Abstract
Research that features participation and action orientation, such as participatory action research (PAR), is especially valuable in contexts where there is rapid change, high social inequality, and great uncertainty about the future, which drives stakeholder demands for information to support their goals. The Amazon offers such a context, for it is a region where diverse stakeholders engage in contestation over environmental governance to address issues such as climate change to achieve conservation and sustainable development. Stakeholder mobilization has changed the terms by which research is conducted, from the definition of priority topics to the application of findings. Due to stakeholder mobilization, more and more research in the Amazon is now necessarily participatory, for stakeholders routinely issue demands about how the research will be conducted and for what purpose. In this paper, we provide an overview of several experiences of implementing methods such as PAR by different teams or networks, focusing on the complementary contributions of outside researchers and local stakeholders. The heart of the paper reports on three broad types of experiences focusing on conservation and development in the Amazon: (1) participatory data collection for co-production of knowledge for environmental governance, (2) inclusive environmental monitoring systems, and (3) innovative models of knowledge exchange to facilitate collective action. Within each type, we report multiple experiences with distinct approaches to participation and action in research. These experiences constitute models that can be replicated in other places for broader impact to support conservation and development.
Highlights
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight a suite of priorities to harmonize human well-being with environmental conservation [1]
This differentiates trans-disciplinarity from multidisciplinarity, which refers to collaboration among researchers from different disciplines who make contributions according to their respective specialties, and interdisciplinarity, in which researchers from different disciplines work toward a synthesis by integrating their contributions [19]
It is well-known for its diverse stakeholders, ranging from indigenous groups and forest extractivists to small-scale farmers, large-scale ranchers, agribusinesses, fishers, miners, loggers, and others, who often engage in conflicts over natural resources [65,66,67]
Summary
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight a suite of priorities to harmonize human well-being with environmental conservation [1]. In PAR, researchers and stakeholders collaborate across the various stages of the research process, beginning with the joint definition of research priorities and continuing to design, data collection, analysis, dissemination, and application of findings It is stakeholders who define the research focus as related to concrete objectives that serve their strategic goals. One key element in trans-disciplinarity concerns the explicit acknowledgment and incorporation of stakeholder priorities in defining the topics for research. Another concern is with the media to permit dialogue between researchers and stakeholders, in which storytelling (to narrate processes and causation) and visual representations (including images with culturally recognized symbols, infographics, and videos) are often vital tools
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