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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Header image: Jorge Calvimontes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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