Less emphasis on publishing, more relationship building with Indigenous communities needed
By Geoff Gilliard
From the humid mangrove forests of American Samoa to the cold waters of Canada’s Pacific Coast, two University of British Columbia (UBC) ecologists are taking a page from the anthropology playbook to create research projects with the Indigenous people of these dissimilar ecosystems.
UBC ecologist Dr. Alex Moore and Dr. Fiona Beaty, a marine biologist who earned her PhD at UBC, are using a social sciences method called participatory action research.
The method arose in the mid 20th century, but is still somewhat novel in the natural sciences. It requires building relationships that are mutually beneficial to both parties. Researchers gain by drawing on the knowledge of the people who live among the plants and creatures of a region. Communities benefit by contributing to research that can inform decision-making that affects them, including conservation and restoration efforts in their communities.
Dr. Moore studies predator-prey interactions in coastal ecosystems, with a focus on mangrove forests in the Pacific islands. Mangrove forests are found where the ocean meets the land and are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Dr. Moore’s work incorporates the cultural values and environmental stewardship practices of American Samoa — where over 90 per cent of the land is communally owned.
During her doctoral research at UBC, Dr. Beaty worked with the Squamish First Nation to centre local knowledge in marine planning in Atl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound), a fjord north of Vancouver in the Salish Sea. She is now the science coordinator for the Great Bear Sea Marine Protected Area (MPA) Network Initiative, which is collaboratively governed and led by 17 First Nations partnered with the governments of British Columbia and Canada. The initiative is establishing a network of MPAs that will cover 30 per cent of the 102,000 square kilometres of ocean stretching from the northern end of Vancouver Island to the Alaska border and around Haida Gwaii.
In this conversation, Drs. Moore and Beaty discuss the benefits and challenges of participatory research, along with their thoughts on how it could make greater inroads in academia.
How did you come to adopt participatory research?
Dr. Moore
My training was almost exclusively in ecology and evolution. Participatory research certainly wasn’t a part of it, but it would be false to say that I got here all by myself. When I started doing my PhD looking at coastal salt marshes in New England, I needed access to private land which involved negotiating access. When I was going to people’s houses to get permission to go into their backyards to set up experimental plots, I found that they had a lot of knowledge to share about the area because they’d lived there for so long.
When I transitioned into postdoctoral studies at the American Museum of Natural History, I switched geographic focus to American Samoa. The museum has a large contingent of folks that do work strongly related to culture- and place-based knowledge. I built off of the expertise of those around me as I pulled together my research questions, and sought out that community of practice that I wanted to reflect in my own work.
Dr. Beaty
My PhD directly cultivated my values of creating knowledge that advances Indigenous stewardship in British Columbia. Even though I was housed within Zoology and the Biodiversity Research Centre at UBC, I could expand a thesis project that brought the natural and social sciences together. Because most of my academic training was rooted in natural science research techniques, I sought out resources, courses and mentors to learn social science skill sets, because there’s so much existing knowledge and schools of practice within the social sciences that I needed to catch up on in order to do participatory research in a good way. UBC has those resources and mentors to share, it’s just that as a natural science student you have to actively seek them out. That enabled me to develop relationships with community members and First Nations and led me outside of academia into a position now where I serve 17 First Nations.
Why have the natural sciences lagged behind the social sciences in participatory research?
Dr. Moore
It’s largely a product of tradition. The natural sciences are rooted in measuring and quantifying empirical data. There’s a cleanliness to work that focuses on empirical data because you have a greater degree of control. When you add the human element there’s far more nuance that makes things a lot more complicated — it prolongs how long it takes to do the work and it can be more expensive. But there is a changing tide among researchers that are engaged work that has real-world implications for conservation, restoration and land management.
Dr. Beaty
A lot of people in the natural sciences assume their research is arm’s length from human communities. But conservation is inherently human. It’s discussing the relationship between people and ecosystems. You can’t separate humans from nature — we are within the ecosystem. But unfortunately, in many academic schools of thought, natural scientists are not taught about that inter-connectivity. We’re trained to think of ecosystems as a separate silo and of researchers as objective quantifiers. Our methodologies don’t build upon the extensive training that social scientists are given to work with people and design research that responds to community needs and values.
How has your work benefited the community?
Dr. Moore
One of the big things that came out of our conversations with those involved in land management in American Samoa is that they want to understand the community’s needs and values. I want to distill my findings down to what is practically useful for decision makers about land management or resource use. I want to leave infrastructure and capacity for American Samoans do their own research. The island has a community college and the instructors there are excited about giving students an opportunity to do more field-based research. I’m hoping to provide skills that they can integrate into their classes to build capacity locally.
