM, we held a project workshop in Takoradi, Ghana. Over an intensive 4 days, we advanced our conceptual and methodological ideas, including our plans for engagement between researchers, artists, and miners. Christophe Sawadogo led a drawing exercise (see here) encouraging us to join in (see here). He later declared: “to see you smiling while taking five minutes to train your fingers in drawing, long life to Gold Matters!” Watching the clip of us painting together, laughing and joking in close proximity, now seems poignant, given the challenges of social isolation and team working during the Covid pandemic.

While in Ghana, we travelled to Tarkwa, a mining town. At one location, we watched women carrying heavy tailings (left over materials) on their heads. Christophe later collected mine dust of different hues – orange, yellow, red, brown – and used tires tracks and other serendipitous markings to create an image of a woman with a headload. Painting people living, working and surviving at society’s margins, Christophe tries to make “the invisible” imagined.

Many of us later came together for the Global Earth Matter’s workshop in the Netherlands: “Visions of Planetary and Political Precarity”, hosted by Wayne Modest, Director of the Centre for Material Culture, and Sabine Luning, Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology in Leiden, the Netherlands. The workshop sought to place notions of planetary precarity within extractive histories of the colonial destruction of societies and natures. For the Gold Matters team, it provided an excellent opportunity for discussion with artists and museum curators, to help advance our plans for artistic collaboration.

2020 marked the start of our schedule for art workshops with miners, and the creation of a travelling ‘pop-up’ exhibition that would move from West Africa to East Africa, Brazil and the Netherlands. The notion of mobility was integral to the exhibition, with its capacity to ‘pop-up’ helping generate “sustainability conversations” in local contexts. In January 2020, we held a workshop in Kejetia, Northern Ghana. Miners from southern Ghana travelled with the Team, helping stimulate comparison of different spatial arrangements and sources for sustainability in mining. Christophe Sawadogo created a public artwork with local women to commemorate miners who had died in a mine accident, while Nii organized a ‘pop up’ exhibition. The workshop both bridged and revealed the inequalities inherent in research (see here with a video clip of the celebration here).

We prepared for further art collaboration in Uganda in March 2020 but rapidly this became impossible with the unfolding of the Covid-19 pandemic. The idea of a travelling exhibition, that would ‘pop-up’ and draw a crowd, became incongruous when faced with the pandemic-induced difficulties of mobility and the need for social isolation.

Later in the year, acknowledging the impossibility of meeting face-to-face, we held our mid-project workshop over Zoom. Likewise, soon after, Lucia da Costa Ferreira convened a workshop at NEPAM, UNICAMP Mineração Artesanal e de Pequena Escala: Transformações em direção à sustentabilidade. These workshops provided important opportunities to share ideas on what sustainability means for us and for our interlocutors, helping to build comparative understanding of the situated character of sustainability issues and of transformative change.

Virtual meetings are now our team norm, providing an efficient means to hold constructive discussions. They also open up possibilities for capacity building, such as quarterly meetings with our five project PhD students on different continents. Nevertheless, I greatly miss face-to-face meetings with the opportunity to share ideas, talk, eat, drink, take selfies, and even argue. For me as research team leader, such social interactions are not a luxury to be easily dispensed with; they are incredibly important for bridging professional hierarchies, assumptions, and cultural differences – all vital for transdisciplinary working.

Beyond our team working, our work has inevitably turned to address the Covid-19 pandemic in mining communities. WhatsApp contact with miners at our field sites helped us to identify early impacts of the pandemic (see here and here). This led to the article Small-scale gold mining and the Covid-19 pandemic: conflict and cooperation in the Brazilian Amazon and another on Ghana in Anthropology Today (forthcoming). Carlos Henrique Xavier Araujo and Giorgio de Tomi also joined an international initiative to record COVID-19 impacts on small-scale mining communities (see the Delve platform).

Writing as I am in February 2021, it feels like we have “reset” our ways of working and our expectations in order to realize a successful project. We are enthusiastically developing our exhibition, giving presentations, contributing to policy work, and writing academic publications. It is also the case that plans for further fieldwork are both on hold and strongly missed, particularly by our PhD students for whom having adequate data is critical for career progression. The ability to engage with gold miners, the cornerstone of our approach to transdisciplinarity and for creating impact from our research, is strongly challenged, although established relationships between members of the research team and miners have been invaluable for continuing dialogue and for progressing our exhibition.

