Are sustainability transitions as straightforward and faster as any other technological transitions in the past? Can we solve the critical problems of climate change and social sustainability through mere technological interventions? What role do the social science and humanities play in the acceleration of sustainability transitions?
The session on critical social science perspectives on transformations to sustainability on 14 June 2021 will discuss some of these vital questions by engaging with six out of twelve research teams from the Belmont Forum–NORFACE Transformations to Sustainability Programme.
The discussion will highlight the need to integrate the scientific facts with critical social, cultural, political, and economic fabric and co-design and co-produce knowledge with critical stakeholders of sustainability transitions. Such integration can enable more democratic engagement in the transition process.
The speakers of the session will provide a rich collection of collaborative approaches adopted to understand complex social phenomena and issues related to mining (GOLD MATTERS), urban water dynamics (H2O-T2S), intellectual property (IPACST), forest management (AGENTS), wildlife conservation (CON-VIVA), and energy systems (GoST).
The discussants will bring to the table that sustainable technological solutions can quickly become debt for marginal communities if deployed in isolation, without understanding their nexus with appropriate financing, training, infrastructure, land features, and other social and environmental issues with it.
Taking learnings from the IPACST project, I will highlight that sustainable technological solutions are coupled with intellectual property rights (IPRs) issues. IPRs provide an economic stimulus to inventors but sometimes contradict open innovation and decentralization. Thus, they may sometimes restrict technological diffusion. I will emphasize the need to relook at the current IP strategies adopted for sustainable technologies by technology providers to facilitate a systematic shift in the production-consumption system.
Finally, the session will bring together critical insights from collaborative projects emphasizing the need for long-term “human” and interdisciplinary solutions to transformations to sustainability perspective.
Stories help us understand others and ourselves. They unite us by forging connections and conveying shared values, culture and history. In other words, they provide meaning to our collective life. From childhood tales to political discourses embodying our hopes and fears for the future, narratives underpin every human life.
It’s no wonder that we need narratives for our societies, nor that doctrines use the power of narratives to dominate them. The problem we face today is that we can’t seem to move past a narrative that has been told for 40 years. Of course, reducing everything to narratives would be naïve, but neither can we underestimate their influence. Indeed, the neoliberal discourse still dominates, though it has shown us time and again its considerable flaws. Its model for growth has been revealed to be unsustainable by its dependence on overexploiting resources and degrading the natural environment, and by growing inequalities within societies and throughout the world.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we’re all interconnected, humans to other humans, humans to the natural world, humans to animals, and so on. It raises the very serious question of how to ensure a sustainable future, if only we cease disturbing the natural balances of our world. And so, in light of the crisis, couldn’t we imagine a different future, where our economies and societies have internalized the lessons of the pandemic? What if we could come out of the COVID-19 crisis with a new vision for our societies?
We’ve certainly learned the importance of public health, but we’re also reminded that we must protect our shared home. If we constantly and ruthlessly exploit our planet to quench the unquenchable thirst of a small segment of our population, we will face dire consequences. This pandemic is just one example of how unsustainable methods affect the whole of humanity.
So, the question must be asked; are we stuck in the broken narrative of neoliberalism? As George Monbiot points out in a TED conference, discredited stories are usually replaced by new stories. Yet, the neoliberal narrative shows resilience.
As the latest Transformations to Sustainability knowledge brief shows, perhaps we’re not completely stuck in this failed narrative, it’s rather that no strong alternative narrative has emerged to challenge the old one. We need a new compelling sustainability narrative to replace our failing model. With a new narrative, we can envision a transformation of our economies, technologies, institutions, but also our human values and cultural norms.
The brief – and the peer reviewed paper on which it’s based – asks whether common ground between narratives on sustainability could create a powerful alternative narrative to challenge the dominance of the neoliberal capitalist discourse. This question is asked at an opportune time, as old stories are losing their grip, but new ones have yet to emerge.
The difficulty with today’s sustainability discourses is that they share very similar endpoints but disagree on the road we must take to achieve them. The inherent contradictions between approaches, such as neoliberalist reformism on one end and radical social change on the other, are illustrated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that embrace social justice, human wellbeing and ecological integrity while committing to continued economic growth.
