Adapting participatory research methods for reflexive environmental management

Introduction: situating photovoice method, practice, and critique

Photovoice is a visual research method involving participatory processes of creating, sharing, interpreting, and discussing photographs. Photovoice was initially conceptualized as a research method for carrying out public needs assessment with emancipatory and empowering potential. It is among visual ethnographic methods that depart from the scientific-realist paradigm of research and knowledge production (Pink, 2013). Photovoice emerged from photo novella, a form of narrative storytelling derived from the coupling of images and text within historical and social context (Wang and Burris, 1994). The visual participatory method is a form of community-based research centered around taking photos and discussing them collectively in focus groups. Through this process, participants learn about mutual needs, life experiences, and senses of self. Photovoice emerged as a visual methodology with an explicit impetus to create social change by bridging communities with policymakers, community leaders, and those with positions of relative power (Milne and Muir, 2019). Wang and Burris (1997), at the forefront of this methodological approach, articulated core principles: giving voice to communities, especially those underprivileged and without representational apparatuses to communicate basic needs and concerns; utilizing photographs and focus group discussions to promote critical dialogue in effort toward eliciting knowledge about community issues; and connecting communities with those that have a direct role in shaping relevant policies (see also Wang, 2006). They advocated for the distribution of cameras, collective image making and discussion, and engagement with policymakers toward social change.

Early practitioners of photovoice cite inspiration from three sources including social empowerment scholarship that considers knowledge not as a domain of experts, but emergent from co-productive processes of exchange (Freire, 2018), feminist theory that gives voice to subaltern subjects (French, 1985; Linton, 1989), and critically reflexive approaches to community-based documentary photography (Liebenberg, 2018; Milne and Muir, 2019). Standard practices involve first selecting community leaders or those with policymaking power to help organize and shape the photovoice process. Then, often in conjunction with a community leader, the researcher(s) forms a group or multiple groups of participants and provide a photography assignment through introducing camera use techniques, ethics of taking photos, and the aims of the research. Participants are allotted time to take photos. After developing the photos, participants discuss them in focus groups discussions. Participants tell stories about their photos and collectively codify themes that address their lived experiences. In some cases, ‘best’ photos are chosen, which indicate that they represent a common need or shared experience. These focus group discussions are generally followed by a public display of some of the images and stories from the photovoice group discussions that communicate findings to a wider audience and policymakers (Wang, 2006: 149–152).

The method became popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, through studies in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province in relation to public health and community development (Wang and Burris, 1997; Wu, 1995). As a research method, photovoice has since been deployed in forms of sociological inquiry to address issues as diverse as childhood autism (Ha and Whittaker, 2016), Latina transgender identity (Rhodes et al., 2015), entertainment-education (Singhal et al., 2007), life course analysis of aging immigrants (Brotman et al., 2019), as well as youth empowerment and health education (Wilson et al., 2008). The method evolved into a popular form of participatory action research that can facilitate the exploration of shared experiences, critical reflection, as well as the needs of marginalized communities (Liebenberg, 2018). Many social science researchers, public health practitioners, and community development organizations utilize this visual research method (Delgado, 2015; Jurkowski and Paul-Ward, 2007; Strack et al., 2004). Although early proponents of photovoice suggest researchers be aware of the embedded power relations in the research process (Wang and Burris, 1997: 374–375), critical analyses of photovoice illustrate that underlying the method are assumptions that linear procedural processes of creating and disseminating knowledge will shape policy and social change. This assumption elides relations of power embedded within the method, which require reflexive attention.

Relations of power between researcher and participants, amongst participants, and those with the capacity to shape policy, such as community leaders or state representatives are crucial facets of participatory methods. In order to understand the content and meaning of participatory research engagements, these relations demand critical reflexivity. Many compelling scholarly critiques discuss reflexivity (England, 1994; Pillow, 2003) and problematize forms of ethnographic refusals (McGranahan, 2016; Ortner, 1995; Simpson, 2007, 2014; Sutton and Levinson, 2001). Over the past decade, issues of power and subject positionality have been explicitly researched in relation to photovoice practice, visual participatory methods, and participatory action research (Brushwood Rose, 2019; Hayhurst, 2017; Milne, 2012; Mitchell, 2019; Mitchell et al., 2017; Switzer, 2018, 2019). In the effort to reformulate methodological approaches, scholars have sought to address relations of power and methodological decolonization (Higgins, 2016). For instance, Lykes’ (2006) collaboration with Mayan women in Guatemala suggests the need for more attention to participant agency and increased input in framing the themes of research at each stage in the photovoice process. Similarly, the work of Castleden et al. (2008) shows how research can be modified through a joint iterative approach, with researcher(s) and participants collectively making changes to themes and the overarching research program at different stages of the research process. They argue that this shared process-oriented approach creates a sense of ownership among participants but requires significant time to allow for multiple iterations. Key methodological addendums they propose include ongoing recruitment, contextualization, individual selection of photographs for photovoice focus groups, and iterative discussion of themes throughout the research process (Castleden et al., 2008). Analogously, Hayhurst (2017) contends that participatory visual research presents opportunities to give voice to marginalized communities but that a critical awareness informed by postcolonial theory should be applied to forms of image ownership, access, control, and possession, as well as representational uses of images. These interventions nuance the methodological approach espoused by Wang (1999, 2006), which has been interpreted by many practitioners as a set of linear procedures that include recruitment, training, photography assignment, group selection of ‘best photos’, group contextualization, and a participatory evaluation, which is then shared with policymakers and the public.