Taking a small step back to reflect, my concern is that the pandemic situation of collective global suffering needs to be grasped as an opportunity to rethink the economic, political and cultural foundations of our society, including in mining communities. Otherwise, we run the risk of missing the opportunity to transform the world in a (more) sustainable way rather than letting events themselves transform us. To this end, we need all our energy, our trans-disciplinary skills, and our imaginations to heal the wounds left by the pre-covid-19 world and to try to build a new one founded on equity and social justice.

Eleanor Fisher is Head of Research at the Nordic Africa Institute.

Cite as follows: Fisher, E. (2021) #Reset2021 – Maintaining Transdisciplinary Teamwork through a Pandemic www.gold-matters.org/?p=1421

Many researchers from the global North engage research assistants in their geographical field of research. Photo by Axel Fassio/FLICKR.

By An Ansoms, Université catholique de Louvain; Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, Université de Mons; Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Université catholique de Louvain; Godefroid Muzalia, Institut supérieur pédagogique de Bukavu and Koen Vlassenroot, Ghent University

Many researchers from the global North (Europe and North America) who do fieldwork in the global South engage research assistants and associates in the geographical field of research.

At best, their contribution is mentioned in a footnote of the articles or reports. At worst, they are kept invisible.

Yet these contributors are key actors in the research process. They forge access to difficult zones and find people to take part in research efforts. They are important in the collection of data, production of research reports and dissemination of results. Eventually, they help to orient, shape and produce knowledge.

Research shows that their role is seldom made visible in research outputs. In addition, they aren’t invited to be part of the research design process. And their role isn’t recognised in the institutional field of research, which is guided by publishing records.

This is problematic because of the way unequal power relations – and power abuse – determine the conditions in which knowledge is produced. Also, there’s a loss of expertise in the hands of these research associates and assistants.

Concerns over research associates and assistants in the production of knowledge aren’t new. They connect to a rich literature on research ethics which emerged within different disciplines as early as the 1960s. This research highlighted the importance of research associates and assistants in the production of knowledge, and the importance of locally embedded expertise – though often without giving them a voice.

To shed light on what’s needed to correct this, we – a group of academics from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Europe – have initiated the “Bukavu Series” – a series of blog posts and a new online cartoon exhibit.

Written by research collaborators and research assistants in the DRC, over 30 blog posts discuss how power relations in knowledge production are skewed. They give first-hand accounts of the role of research assistants and associates, their challenges and their responsibilities.

We don’t want to pretend that the Bukavu Series can solve the problem of invisibility of research associates and assistants. But this is a step in making their voices heard.

Bukavu Series

The contributions in the Bukavu Series cover a number of ethical and emotional challenges that research associates and assistants face.

They discuss the incompatibility between research projects’ expectations and field complications. These include difficulties in getting access to “the field”. They are often embedded within the methodological set-up of research projects. Resolving these complications can be difficult because of time pressures and limited budgets.

Another challenge is related to the associates’ interactions with people in contexts of violence, conflict or economic hardship. As some blog posts tell us, they often struggle with people’s expectations to be financially compensated for participating in research. But these resources are usually not provided, and associates’ struggles with respondents’ expectations often remain unacknowledged.

Research collaborators and assistants also struggle with questions around the communication of research results to their respondents and society at large. People expect to get an insight into the outcomes of the research in which they participated. But again, this is often not foreseen in the research design.

Besides the inherent ethical issues, this complicates any potential return to areas as part of future research activities.

Similarly, there’s little recognition about how doing research in conflict-affected environments can have profound effects on the mental well-being of researchers. Various posts reflect on researchers’ entanglements and traumas, shed light on strategies that might reduce these risks, and point at the lack of support by those commissioning research activities.

And there’s the challenge of visibility. Several contributors claimed the right to be recognised as full partners in research projects. Some bloggers argued that the role of research associates was almost automatically confined to that of “research assistants”, pushing them into a position of subordination.

What must change

To change this, there are a few principles that should urgently be adopted. This is not only a moral obligation but also a necessary step in the transformation of the production of knowledge and academia at large. These steps include:

Acknowledgement upfront of the key role played by research associates and assistants alongside the lead researcher(s) right from the start of the research cycle;
Equal participation between lead researchers, collaborators and assistants in the design of project cycles;
Equal ownership over the generated data;
Recognition in the final outputs of research.