Nonetheless, the brief identifies common ground between alternative sustainability narratives: ‘a view of the world as made up of systems and networks; a relationship with nature that is sustainable, regenerative and planet-centric; human interdependence and cooperation; the goals of human wellbeing, justice and plurality; and agreement on the value of participatory governance, a new economic system, prioritizing different human values and participatory knowledge practices as potential strategies for transformation’.
It then rounds up the common ground in five memes* – or key elements for a new narrative – that can be researched and articulated to form a shared sustainability narrative: worldviews, the human relationship with nature, human relationships with each other, the goals of transformation and strategies to achieve transformation. Could they be the building blocks of a storyline that would mobilize a discourse coalition to challenge neoliberalism? For now, it seems the common ground is significant enough to offer hope for developing a new shared narrative, enabling us to guide the transformation to a more sustainable future.
* the building block of a narrative or discourse; a replicable idea that can be transmitted. (not an internet meme).
James Waddell is currently undertaking an internship with the International Science Council. James is a Sciences Po School of Public Affairs Master’s student, majoring in Energy, Environment & Sustainability. During his studies he has acquired a rich background in social sciences, public policy and environmental policy. With his passion for these fields, he has imagined working for an organization with a “public purpose” for a long time. He is glad to finally put his knowledge to good use at the ISC, mainly through his support of the COVID-19 Scenarios Project, the Bouncing Forward Sustainability project, providing French content for the website, and providing assistance for other long-term projects.
Header image: L. Brideau via Flickr.
Illegally working with pans and mercury for a gram of gold? The international research programme Gold Matters adjusts and nuances this one-sided view policymakers have of small-scale gold miners. The programme focuses on conversations with the gold miners themselves: how do they see their future? This focus can lead to new perspectives on sustainability and ways of working. ‘Amazement is very productive.’
New insights come up when cultural anthropologists Sabine Luning, Marjo de Theije and Esther van de Camp talk about the gold miners they met in various African and South American countries. The typical neoliberal, large-scale gold mining in Africa and South America might be the dominant form of mining, but there are also at least sixteen million people worldwide who depend on small-scale gold mining. It is therefore hardly surprising that some researchers have specialised in the study of this way of life.
From panning to excavators
Or rather: ways of life. Gold miners in the rainforest of Suriname or Brazil work very differently from those in Ghana, Burkina Faso or Uganda. In the Sahel countries, there is often a lack of water to work with, whereas in the Amazon countries excavated pits often flood. Sabine Luning from Leiden University: ‘The conditions and techniques vary considerably, from panning for gold in creeks to using gigantic water hoses, or even excavators that open up the land to find gold ore that is subsequently grinded and processed into gold.’
The researchers and miners jointly map the landscape and the mines to discuss, for example, what the land could look like in the future. That leads to new ideas about sustainability.
Because large mining companies pay taxes and are checked for compliance with environmental rules, they have a better reputation with the IMF and the World Bank than small-scale gold miners. The latter often have a poor reputation, says Luning. ‘Governments frequently view small-scale gold miners as criminals, who work without the required permits and cause environmental damage. For example, the fact that mercury ends up in the food chain is definitely a problem. However, there are considerable differences in working methods. In Burkina Faso, for example, the government now recognises that large-scale, transnational mining excludes its own citizens too much.’
Aim of this research
In the research programme Gold Matters, nineteen researchers from countries including the Netherlands, Brazil, Burkina Faso, the United Kingdom and Sweden are collaborating with gold miners and artists in a transdisciplinary manner. The aim: visualising how mining takes place in the landscape and how that will influence the future of people and the natural environment.
Luning: ‘In January 2020, we jointly organised the first pop-up exhibition in a Ghanaian mining community.’
Exhibitions in mining communities form the heart of the research programme. The researchers collaborate with gold miners and artists in creating these exhibitions.
