Abstract
Marine conservation transdisciplinary researchers often get to the field with a previously designed question, often formulated outside the actual geographical, social, cultural and ecological setting in which the research projects are supposed to be anchored. Involving people on the ground in the initial phase of formulating the questions and setting the research agenda is still uncommon. Once in the field, transdisciplinary researchers may or may not have the support of local communities to sample their data, although they will regularly need to count on these same communities if a collaborative regime is to be pursued and informed by the research outcome. This paper discusses measures that can be taken by marine fisheries and marine conservation researchers to improve participation in, and ownership of, the research by local counterparts, most importantly members of the communities where research is being conducted. The data was generated with a purposively sampled survey of 18 members of our research networks. Key proposed measures derived from this data include: (1) build rapport; (2) engage and exchange; (3) be accommodating and attentive; and (4) be respectful. Knowing who is asking the questions and assuring that all stakeholders have a voice in this process becomes especially relevant under extreme circumstances (e.g., disasters, pandemics), when problems are numerous but can only be accessed by those on the ground. We advise for faster progress in transforming academic and funding environments for true “level-playing-field” transdisciplinary and co-designed research projects that can help change top-down research tendencies.
Highlights
Research collaboration is often understood as a partnership between different scientific research groups
With a focus on marine areas and small-scale fishing projects, and examples from Bangladesh, Brazil, Fiji, and India, this paper aims to trigger and re-awaken the much-needed discussion on the potential overlaps between initially funded research questions, and those questions that are relevant for the local stakeholders (e.g., Marijnen et al, 2020)
We propose some preliminary insights on how to improve transdisciplinary research so that it raises the profile of people on the ground (Chakraborty and Kaplan, 2020) so that their research priorities arenational research priorities
Summary
Research collaboration is often understood as a partnership between different scientific research groups. Collaborating improves research quality and diversity (e.g., represented by different geographies), and provides new approaches to problems and different sources of knowledge. These collaborations have increasingly included transdisciplinary research, as the complexity of many societal problems expose the limitations of “traditional” disciplinary approaches. Transdisciplinarity has become part of marine conservation, it still needs to properly integrate both different disciplines and knowledge systems (e.g., Davies et al, 2020; Vierros et al, 2020) This means rethinking transdisciplinary approaches from question framing to interpretation of results (Bracken et al, 2015; Partelow et al, 2019; Davies et al, 2020; Freitas et al, 2020; Wisz et al, 2020)
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