Towards a critical recovery of liberatory PAR for food system transformations: Struggles and strategies in collaborating with radical and progressive food movements in EU-funded R&I projects

Tobia S. Jones*, Anne M.C. Loeber

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

From sustainability and justice perspectives, food systems and R&I systems need transformation. Participatory action research (PAR) presents a suitable approach as it enables collaboration between those affected by a social issue and researchers based in universities to co-create knowledge and interventionist actions. However, PAR is often misconstrued even within projects calling for civil society actors to act as full partners in research. To avoid reproducing the very structures and practices in need of transformation, this paper argues for university researchers to team up with members of food movements to engage in ‘liberatory’ forms of PAR. The question is how liberatory PAR's guiding concepts of reciprocal participation, critical recovery and systemic devolution can be enacted in projects that did not start out as PAR projects. Two EU-funded projects on food system transformation serve as a basis to answer this question, generating concrete recommendations for establishing co-creative, mutually liberating, and transdisciplinary research collectives.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100100
Pages (from-to)1-13
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Responsible Technology
Volume20
Early online date22 Nov 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s)

Funding

EU research funding serves as a strong lever influencing research and innovation (R&I) in Europe and beyond. Even though EU-funding requirements have increasingly promoted the participation of non-academics in research projects and invite civil society actors to act as full partners in research, it remains to be seen if they enable full equitable participation in co-creating transdisciplinary knowledge, organizing skills and collective actions in pursuit of environmental sustainability and social justice. While food movements in the Global South experiment with and promote strategies for community-university partnerships in collaborative enaction of social transformation (see Wezel et al., 2009; M\u00E9ndez et al., 2013, 2017; Gregory & Peters, 2018; Guzman et al., 2022; Kesselman, 2022; ACRAF, 2024), there is an absence of partnerships with these movements and their organisations in EU-funded R&I projects. This article asks how we, as university researchers, can revitalize a liberatory PAR praxis with progressive and radical food movements while navigating EU-funded R&I projects for food system transformation? In answering this question, we offer a response to calls for a critical recovery of PAR (Braun & Loeber, this issue; Pyrch, 2007; Rappaport, 2020). Our own experiences with struggles, strategies and failings to accompany and resource food movements from different positions and roles within two EU-funded projects, both designed from the ambition of food system transformation, serve as a basis for bringing discussions onward and inward with how this can be done in practice within the confines of EU-funded research.First, we revisit empirically grounded accounts of original formulations of PAR as co-created in the 1970s and 1980s in Colombia (Oslender, 2016; Rappaport, 2020) and the broader Global South (Swantz, 2016; Tandon & Hall, 2014). This analysis is intended as a critical recovery of the radical origins of PAR as a mutually liberating and transformative process between members of marginalised communities belonging to progressive and/or radical movements and university researchers. In doing so, Section 2 articulates three guiding concepts that can inspire and safeguard a liberatory PAR process, that also serve as benchmarks for our current praxis. Section 3 thereupon details our methodological approach that combines a descriptive, historical analysis of participative closures and openings for societal actors in EU-funded R&I projects with a first-person narration of our own experiences with PAR. Subsequently, Section 4 analyses the evolution of staged participation and stakeholder helixes in R&I projects funded by successive EU Framework Programmes from 1994 to 2027 to further contextualise and understand how they can enable and disable liberatory PAR. In Section 5, we empirically cross-pollinate our current efforts to work with liberatory PAR within two on-going EU-funded projects, FoodCLIC and FOSTER, designed in response to calls for food system transformation. Drawing on these experiences, we conclude with suggestions for university researchers to recover and revitalize PAR with radical and progressive food movements who are compelled to collaborate for double transformations and mutual liberation.External academic researchers from an organization funded by the US Presbyterian Church inserted themselves alongside these networks and social movements across Colombia. Many of them were disillusioned with their academic training in positivist social science from Euro-American universities as this was inappropriate to their lived realities and struggles as Colombians (Fals-Borda & Brandao, 1986). They learnt to liberate themselves from the mandate to claim objectivity, by deconstructing the researcher-researched power asymmetry, and reframing research objects or subjects as \u2018co-researchers\u2019. Reciprocally, the academic researchers became politically committed and active participants in social movement organisations and grassroots communities of the co-researchers. This amounted to a shift from participation by people towards participation with people for mutual liberation (D\u00EDaz-Ar\u00E9valo, 2022), i.e. a shift from researcher as a \u201Cisolated autonomous individual to a contextualized, historical agent-in-community\u201D (Lykes & Mallona, 2008: 112).It is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate original liberatory PAR processes in detail. Yet, the historical-empirical work done by Rappaport (2020) foregrounds three guiding concepts that emerged from radical experimentation with grassroots communities of social movements in PAR processes. The three guiding concepts offer a conceptual framework to understand the conditions and commitments that enable(d) liberatory PAR. They provide the grounds to strategize and analyse how liberatory PAR can(not) be applied in contexts of EU-funded R&I projects led by universities.The way in which this research question will be answered echoes the origins of this paper. As academics affiliated with Western European universities working on EU-funded food system transformation projects, we, authors, shared our views and experiences in conversation. We were both struck and puzzled by how, despite potentially radical research project ambitions, the execution of the research projects time and again threatened to amount to disbalanced, even extractivist forms of collaboration with societal project partners. A first line of reasoning in answering our question was elaborating the roles and room assigned to non-academically affiliated, \u2018societal\u2019 partners in subsequent EU-funding schemes. The resulting historical reconstruction based on document analysis, we then complemented with an analysis of the way in which \u2018participatory action research\u2019 currently features in EU-funded