More generally, contemporary problems of knowledge production cannot be detached from the broader inequalities, nor can they be considered separated from existing power relations defining academia. The relations of domination – at the root of these inequalities and ingrained in a historical trajectory – explain to a large extent the unequal representations in the production of knowledge.

There’s a need to call into question the tendency in academic circles to consider institutions located in the global North as “the” valid reference points for the production and validation of knowledge. More prominence should be given to institutions – and scholars – located in the global South in all the dimensions of knowledge production and by all those involved in the generation of knowledge.

An Ansoms, Professor in Development Studies, Université catholique de Louvain; Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, Assistant professor, Université de Mons; Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Associate professor, Université catholique de Louvain; Godefroid Muzalia, Professor au Département d’Histoire-Sciences Sociales , Institut supérieur pédagogique de Bukavu et Koen Vlassenroot, Professor in political and social sciences, Ghent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged some of the central assumptions of research on transformations to sustainability, even while increasing the need for actionable knowledge about social transformations. The pandemic has also changed the parameters for transdisciplinary and internationally collaborative research. Twelve international, transdisciplinary projects in the Transformations to Sustainability programme share insights on how COVID-19 has impacted on their work. 2020 was continuously surprising and often overwhelming. When the twelve T2S projects convened virtually at the beginning of June 2020, apprehension was palpable and virtual meeting skills shaky. Six months later, in mid-December, the project members were overwhelmingly positive about how well they had adapted to such an unprecedented and still uncertain situation. The vast majority of 50 project representatives at the meeting were at least reasonably satisfied with or even proud of what they had achieved in 2020, under difficult circumstances. At the meeting the project members were asked to reflect on both the main challenges and the positive impacts of the Covid-19 epidemic on their work, how they had adapted to the situation and what they saw as the emerging needs and opportunities for research on transformations to sustainability.

Researchers are humans too

T2S project members highlighted some of the universal work-related challenges during the pandemic – the pressures of working from home while looking after young children, or conversely the sheer inability to work from home due to lack of infrastructure, both of which significantly affected productivity (and personal wellbeing). On the positive side, colleagues and funders showed empathy, understanding and patience, while the teams pulled together and demonstrated flexibility, resilience and commitment to the projects.

Co-production can only go so far in a virtual world

Fieldwork and data collection posed the major practical challenge for most projects. Unable to travel and meet in person with research participants, the projects adapted by moving interview and other data collection methods online, which to a certain extent was rather successful. Certain stakeholder communities remained very receptive to digital contact and communication with them was perhaps even easier than before. For example, one project reported having better access to women via online means. However, many T2S projects are working with the world’s marginalized communities, which are not accessible by digital means and with whom personal contact is essential; their contribution to and engagement in the projects has suffered. In this sense the T2S programme provides more evidence of how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the social inequalities that the projects aimed to alleviate. Even projects working with well-connected partners in the Global North have found it challenging to build new relationships and trust with research participants by virtual means. Co-production, so vital in research for transformations, is clearly limited in a virtual world.

The pandemic has given a boost to methodological creativity, innovation and inclusiveness

For many project members, the constraints imposed by the pandemic were the spur to become creative in adapting or radically changing methodologies for data collection and stakeholder engagement, to learn new skills in the use of digital tools and to pause to reflect on how to do things differently in the new context. People’s readiness to meet virtually increased, and virtual meetings became more efficient. There was a sense that virtual meetings democratized the research and learning process, as many meetings and conferences went online and there were fewer barriers to participation. Some felt that communication, interaction and cross-fertilization within the projects improved because of the frequency of virtual meetings. Some also used the time not collecting data in the field to reflect more deeply on what could be learned from existing data. In contrast, others noted the pressure to participate in ever more virtual meetings, which, apart from creating fatigue, eats into time that could be used for analysis, writing and publishing. One person suggested that there be fewer meetings, but more sharing.

