Participatory research in times of COVID-19 and beyond : Adjusting your methodological toolkits

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 disrupted societies and economies across the globe. The pandemic has also had serious effects on the global scientific research community, as laboratories and offices have closed, academic events have been canceled, mobility for students and faculty has been restricted, and scientific careers have had to be put on hold.

Switching to online formats has been discussed as a solution to some of the pandemic-related challenges, but according to recent studies, researchers vary in their assessments of how successfully online formats can replace face-to-face formats for different research activities. According to a recent survey, most researchers believe that online formats are suited to handling a large share of the administrative work and to replacing project meetings, which will also apply after the pandemic. However, assessments regarding fieldwork, where personal interaction with stakeholders is essential, are much more pessimistic. Approximately one-third of the respondents believe that fieldwork cannot be replaced at all by online formats in the future, and another third state that only up to a quarter of all fieldwork might be performed online.

These concerns call for solutions to adapt and enrich our current methodological toolkits for fieldwork in order to mitigate negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is particularly relevant for transdisciplinary research, which requires close collaboration between researchers and stakeholders outside academia and the use of participatory methods for data collection and analysis. Participation in this context means that researchers and stakeholders become essential partners in the co-design of the research, co-production of knowledge and results, and co-creation of impact. Although participation also comes with certain challenges (e.g., substantial time investments required on both sides, risk for stakeholder fatigue, difficulties in maintaining stakeholder engagement over longer time periods, biased representation of different stakeholder groups, and management of unrealistically high stakeholder expectations), enhancing societal relevance and legitimacy through stakeholder engagement processes is considered a worthwhile and crucial aspect of transdisciplinary research. This goes beyond informing and consulting with stakeholders but requires regular involvement and genuine collaboration, with specific participatory methods to support stakeholder engagement.

Although there is already a surge in the literature of guidance as to how one can effectively replace physical face-to-face meetings with online formats, including first overviews of the literature, much of this advice remains generic and does not take into consideration how online formats influence the roles participants might take in the research process of specific tools and methods. In addition, little is known about potential changes in the empowering nature of participation, such as increased self-efficacy and direct uptake of results by stakeholders.

Thus, the objective of this perspective is to share and discuss our recent experiences with adjusting participatory methods used in transdisciplinary social-ecological research. We draw on rich experience from several ongoing projects (one in Costa Rica and four others in different parts of Europe), all of which explore innovative and more sustainable ways of promoting ecosystem services provision and biodiversity conservation in agricultural and forest ecosystems. On the basis of the pros and cons identified through several rounds of shared reflection, we elaborate on the lessons learned from adjusting our methods and discuss how this knowledge can enrich and diversify the pool of available methods after the pandemic. We conclude that combining the adjusted online approaches with well-established face-to-face formats into more inclusive hybrid approaches can even enrich and diversify the pool of available methods for the time after the pandemic.

Rights

2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Cite as

Downloadable citations

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.12.006

Repository URI

https://hdl.handle.net/2164/18118