Research with Indigenous and Local Communities

Owned by Shannon Bradley
Apr 09, 2024
4 min read

https://i2insights.org/2024/04/09/research-with-indigenous-and-local-communities/

Improving how we do research with indigenous and local communities

April 9, 2024

By Roxana Roos

How can we best include the perspectives of indigenous and local people in global change research? What are the major challenges in doing research with and within local and indigenous communities? How can we best deal with such challenges?

More and more, global challenges like climate change are being felt locally, and indigenous peoples are often the most vulnerable. The inclusion of the perspectives of indigenous and local people when developing ways to respond to societal challenges is increasingly the norm in the scientific world. For response strategies to be effective, communities need to be involved in their development. This is true for a whole range of topics, from social justice to climate adaptation. But getting local communities involved in research by ‘outsiders’ can be a challenge for a multitude of reasons.

I propose eight important barriers to the participation of local and indigenous communities, along with potential solutions, based on the experiences of practicing researchers who have worked with such communities in the Philippines, Mexico, Russia (Siberia), Greenland, Norway (Svalbard), Canada, Germany, Greece, Colombia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Bangladesh, France, and New Zealand.

  1. External pressure to find respondents or partners, to collect data, to involve local people in projects, and to publish stems from challenges related to the lack of opportunities for long-term collaboration with the locals because of fixed timeframes and limited funding.

    Solutions include trying to avoid projects in locations where the researchers cannot stay for a longer period with the locals and involving local people in the writing of articles and/or in reviewing draft articles.

  2. Engaging local people in projects can be difficult, especially long-range (via email, social media, etc.).

    Solutions include meeting the locals in person, using art or local artists to establish communication, and improving how projects or issues are presented to local people.

  3. Relevance of projects for local people can be perceived as low if there is a mismatch between the researchers’ own interests and local people’s needs. Recruiting respondents or participants can be hard due to stipulations by project funders and because local people may have little trust in science and do not see it as relevant.

    Solutions include involving local people from the start in project development and adapting projects to local people’s problems.

  4. Indigenous peoples’ negative experiences from previous projects stem from extractive research practices where foreign researchers come to the community for a short period of time, ask questions, collect the data, and leave, giving nothing back to the community. Local people fear recolonization. They see that the visiting researchers get more benefits (eg., career and salary) than they do.

    Solutions include collaborative approaches, co-production, and transdisciplinarity for building trust, making local people’s knowledge and concerns visible, making scholars with indigenous backgrounds co-authors, and if local people have developed or created something (eg., artwork), leaving it with them.

  5. Different cultures, history, and geographical conditions, which lead to:

     

    • challenges in getting a balanced sample of participants because of gender hierarchies and age hierarchies in indigenous communities;

    • challenges with understanding because of insufficient cultural competence;

    • researchers’ curiosity being blunted by having too much cultural knowledge;

    • the challenge of obtaining relevant data;

    • misunderstandings due to assuming that different groups of indigenous people have identical cultures; and

    • challenges in understanding what is being said due to a lack of knowledge of an underlying conflict.

  6. Solutions include:

     

    • asking local people to allow women and youth to participate in projects;

    • involving art and local artists to improve understanding between participants;

    • acquiring as much prior knowledge as possible about the research area;

    • letting local people speak freely during interviews even if off-topic (to get to know their culture); and

    • involving researchers who know a particular community and culture.

  1. Language challenges occur, for instance, when interpreters have poor skills in the researchers’ language (eg English), summarize and filter what is said, and when interpreting disrupts the flow of conversation.

    Solutions include using colleagues who speak the local language and know the local culture, using local field assistants and using art as a means of communication.

  2. Payment for participation/interview is a challenging issue because not paying may result in fewer locals participating.

    Solutions include always paying a certain amount and inviting local people to workshops where they can exchange knowledge with others.

  3. Divergence between epistemic cultures may lead to misinterpreting local knowledge and local ways of knowing when using Western theoretical frameworks and methods. Using indigenous theories and methods or building on, and referring to, work by indigenous researchers (non-Western epistemologies) is not widely accepted by the Western scientific establishment and so colleagues from non-Western countries can feel excluded.

    Solutions lie in the decolonization of knowledge and science. That requires dialogue between different ways of knowing and the inclusion of non-Western researchers in projects and article writing.

Concluding remarks

Have you experienced similar or other challenges and how did you tackle these? How can we as researchers improve the way we do research with and within local communities and indigenous peoples?

To find out more:

Roos, R. (2024). Maybe you need to do something about it: Challenges in global environmental change research with and within local communities. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11: 429, (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02942-5

Biography: Roxana Roos PhD is a Norwegian transdisciplinary researcher, working in the field of environmental change. Since 2022 she has worked as a senior researcher at Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in the international research project Semper Arctic (Sense Making, Place attachment, and Extended networks as sources of Resilience in the Arctic) funded by the Belmont Forum.