Alternative approaches to co-design: insights from indigenous/academic research collaborations

Highlights

• We review recent scholarship about indigenous knowledge and global environmental change.

• Research with indigenous communities requires respectful research partnerships.

• Co-design with indigenous partners can enable inclusive approaches to transformation.

• Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies enrich global environmental change studies.

The impacts of global environmental change create new challenges and opportunities for indigenous peoples worldwide. Yet, there remains limited recognition that indigenous knowledge frameworks could (and should) influence the processes and outcomes of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This paper presents insights relating to indigenous issues in a global environmental change context from two workshops, which were held in Brisbane, Australia, and Umeå, Sweden. These workshops were attended by more than 30 indigenous and non-indigenous researchers, natural resource managers, policy-makers, and representatives from government and non-governmental organizations from across Asia, Oceania, and Scandinavia. This paper builds on workshop participants’ insights and illuminates key components of the process of co-creation of knowledges for and with indigenous communities, and describes some of the main challenges to, and opportunities for, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural knowledge production. We argue that indigenous methodologies offer important lessons for current efforts within global sustainability research to integrate different knowledges and design and conduct research in culturally and ethical respectful manner.

Introduction

Over the last two decades a wealth of research exploring indigenous peoples’ experiences and responses to global environmental change has grown.¹ These works typically focus on pertinent environmental issues affecting the lives and livelihoods of indigenous communities at a local or regional level. Yet few studies specifically discuss the ways in which such research is conducted and what can be learnt from indigenous research practices. Indigenous-focused global environmental change research has developed in both scope and depth, as evident in the substantive increase in research publications and international forums [2, 3••]. This development coincides with wider progress in indigenous social science research where an ongoing theme is how indigenous-specific geographies of home, place, environment, and heritage are situated within changing social, cultural, political, and environmental contexts [4, 5, 6, 7•, 8, 9•, 10•]. However, as Ford et al. [11] observe, indigenous peoples’ interests remain at the periphery of international climate change research and agreement making, and there remains limited recognition that indigenous knowledge frameworks could (and should) influence the processes and outcomes of climate change mitigation and adaptation [12••, 13••].

The authors of this paper, indigenous and non-indigenous, organized two workshops in Brisbane, Australia (8–9 December 2014) and Umeå, Sweden (28 January 2015) focused on the process of co-designing a research agenda to accommodate indigenous ontologies and knowledge systems in responding to global environmental change. The themes explored focused on the role of indigenous knowledge, values and contexts in addressing climate change impacts, adaptation and societal transformations. The workshops were very much organized around social interaction: each day began with a short overall presentation of climate adaptation and transformation and rest of the day was organized around small group discussions on selected themes. After discussing a theme in a group setting, each group reported back to the whole group and a general discussion was held as to what the different insights and perspectives meant, and how these could be combined into a workshop report and the proposed project proposal to establish the network. The participants shared in particular their experiences as indigenous academics/practitioners and how they saw their own roles in their own communities. The workshops were attended by more than 30 indigenous and non-indigenous researchers, natural resource managers, policy-makers, and representatives from government and non-governmental organizations from Griffith University, Northern Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Authority (NAILSMA), University of Auckland, Umeå University, Government of Vanuatu, Torres Straits Regional Authority, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), James Cook University, University of Southern Queensland, Waikato University and University of Technology Sydney.

In this paper, we first briefly review indigenous global environmental change research and indigenous research methodologies, point out key gaps in understanding transformation processes in indigenous contexts, and identify important lessons on how to accommodate different conceptualizations of, and knowledge about, the environment and environmental management. Next, we outline some of the key considerations of co-design processes. Last we identify key lessons we learnt from our workshops.