Fundamental challenges for social transformations research

The pandemic has made transdisciplinary work with disempowered communities more difficult. It has also exposed and called into question some of the assumptions of research on transformations to sustainability. What does transformation mean in the context of the massive disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? The pandemic has lit up with a flash the complexity of the drivers of unsustainability and the uncertainties of the present and the future. Is the pandemic heralding a positive global transformation or is it a temporary disturbance that will generate vigorous and competitive efforts to rebound? Is it an unprecedented opportunity to mobilize a newly sensitized global community around transformations to sustainability or does it demonstrate that powerful, undesired transformations are well underway and not at all within our control? As one project member wrote, ‘The desire to return to ‘normal’ is a powerful discourse (as much as the idea that we will not return to ‘normal’). This is a challenge for transformation-oriented research.’ Reflecting these uncertainties and ambivalences, many projects sensed a shift in the priorities of their research participants and stakeholders, and doubts about their continuing ability or willingness to engage in a differently focused project. Some projects have shifted their focus to take advantage of new learning opportunities brought by COVID, while others caution against losing sight of important research questions unrelated to COVID. The new situation is bringing some of the researchers to reflect on the role of the scientist in such a context, and the impact they can hope to achieve.

What do the projects need now?

On a practical level, what the projects need to be able to achieve their main objectives is time, and preferably supplementary funding, particularly for the post-doctoral researchers employed on the projects; while the projects have been granted no-cost extensions, it may not be possible for the funders to extend the contracts of the post-docs, leaving both the project and the early career researchers vulnerable at a difficult time. Some feared that the delays in data collection and analysis done by post-docs may now result in unfinished projects, if the post-docs need to leave for economic reasons. Apart from that, the projects called unanimously for more cross-project sharing and discussion on:

Collecting data and working with stakeholders, especially vulnerable communities, in the context of COVID-19
Understandings or models of transformation and sustainability and how to measure them, particularly in the context of COVID-19
Understandings of other concepts such as ‘development’, ‘Global South’, etc.

The main suggestions as to how to accomplish the desired exchange were through:

Shared document for methods, practices, what worked, etc.
Repository of literature on digital research and engagement methods and tools
A joint publication on experiences with digital interviews/research methods
Providing research data to open data repositories

Anticipating the challenges

The challenges the project members see ahead are multiple. They include the changing priorities of the communities they want to work with and the looming impossibility of working with remote or vulnerable communities in the future. How can such communities be empowered to engage in research in such circumstances? What ethical questions arise, in view of the imbalance of resources available to researchers in the Global North and research participants in the Global South? The needs and challenges were also seen as opportunities: to better understand the relationship between COVID-19, transformation and sustainability and to envision what ‘post-COVID’ might look like; to harness and advance digital technologies for engaged, co-produced research for transformations; to address the vulnerabilities mirrored and reinforced by COVID. Adding to other calls for transdisciplinary research funding to be longer term and more flexible than for more conventional research, the project members recommended, somewhat unsurprisingly, that funders make funding available for follow-up research. Above all, what is needed from project members and programme coordinators as the projects head into their final 18 months is patience, empathy and good communication.

Is your scientific information newsworthy?

There are 6 principles to determine whether the scientific information is newsworthy or not for wider public:

Impact: No. of people it is impacting
Novelty: Something that is never heard/seen before
Prominence: Related to a famous personality/institution./people
Controversy: Disagreements between two school of thoughts/ideas
Proximity: Related to a situation, place or person that audience is familiar with
Topicality: Something which is in people’s mind during a given period of time.

Fulfilling these criteria is a first filter that will give you a hint that information is worth packing in an interesting form to deliver it to wider audience.

How to package your scientific information?

Now, there are three key points to take into account while packaging your scientific information in an interesting manner for wider audience:

Humanise the science: Make it a human story. Talk about person, people or a community and how can they be affected by this information.
Relate it to a trending topic: Try to relate your information (and package it as one of the possible solution) to any answered question of dominant topic in mainstream media.
Relate it to people’s most pressing need: Identify key things that people care about and show the editors in 1-2 sentences how your research finding is interesting, important and urgent and addresses their pressing need.

Keeping these points in mind will give a structured approach and confidence to early career researchers to start communicating their research findings to wider audience and make it useful for the society.

By Sarah Nash and Caroline Zickgraf via the MISTY project blog.

Beating the anti-immigrant drum does nothing to help climate action.

Grace, a refugee from South Sudan (Wikimedia Commons).

Exaggerated predictions for future flows of people have long formed the core of the anti-immigration playbook. When you add the impacts of climate change to the equation, the numbers skyrocket.

Experts agree there is a relationship between climate change and human mobility. As early as 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s principal scientific body on climate change, deemed mass migration a key risk associated with rising global temperatures. Since then, scientists have amassed an impressive amount of diverse data and complex knowledge on how impacts of climate change, from sea-level rise to drought and desertification, can affect the ways people move. Yet, above all else, people want headline numbers. The future scale of displacement is seen to give weight to the issue.

