Martin Pastoors’ Blog: Canada’s Participatory Research Futures

Martin is working with the Canadian Fisheries Research Network to better understand what this successful, active collaboration between scientists and industry across Canada, driven by industry, can teach the GAP2 project. You can read all of his blog posts here.

‘Highly Qualified Personnel’ of the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) find many gaps that still need to be filled

The Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) is a collaboration of academic researchers, fishing industry, government researchers and fishery managers from across Canada, funded under the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Prior to the network’s annual meeting, a workshop of the Highly Qualified Personnel (i.e. Master Students, PhD students and Postdocs) was convened. The objective was to discuss future career prospects in participatory research.

An important conclusion was that “big gaps” remain in Canadian fisheries research: gaps between participatory science and policy-making and gaps between natural science and social science approaches. This, of course is very similar to the European situation and the is the backdrop to the setting of the GAP2 project. As leader of the WP3 in GAP2 (“Making a difference with participatory science”) I feel that this places a substantial expectation on what we should be aiming to achieve in GAP2. Raising political awareness about the potential role of the case studies in the decision-making process is an important element of that.

I picked up a number of interesting approaches and ideas during the workshop. One was the initiative to set up CFRN ‘passports’ or ‘experience portfolios’ that describe the specific experience of individual students in the field of participatory research. A second important topic that often came back was the need to develop flexible and short internship possibilities, both in different research environments, but also in policy-making or industries. This could be an interesting avenue to take up within the GAP2 network in coordination with the CFRN network. When we discussed the inclusion and exclusion of different groups in the co-construction of a participatory research project, one of the participants mentioned this wonderful quote: “if you are not on a plane when it takes off, don’t expect to be on it when it lands”. This referred specifically to the inclusion (or not) of environmental NGOs and management agencies in the setup of the projects and case studies.

Many discussion were devoted to the training needs for the students. What are the specific needs for students that operate in the domain of participatory research and that are not covered already by the traditional university courses? What came out as important elements were the training in social science and soft skills. Having just finished the GAP2 workshop on social science myself, I have actively promoted our idea of rolling out social science techniques to natural science researchers. The main aim of such an exercise would be to sensitize the researchers to the background and contexts in which these techniques are used and what the information could bring.

So much to learn from the exchange with Canada. I am already looking forward to the programme for the next two days in which the results of some of the projects will be presented. It is a great privilege to be able to share in the lessons from the CFRN.


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