“Policymakers often talk about these people rather than engaging in dialogues with them”
Sabine Luning
Such exhibitions lie at the heart of the research programme. The researchers want to inspire, for instance, miners in Brazil by showing them images of and stories from miners in Uganda. ‘Amazement is very productive,’ confirms Luning’s colleague Marjo de Theije, professor at VU Amsterdam. ‘One time I spent spent hours talking with Ghanaian gold miners about fifteen photos from Brazil because they had so many questions about these! For example, they saw the possibilities an excavator provides. The conversation was so rich! Even though they may live on the other side of the world, gold miners have something in common; they understand each other.’
Soya or gold…
The researchers also aim to reach out to policymakers through their exhibitions. Luning: ‘They often talk about these people rather than engaging in dialogues with them. Too often policy makers suffer from tunnel vision but do base their policy on this. They can make life more difficult for the gold miners, which is hard to justify.’ De Theije: ‘Gold miners in the Brazilian Amazon say: “People consider an undulating soya field beautiful. Yet far more trees need to be chopped down for that than for our work. We have no other possibilities. Either we do this work, or we become thugs”.
…Women or grinding mills
Burkina Faso and Ghana are two of the locations where Luning worked. ‘In the south of Ghana, gold miners use more technologies to process ore than in the north of the country and in Burkina Faso. Here, the grinding of the ore is not done by women but by grinding mills. Such technological innovation also causes tensions because the women loose the income they used to gain by grinding the ore.’ This is what the women and gold miners discussed with each other during a workshop: how do you balance income and health, what are the alternatives and who determines the ultimate direction of changes?
The gold miners decided to photograph their work for a wider public. Instead of in an exhibition, these photos will now first be shared online.
Another way of initiating important conversations is to jointly map the landscape and the mines. Luning: ‘We walk through the landscape together and discuss its characteristics, how different mining teams operate next to each other, but could also increase collaboration e.g. by jointly tackling water problems. We talk about what the land could look like in the future. That can lead to new ideas about sustainability.’
For her research, De Theije also visited various countries, including the rainforests of Suriname and Brazil. ‘Gold prospecting has a long tradition in the Amazon area. Men move through the forest from one gold site to another. If they are successful, then entire families join them, and lively communities can arise with shops, dance halls and cafes. Once the gold runs out, then all of that disappears again.’
Seventy family members
In Suriname, De Theije once met a single mother from Brazil. ‘She had saved some money during her work as a cook in a mine and had started a little cafe. She maintained good relations with the gold miners. If they needed a good tractor driver, then she knew how to bring them into contact with somebody. In the end, some seventy family members of this woman were working in Suriname!’
In Suriname, the work has changed and they now use excavators instead of spades.
De Theije witnessed the changes in work methods that occurred in Suriname. ‘Fifteen years ago, men dug a hole with a spade. Now they no longer do that, but use an excavator instead. That became profitable when the gold price surged and the oil price fell. It is fascinating to see how accurately they calculate the grams of gold which must be found for using one barrel of diesel, the price of which can amount to twenty grams of gold, for example.’
COVID-19: a major setback
The researchers wanted to spread all of that knowledge and those stories among miners and policymakers, but the coronavirus crisis has seriously disrupted their plans. A case in point is Esther van de Camp, a PhD student from Leiden University, who had just initiated a new initiative when she was obliged to return home in March 2020 due to the corona crisis. ‘Gold miners were going to take photos of their work using second-hand cameras, and we were going to jointly create an exhibition for the local government and the many NGOs active there. The exhibition would also include photos from Brazil and Ghana as well.’
The researchers are now thinking of other, online ways of sharing their insightful and inspiring findings with gold miners and policymakers. That is a considerable task, but there is another challenge which should be mentioned. Van de Camp was fortunate: in total, she managed to do more than five months of field research in Uganda. During that time, she built up a good network and obtained a lot of information. However, her supervisor Luning observes that not all young researchers were so lucky. ‘Some PhDs and postdocs have not been able to complete their fieldwork and have to come up with a plan B with (too) little research material. The COVID crisis is a real disaster for young researchers who still need to build up their career and are now working at home, sometimes with young families.’
Did you know? What should you look out for if you want to buy gold jewellery? Marjo de Theije, who wears beautiful earrings during the interview: ‘Many different standards have been developed for ethical, fair trade or fair mined gold for which people are better paid. The extra income generated is also used to help the community of mineworkers adopt cleaner technologies or establish a school, for example.’ In the Netherlands, Solidaridad is taking active steps to integrate social and ecological sustainability in the gold covenant between companies, governments and civil society organisations. On the producers’ side, they are working on improving the conditions in goldmines.