Predictions of how many people will be displaced in the future by climate change are what continually gain traction in the media, and, therefore, grab public attention. Over the past three decades, several reports have offered up predictions for how many people will be forced to move, typically delivering a figure in the hundreds of millions. More often than not – and much to the chagrin of experts on the topic – the predictions are little more than guesstimates motivated by the goal of shocking people into climate action. Scientific rigour takes a back seat.

Those of us who have made careers in the academic nuance of climate change and human mobility tend to work hard not to auction our expertise to media outlets desperate to peddle people who move as a homogenous bloc to be feared. And yet our careers tend to be punctuated by the frustration foisted on us by these high profile reports – often from well-meaning environmentalists – being picked up by the press, and transformed into yet more scare stories about ‘immigrants’ to the West.

The latest, published in the Institute for Economics and Peace’s ‘Ecological Threat Register 2020’, claims that a staggering 1.2 billion people could and indeed will be displaced due to “ecological threats” by 2050. Major news outlets like t he Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, Reuters and CNN have all run stories on the 1.2 billion people to be displaced by the climate crisis, without ever stopping to question the number. In fact, the report’s conclusions have been uncritically reproduced practically across the board despite significant flaws.

Far from anything resembling credible science, the 1.2 billion figure is arrived at through manipulation and misrepresentation of data that might as well have been worked out on the back of an envelope. This discredits both the data that the report misuses and the work of reputable modellers who are developing robust, albeit less sensationalist, predictions.

Within the report a graph depicts the global displacement trajectory: a line climbs swiftly and steadily from some 20 million displaced in 2008 to 1.2 billion in 2050. This is no accident: the report blatantly misuses statistics on annual, new internal displacement from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) to paint an exaggeratedly alarming picture. If we look back at how recent years are presented in the graph, the trick is cumulative. IDMC estimates that 46 million people are currently displaced within their own country. The report places displacements in 2019 closer to the 400 million mark.

What the report has done is add together each year’s figures for annual new displacements, treating each year’s figures as a building block to be stacked upon the rest. This means that what we are seeing is not the number of people displaced from their homes in or by any given year, but a sum of annual new displacements since 2008. Moreover, it includes new displacements regardless of whether they were caused by natural disaster or by conflict, increasing the projection even more.

With contemporary data already skewed, the future prognosis cannot be anything but fiction.

A threat to Europe

Another central tenet of research on climate change and human mobility – that the majority of people forced to leave their homes stay in their home country – is also conveniently brushed aside. Although the authors only consider internal displacement statistics in their calculation, they emphasise the adverse effects that huge numbers of migrants and refugees will have on developed regions, in particular Europe. It is presented so as to spark fear of a dystopian world in which the Global North is overrun by people fleeing the Global South, bringing with them chaos, conflict, and destabilising (largely White) democracies.

The Institute for Economics and Peace claims that while Europe has higher capacity to cope with ecological threats, it will not be ‘immune’ from flows of refugees (an interesting choice of words in the midst of a global pandemic). It warns that 1.2 billion people on the move will “cause considerable unrest and shift political systems” in Europe, calling upon the so-called ‘European migrant crisis’ beginning in the second half of 2015 as a harbinger.

In an ironic twist, the report blames the arrival of 2 million Syrians and Iraqis for a rise in populism in Europe, fuelling “the rise of new political parties, increased hostilities to immigrants and heightened political instability”. This is a clear example of blaming the discriminated for their discrimination rather than broaching the uncomfortable reality of socially entrenched racism and xenophobia.

Often, we see populists and right-wing political parties espousing this constructed immigrant threat, blaming people from the Global South for stretched welfare states and health systems in the global North, presenting them as a danger to existing belief systems and values and as a potential source of terrorism and gender-based violence. This kind of xenophobic rhetoric is easy to spot. But sometimes a wolf is dressed in ‘liberal’ and ‘scientific’ clothing. Reports such as the Ecological Threat Register may take a subtler tone, but they are playing off of and feeding into these fears.