Dr. Beaty
In the early days of my relationship-building with the Squamish Nation, we discussed what their vision was for the region and how they saw research partnerships benefiting them. Over and over again, I heard their desire to have more opportunities for their youth to get out on the water and interact with the ocean and their territory. I secured funding to employ youth from the Squamish Nation and involve them in conducting the research. Their agency and motivations were centred in the knowledge-creation process and transformed the nature of our interviews. It wasn’t me, a settler external to their community, asking questions. It was their own youth asking them why these places are important and what their visions are for the future. The Nation is in the process of developing a marine use plan, so they’ll be able to use perspectives and data from their members, as well as from non-Indigenous members in their territory.
How did you establish trust with the community?
Dr. Moore
It takes time. Don’t fly in expecting to do a particular research project, and then fly out with all the data that you were hoping for. When I first started in American Samoa I made two or three visits without doing any actual research to provide opportunities for people to get to know me. I was getting an understanding of the landscape of the communities. A big part of it was thinking about ways we could co-benefit from the work. Then I did a series of interviews and surveys with folks to get a sense of the connection that they have with the mangrove forests.
Dr. Beaty
Trust building takes time. Show up to listen rather than to tell. Recognize that you will make mistakes, and when you make them, you need to apologize and show that you recognize that mistake and try to mitigate harm going forward. That’s part of Reconciliation. So long as people, particularly white settlers, avoid spaces that cause them discomfort and avoid owning up to our mistakes, we won’t learn how to break the systems and patterns that cause harm to Indigenous communities.
Do universities need to change the way that natural scientists are trained?
Dr. Moore
There does need to be a shift in the way that we think about academic training. At the bare minimum there should be more training in qualitative methods. Every scientist would benefit from ethics courses. Even if someone is only doing what is considered “hard science”, who’s impacted by this work? How are they collecting data? What are the implications beyond their intentions?
There’s an argument to be made about rethinking how we evaluate success. One of the biggest disadvantages of the academic system is how we are so hyper focused on publishing that we forget about the value of making connections that have broader implications. I’m a big fan of committing to doing the work required to build a relationship — even if that means I’m not publishing this year. If it means that a community is better resourced, or getting questions answered that are important to them. Those things are just as valuable as a publication, if not more. It’s a fact that consultation and relationship building takes time, but we don’t have to see that as a bad thing. Those commitments can lead to many more opportunities down the line that you might not have otherwise had.
Dr. Beaty
A lot of natural science programs perpetuate helicopter or parachute research. It’s a very extractive way of doing research because you drop into a community, do the work, and leave with findings that benefit you. This is a problematic approach that academia and natural scientists must correct when doing field work. Moreover, academia is designed to foster very transient and international ways of thinking. That makes it really hard for graduate students and early career researchers to practice community-based research because you’re expected to float around doing a two-year post doc here and then another one over there. That’s where supervisors come in. They’re in institutions for a long time and they have the opportunity to help build long-term relationships. I think they have a responsibility to do so in order to enable grad students to conduct participatory research.
Finally, there’s a cultural shift that academic institutions need to make to value Indigenous knowledge on an equal footing with Western science. In a recent paper about improving research practices to create more meaningful outcomes for communities and for science, we list individual, collective and systemic pathways to transform our education systems to better prepare students. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to recognize that there are valuable practices that we can learn from and implement.
How can funding agencies support participatory research?
Dr. Moore
There are more blended opportunities for research now across NSERC and SSHRC and they’re seeing the value of work at the intersection of the natural and the social sciences. There should be more flexibility in the ways funding programs evaluate success. In some cases, success looks like publications. In other cases it can look like maintained relationships that provide needed resources for communities. We have to expand our metrics of success beyond how many papers we publish, how many talks we give, how many conferences we go to. Folks are grappling with how to evaluate their work. But that’s just growing pains — it’s bound to happen.
Dr. Beaty
Researchers need to be funded for the extra work involved in community-based research: presentations, meetings the events that you have to show up to as part of the relationship-building process. A lot of that is unfunded work so researchers are doing it off the side of their desk. Philanthropic organizations are now shifting to trust-based philanthropy that recognizes that a lot of change making is hard to evaluate, especially over one- to two-year time frames. A lot of the outcomes that we’re searching for, like increased biodiversity or improved community health, are long-term goals.
NSERC’s top metric for evaluating grad student applications is publications. Communities don’t care about that. People who are interested in working with community have finite resources. If you’re diverting resources towards sharing your work back to communities, it may take away from your ability to publish, which undermines your ability to receive funding. So, you have to secure funding from other sources which just adds more and more work. Supporting researchers’ relationship-building work can generate greater capacity to conduct participatory research across natural and social sciences.