Photos: Nii Obodai & Sabine Luning.
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.
New beginnings for Gold Matters
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!
Our 2018 launch meeting
Nii Obodai photographing the Team
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)”.
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.
Marjo de Theije and a Ghanaian miner discussing mining in Brazil and Ghana.
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.
Nfaly, Cristiano and Luigi sitting near the mine shafts speaking to miners and local villagers.
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.
Christophe’s painting of a woman carrying mine tailings
Creating the picture
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.
Viewing artworks
Christophe sharing ideas at the Global Earth Matters workshop
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).
The pop-up celebration
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.
Our mid-term workshop over Zoom
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.
Related links
See the feedback from T2S researchers in answer to the question: What have been the most surprising, challenging or positive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on your research or work?
See the feedback submitted in answer to the question: What new needs, challenges or opportunities are opening up for research on transformations to sustainability in 2021?
The following preprint is an interesting, systematic study of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on collaborative (transdisciplinary) research: Arnott, James and Russell, Patrice and Bath, Sean and Bednarek, Angela and Combest-Friedman, Chelsea and Fisher, Leah and George, Douglas and Hudson, Charlotte and Maillard, Lisa and Moser, Susanne and Read, Jennifer and Seiztzinger, Sybil and Soberal, Nicholas and Teicher, Hannah and Zycherman, Ariela, Collaborative Research in a Virtual World: Implications of COVID-19 for the Co-Production of Environmental Knowledge and Solutions (December 24, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3755008 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3755008
Image courtesy of Svenja Prigge, Young Entrepreneurs in Science/Falling Walls Foundation.
The above image published as a an Entrepreneurship Tip by Young Entrepreuners in Science, a program of the Falling Wall Foundations captures not only a commonality between the research process and a startup process, but above all, it encapsulates the essence of inquisitive minds.
As a society, we ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. It is the ideas of those preceding our society that allow us to invent and innovate. Without innovation, we would not be able to enjoy the advantages of our everyday life. It is the high level of industrial development that encourages us to ask for a better and sustainable world. But sustainability could not be achieved without improving humans, the main source of ideas and innovation. Only inquisitive minds that embrace ethics, human values, and high integrity as guided by the UN Declaration of Human Rights can change our world for the better.
The IPACST project, indeed, is inspired by these values in trying to yield research results with companies that embrace sustainability principles.
Many thanks to Hanna Lange, Svenja Prigge, and Miett Xylander for proposing an interview with Viola, IPACST team member in Berlin. The interview will be published on the platform of Young Entrepreneurs in Science/Falling Walls Foundation.
Knowledge dissemination is a crucial part of scientific research. Early career researchers get trained (formally or informally) during their research journey to publish their research finding in scientific journals.
In scientific publications, we have the luxury of using specific technical jargon, dry scientific language and even explaining each and every detail of our research methodology. However, communicating the same to mainstream media in a language which is appealing to wider population from a diverse background is a different ball game and can be a real challenge. Early career researchers face constant struggle to communicate their findings and scientific information to policy audience and general public. This becomes even more difficult when they try to tell the world, “see – how hard have I worked, care and cautions have I taken to get these reliable results.”
To get some useful tips and initial hand holding on how to address this challenge, IPACST postdoc researchers attended “Media Skills Training for Early Career Transformations to Sustainability Researchers” conducted by The International Science Council in partnership with SciDev.Net. on 24 Nov 2020. Objective of this training was to give early career researchers the skills and confidence to reach policy audiences and the wider public with their research findings through the media.
The training was structured in two parts: (1) an online short self-paced course to help researchers understand how to make scientific information interesting to readers, audience and viewers. (2) A condensed webinar to interactively discuss problems and challenges faced by early career researchers in communicating their research and to give them useful tips to solve them. The trainer, Dr Charles Wendo, shared some useful and crucial tips to make the scientific information interesting to mass media. Here are key take-away to help fellow researchers to capture key-points:
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.
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 the 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.