And that is the crux of such reports: it’s not the changes in climate and the floods, heatwaves, extreme weather events, droughts and forest fires that are to be feared. The object of fear is the ‘Other’, people forced to flee their homes as a result of these changes who travel to ‘our’ shores. Despite summer heatwaves in cities across Europe and associated mortality, wildfires in the United States that have reduced entire communities to ashes, and recurring floods affecting the same communities again and again, the Global North is more scared of boats of people traversing the Mediterranean Sea, of people clandestinely moving across its land borders, and scaling walls built to keep them out. In this worldview, the ecological threat isn’t ecological at all – it’s human.

Strengthening the fortress

Of course not every articulation of displacement in the context of climate change has a malicious background. Environmental activists and humanitarians, too, draw upon these predictions as leverage to agitate for more action to counter climate change: Swedish activist Greta Thunberg tweeted this report’s figures to urge us to #facetheclimateemergency. However, contrary to their well-meaning aims, there is no evidence that concerns for displaced people lead concerted climate action.

What such misleading predictions do achieve is the entrenchment of anti-immigrant sentiments that seep into policy frameworks and are subsequently difficult to change. We call for climate action, but get anti-immigrant action. For Europe, this is translating into the strengthening of the European Border Agency FRONTEX, financially propping up camps to house the displaced in border regions, tying development assistance to a willingness to block migration routes, and even information campaigns to dissuade people from pursuing a new life in Europe.

And this is why we are so concerned about this report, and the narrative that comes with it. It provides fuel to the anti-immigrant fire; fuel that has been given a veneer of scientific rigour and can be used to argue for ever more restrictive immigration policy. It centres a European gaze on displacement, reducing the tragedy of people being displaced to a dehumanised question of scale and using them as another rhetorical weapon in the climate debate. We are talking about people’s lives. And if this is not the starting point of every conversation on climate change and displacement, then we are doing something wrong.

By Sonja Fransen & Beatriz Cardoso Fernandes, UNU-MERIT, with Dominique Jolivet, University of Amsterdam (MISTY project). This article was shared as part of a United Nations University Migration Network series that explores the interrelations and acute challenges of migration, climate change, and COVID-19.

Can the global health pandemic provide a ‘window of opportunity’ to change the way we think about sustainability? A new study by researchers from the Migration, Transformation and Sustainability (MISTY). project and UNU-MERIT finds that for almost a quarter of Amsterdam residents surveyed, the coronavirus has increased their interest in sustainability.

On 17 March 2020, the Mayor of Amsterdam announced new measures to contain the coronavirus, including the closure of schools, restaurants, and cultural venues. In July 2020, researchers from the Migration, Transformation and Sustainability (MISTY) project sent an online survey to members of the Amsterdam City Research Panel asking them what impact the coronavirus crisis was having on their lives, set against the broader backdrop of sustainability (understood here in terms of social, economic, and environmental sustainability). Members of the Amsterdam City Research panel are ‘Amsterdammers’ who regularly participate in different online surveys about varying subjects related to the city. Our sample included 1,381 individuals, of whom 20% are migrants, 53% are Dutch-born with parents also born in the Netherlands, and 24% are Dutch-born with parents born abroad. The majority of the sample is highly educated, in a rather comfortable economic situation, and aged between 35 and 64 (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Profile for majority of survey respondents. Source: MISTY Project

We first asked how the COVID-19 crisis had impacted respondents’ health, income, and social lives. Four months after the initial outbreak, almost 60% were feeling the negative effects of the pandemic in at least one of these dimensions — more than 16% had experienced negative effects on their health and almost 21% on their household incomes. COVID-19 restrictions hit their social lives in particular — 43% declared a worsening of social contacts. This confirms recent studies on the impact of the various COVID-19 measures on subjective well-being and social isolation of individuals. International migrants and second-generation migrants were the most affected in Amsterdam (Figure 2). Apart from these negative effects, there were some positive impacts: 12% of respondents reported that social contact with neighbours had improved, while 8% said that they appreciated the natural environment in their neighbourhoods more during the COVID-19 crisis.

Figure 2: Number of respondents reporting negative impacts of COVID-19 pandemic. Source: MISTY Project

Can a global health crisis affect our attitudes towards sustainability?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity for researchers to study how a global health crisis affects the way people think about sustainability issues. Academic literature shows that attitudes are not stable over time. They are dependent on one’s social environment — and a change in this environment can change the way individuals think about certain social issues. In fact, major ‘shocks’ can profoundly change individual attitudes.