research projects, based on a search in CORDIS, the repository in which the results of EU funded research and innovation are collected.The two projects described here did not start out as PAR and offer ground for reflection on the question to which extent and how it is possible to exercise agency and devise strategies to start building relations with such partners. A comparison between the experiences in the projects show that, firstly, it is possible to redefine project tasks into co-designing and/or implementing research activities with \u2018vulnerable\u2019 groups. Yet, secondly, clearly, depending on project design and objectives, the possibilities to do so vary greatly. Comparatively, the FoodCLIC project afforded more opportunities for reciprocal participation because there was budget allocated for marginalised food system actors (here: small-scale agroecology farmers and racialised migrants with low-income) to be compensated for their knowledge and participation in decision-making activities, as well as approximately \u20AC95.000 for each city-region to realize innovative actions not prefigured in the project's design. Still, reciprocal participation with civic movements was significantly limited in both projects. FOSTER's original aspirations for partnership with citizen-driven initiatives was curtailed because of the relatively tight knit network in which calls for EU-funded research are received and read, and in which the search for further partners took shape. Time pressure to have all partners on board before the deadline for proposal submission, was a major incentive to search for potential partners in the academic initiators\u2019 regular circle of contacts, notably looking for known and hence trusted partners already in possession of a \u2018code\u2019 (the PIC) by which to legitimately enter the submission portal. This happened in spite of the list of criteria drafted by which to select citizen-driven initiative. Similarly, in FoodCLIC, despite making a guideline for direct representation of food-deprived groups, such representation failed mostly because the project design did not account for the additional time and care that is needed to build solidary relations that are new to the systemic intermediaries and the institutional network which employs them. In both projects, the exhaustion of university researchers\u2019 hours allocated to pre-designed project tasks prevented them from meaningfully participating in the activities and/or activism of radical and progressive food movements. As a consequence, participation remains a majorly a unidirectional affair that too easily becomes extractive. In the occasions, where systemic intermediaries were already part of food movements or had the mandate to do ethnographic research, reciprocal participation was more attainable and liberatory partnerships are developing as both projects continue unfolding.Drawing on 20th century developments and understandings of liberatory PAR for inspiration presents a way forward. Liberatory PAR centred the direct participation of social movements and organizations of socially oppressed groups, making knowledge a transdisciplinary resource for liberatory action. As the FOSTER and FoodCLIC projects show, there are options and openings to enact liberatory PAR within EU-funded research projects, yet the possibilities to do so critically hinge on overcoming cultural, practical and administrative hurdles. Notably FoodCLIC shows that there are possibilities to centre the needs and knowledges of marginalised communities at the frontlines of radical and progressive food movements. We conclude from the inspirational accounts of liberatory PAR and our praxical experiences of engaging with PAR guiding concepts within EU-funded food system transformation-oriented projects, that a sharing of power with research \u2018subjects\u2019 to become full partners in a co-creative and transdisciplinary action research collective is critical for the necessary \u2018double transformations\u2019 in R&I and agri-food systems. Furthermore, on the micro-level of research practice, we see there is space to (un)learn how to transform power relations in ways that may ripple outwards beyond dedicated fields of research to a wider ecology of systems. We thank PAR protagonists of past times for the inspiration and motivation to keep trying.The authors wish to thank Gloria Mu\u00F1oz Mart\u00EDnez for sharing her experiences with Fals-Borda at the National University of Colombia. It was an honour to listen to her. [First author] learnt how she and other contemporaries had weaved PAR's principles with ancestral knowledges to co-create a methodology of community-based co-design through \u2018experiencia comunitaria\u2019 that is simultaneously inter-cultural, inter-generational and inter-disciplinary (Grisales-Boh\u00F3rquez et al. 2021). [author] gives thanks to the many others who shared their ceremonial, emotional, spiritual and symbolic dimensions of experience which modern academia marginalises and forecloses despite their evident power to connect movements, heal colonial traumas and motivate life-long commitments to life-centred (food) system transformations. The work reported in this article is based on research supported by European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreements n\u00B0s 101059954 and 101060717. The views expressed in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. We wish to share our appreciation for the funding received, and thank our respective project's colleagues for acting as sparring partners in conversations that informed and inspired the observations and arguments elaborated here. The authors wish to thank Gloria Mu\u00F1oz Mart\u00EDnez for sharing her experiences with Fals-Borda at the National University of Colombia . It was an honour to listen to her. [First author] learnt how she and other contemporaries had weaved PAR's principles with ancestral knowledges to co-create a methodology of community-based co-design through \u2018experiencia comunitaria\u2019 that is simultaneously inter-cultural, inter-generational and inter-disciplinary (Grisales-Boh\u00F3rquez et al. 2022). [author] gives thanks to the many others who shared their ceremonial, emotional, spiritual and symbolic dimensions of experience which modern academia marginalises and forecloses despite their evident power to connect movements, heal colonial traumas and motivate life-long commitments to life-centred (food) system transformations. The work reported in this article is based on research supported by European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreements n\u00B0s 101059954 and 101060717 . The views expressed in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. We wish to share our appreciation for the funding received, and thank our respective project's colleagues for acting as sparring partners in conversations that informed and inspired the observations and arguments elaborated here.

FundersFunder number
ACRAF
EU Framework Programmes
European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme101059954, 101060717
European Commission95.000
FOSTER112
Universidad Nacional de Colombia2021

    Keywords

    • EU research funding
    • Food movements
    • Food system transformation
    • Liberatory research methodology
    • Participatory action research
    • Public participation

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