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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Header photo: Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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