In our study, almost 24% of Amsterdammers reported more interest in sustainability issues compared to the start of the pandemic. When asked why, many respondents said that the pandemic had been a ‘wake-up call’, prompting the realisation that we, as global citizens, should take better care of the environment and each other:

“The crisis makes obvious both some of the ways in which our way of life is not sustainable, and the capacity we have to adapt quickly to a new environment with increased constraints.” (Male, 31 years old, first-generation migrant)

“The coronavirus has exposed in a painful way that a limit has been reached with what the earth can handle from humanity.” (Male, 52 years old, second-generation migrant)

Some individuals also mentioned that simply spending more time at home gave them more time to think about ‘larger’ societal questions such as pollution, overconsumption, and social ties in their neighbourhoods and city. Contrary to our expectations, those who were more affected by the pandemic (socially or economically) were not more likely to become more concerned with sustainability issues. Instead, higher educated individuals and those with migration backgrounds reported increasing awareness of sustainability issues. Moreover, the neighbourhoods in which people resided played a big role as well. For example, individuals residing in the centre of Amsterdam expressed more concerns compared with those living in the suburbs. Further research on this topic will have to show why this is the case.

A turning point in our views on sustainability?

Apart from expressing their fears and concerns, many Amsterdam residents also articulated their hopes that this crisis would create a turning point in our thinking on sustainability at local, national, and global levels. Whether the global health pandemic will support lasting transformations to sustainability remains to be seen. Despite reporting increasing awareness of the importance of leading sustainable lives, few respondents (on average between 5-10%) reported changing their actual behaviour since March 2020 in terms of consumption, energy use, or recycling. This shows that changing attitudes do not necessarily translate into action.

This article was first posted here as part of a United Nations University Migration Network series that explores the interrelations and acute challenges of migration, climate change, and COVID-19. As a build-up to International Migrants Day on 18 December 2020, the series examines these connections at local and global levels, highlights impacts on migrants, and provides evidence-based insights for United Nations member states, governments, and policymakers.

Lalatendu Keshari Das, reflects on the POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 2020 conference, which took place virtually earlier this year.

The organisation of the 2020 POLLEN conference on Contested Natures: Power, Possibility and Prefiguration came at a time of increased uncertainties and vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only forced all of us to adapt to a ‘new normal’, but has also posed important questions for researchers like us, who engage in long-term field-work-based community studies. Within the framework of the conference, in addition to the two panel discussions presented by the Transformation as Praxis: Exploring Socially Just and Transdisciplinary Pathways to Sustainability in Marginalised Environments (TAPESTRY) project, what interested me were the subtle discussions on ethics in research, particularly at a time of restricted mobility and physical distancing.

At the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, the term ‘social distancing’ came to prominence, when governments worldwide, notwithstanding their ideological differences, imposed restrictions on travel and get-togethers under the pretext of halting the forward march of the virus. ‘Social distancing’ became a way to describe this situation. However, in a country like India with its history of caste, class and religion based segregations, the term social distancing has always been used for pushing the marginalised groups to the margins. This became doubly troublesome during the pandemic, as our research participants at the Versova Koliwada, an urban fishing village, in Mumbai were not only restricted from visiting their fishing sites, but also barred from going to urban centres in the city for work. At a time when the immediate needs of the communities were at stake, convincing them about the importance of long-term sustainability goals seemed like a joke, in the first instance.

But it was no comedy. With the prolongation of the lockdowns, it dawned upon both the fishing communities and the researchers alike that COVID-19 was only one uncertainty in a number of uncertainties faced by people on the social, political, economic and ecological margins. These are also the groups who have been pushed further to the margins, both politically and economically, by the real estate, infrastructure development and financial capital-induced expansion of the city. As recent studies have shown, the city of Mumbai is one of the coastal cities in the world that’s most vulnerable to sea level rise, tropical cyclones, and consequent floods (MFF 2008: 48). It also ranks second in the world in terms of population exposure to natural hazards with low adaptive capacity.

The fear of the pandemic is real and here to stay. At the same time, the marginalisation of women fishers from the fishing economy, the increased pollution of the creeks and destruction of mangroves in Mumbai, the emerging class divisions within the fishing community (with households in salaried employment sufficiently well cushioned to withstand uncertainties over the medium term) is posing challenges to the TAPESTRY team to canvass carefully with the community in question. This is because both the community and the researchers have become well aware that COVID-19 pandemic and its fallouts are only a symptom of a bigger malice: The situation in which our development models have time and again failed to acknowledge the syncretic nature of the production of knowledge. The pandemic gives an opportunity to rethink sustainability as a political process, and to bring both the local communities and experts from outside together to articulate development and sustainability as two strands of one braid.

