Plain Language Summary
The Plain Language Summary below was written in The People in Nature blog. Click here to access to full Plain Language Summary.
"People from different walks of life need to work together if we are to understand and find fair and long-term solutions to the complex sustainability challenges the world faces today. Specifically, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have deep knowledge of their environment and local context, including ways of ‘being and doing’ that have been poorly recognised or neglected in sustainability research, which still leans towards a predominance of western knowledge and thinking.
To address this imbalance, we worked with a group of international researchers, practitioners, and community collaborators from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and South Africa to co-design a set of principles to guide how sustainability researchers can work better with Indigenous and local knowledge holders. The process comprised a facilitated series of in-person and online workshops over a four-year period, involving open discussion, learning from examples and experience, collective reflection, and refinement.
The seven principles for working together that we agreed on include: 1) honour self-determination and nationhood; 2) commit to reciprocal relationships; 3) co-create the research agenda; 4) approach research in a good way: embed relational accountability; 5) generate meaningful benefits for communities; 6) build in equity, diversity, and inclusion; and 7) emphasize critical reflection and shared learning. In the paper, we explain each of these principles. We also highlight how they can be applied to cultivate safe and ethical spaces for learning and producing knowledge together.
We hope that by sharing these principles and associated practices, we engender more sensitive, collaborative, and ethical sustainability research, particularly in intercultural settings." (The People in Nature Blog, 2023).
Guiding Principles for Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research and Practice (2023) is an open-access paper that can be viewed here and downloaded here. This article was featured in the Higher Ed Top Ten, which links to a story in Nature highlighting the importance of restructuring the approach to Global North-Global South research collaborations.