Lalatendu Keshari Das is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, located in the Himalayan province of Uttarakhand, India. Lalatendu’s work articulates three debates- Marxist debate on capitalist development, political subjectivity, and ecology. Through this, Lalatendu tries to understand issues pertaining to social movements, agrarian change, fisheries, and social and environmental justice. He can be reached at lkdas@hs.iitr.ac.in.

Heading photo: urbzoo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Rucha Deshmukh and Dhaval Joshi share reflections on the POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 2020 conference, which took place virtually earlier this year.

India is poised for a second green revolution. In this context, it is important to revisit and reflect on India’s first Green Revolution, which began in the early 1970s. The popular narrative of ‘green revolution’ typically suggests that food security was enhanced, and that it led to improved incomes and better livelihoods for millions of farming households, at the same time as ushering in an era of ‘scientific’ agriculture in the country. With this backdrop, it was interesting to attend a session on Green Revolution Epic Narratives at the POLLEN Conference. The session explored how these narratives have been shaped and re-shaped, disseminated and constructed by various actors, but most importantly by the state across three countries — Brazil, China and India.

The Green Revolution changed the agricultural scene in India. The transition from traditional agriculture and irrigation systems to high-yielding seed varieties, use of fertilizers and pesticides, and increased water input led a shift towards ‘modern’ agriculture. But how was this transformation narrated? During the POLLEN conference we heard how this story was told through a series of stamps, which were presented by Dr. Poonam Pandey, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science. We learnt how the nation perceived the idea of food security and what measures were taken to fulfil the notion of a food-secure country in their imaginations.

What does the science of modern agriculture as imbued in the Green Revolution entail, and how is it communicated? There are various avenues for the state to further its agenda. Out of the many spaces, Dr. Pandey has documented how the Indian state used stamps to construct this narrative. We often miss out on the state machinery and its use of visual symbols to depict a story – in this case, through stamps. Stamps were commonly used by people from all regions and groups, providing a good opportunity for the state to disseminate the narrative. During the Green Revolution this was done through stamps depicting a fertilizer plant, tractor, irrigation mode (bullock-based groundwater irrigation) and the inauguration of the Damodar Dam, when the then Prime Minister Nehru proclaimed ‘dams as temples of modern India’. Collectively these stamps constructed the narrative that highlighted the shifts and priorities of Indian agricultural policy at the time.

The concept of Green Revolution is powerful and it remains strong in people’s memories. It is mainly remembered for the mixed impact it had on the people: on one hand it elevated the socio-economic condition of the farmers by exposing them to the opportunities to increase their production, and on the other hand, the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers and increased groundwater abstraction degraded the condition of soil and water. This environmental degradation was exacerbated by fertilizer, pesticide and energy subsidies, and a limited focus on water management, which has since led to problems of groundwater depletion and degradation of soil quality. It should not come as a surprise that not a single stamp depicts any of the groundwater sources that are today recognized as important factor that heralded the revolution. This shows the contested nature of Green Revolution: it promised food security at the same time as putting at risk the sustainability of the resources that formed its basis. Alternative farming and agricultural production methods such as organic farming and chemical-free natural farming, also known as Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), have emerged in response to these problems. They are demonstrating alternatives to the long-term problems associated with the approach of the Green Revolution.

Today a second green revolution is being promoted, based around the narrative that the first Green Revolution was aimed at production on mass scale, while the second green revolution is about production by the masses. However, the question of managing a common pool resource like groundwater, and the need to focus on soil health, are not considered in their totality in the discussions of a second green revolution. Epic narratives may not necessarily help us build epic solutions. Understanding who is constructing, dictating and furthering a narrative is critical if sustainable transformations are sought for the future.

This blogpost documents the thoughts and opinions of Rucha Deshmukh and Dhaval Joshi, who work as researchers with Advanced Center for Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM), India. Presently, Rucha Deshmukh is pursuing her Masters in Water Science and Policy from Shiv Nadar University and Dhaval Joshi is pursuing his PhD in Human Geography at School of Geosciences from University of Edinburgh.

Propos recueillis par Roger Calmé [Interview by Roger Calmé]
Photos: C. Sawadogo

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