Within this vein of critical dialogue on participatory methods, I discuss reflexive adaptations to methods in the context of applying photovoice to research environmental management. In using the term ‘reflexivity’, I mean to draw attention to the situated character of all involved in the moments of research interaction; the researcher(s), participant(s), and the conditions within which interaction transpires. For Pillow (2010), reflexivity entails the iterative process of coming to understand positionalities involved in research – an unavoidably geographical process. A reflexive approach to participatory methods considers aberrations, alternative and flexible forms of participation as informative to research method as a dialogic process.

Attention to forms of resistance to prescribed ways of participating, scholars have shown (Brushwood Rose, 2019; Milne, 2012), can also elicit information about the lived experiences, social positionality, and needs of (non)participants. Nonparticipation, resistance, and refusal, Milne (2012) contends, require reflexive attention from all involved in research processes. Brushwood Rose (2019) demonstrates that the kinds of agency exercised by (non)participants to augment, alter, or confound normative forms of participation are worthy of critical attention. This is particularly important as research has shown how participation in photovoice can elicit unintended consequences that may not only enable participants to express themselves in new ways but also create new silences, suspicions, or omissions (Prins, 2010). As Milne and Muir (2019: 8) articulate, ‘understanding and exploring absences, silences, and exclusions’ may be as important as exploring what is visually presented and said out loud. It may potentially be more so in disadvantaged communities for whom research participation has historically portended further societal marginalization. As these works, and this article, demonstrate the complexities of (non)participation can be viewed as terrain for reflexive approaches to research methods. Building on critical scholarship, I address issues surrounding positionality and power relations embedded within participatory research. I address limitations due to the lengths of time dedicated to research, recruiting, and analytical processes (Sitter, 2017). My intervention brings insights from critical studies of participatory methods to examples of adapting photovoice research methods in the context of studying environmental management.

In this article, I address these questions: How can reflexive approaches to participatory methods be applied to the study of environmental management? What might reflexive adaptations to visual participatory methods reveal or obscure? How can reflexive adaptations inflect power relations within the research process and shape the research content? How can reflexive approaches to participatory research methods support more socially equitable sustainability practices? These questions are critical as scholarship in environmental studies advocates for a greater scope of participatory engagement in effort toward a public praxis of earth stewardship (Osborne, 2017). Alongside calls for greater public participation, and the foregrounding of Black, indigenous, and subaltern experiences (Finney, 2014; Taylor, 2016), are critical accounts that rethink the universality of sustainability’s core tenants and approaches to environmental management. In particular, scholars argue that environmental justice be considered a key component of sustainability (Agyeman, 2013; Rodenbiker, 2020a, 2020b; Sze, 2018). In addition, researchers have shown how particular social and political contexts within which sustainability takes on meaning shape environmental management practices and the social effects of sustainability projects (Rodenbiker, 2021; Sze, 2018). These studies demonstrate the need for reflexive attention to how environmental management practices affect people and how sustainable development practitioners can engage with those unevenly effected by environmental management practices. Greater reflexive attention to research methods is crucial to socially just sustainability praxis.

In what follows, I discuss reflexive adaptations to photovoice research in the context of studying social dimensions of conservation in Southwest China. I illustrate how crucial insights came from adopting reflexive adaptations to standard photovoice procedures. In addition, I highlight how methodological adaptations produced new omissions, limitations, and uneven power relations. After providing context for the study, I discuss ethnographic moments of refusal as grounds for intersubjective exchange. I then highlight insights from conducting individual interviews with and without photographic images, in addition to standard photovoice focus group discussions. Next, I consider what I call ‘suspended participation’—a process of extending the duration of the sampling period and mode of sampling. Following these sections, I discuss critical concerns surrounding technologies of photography, image sharing, and digital surveillance. These reflexive adaptations revealed social needs and inequities linked with recent conservation projects. I conclude arguing that reflexive approaches to participatory methods can yield information that speak volumes and shape more equitable sustainability practices, but that such adaptations can also generate new omissions and uneven power relations between researchers and participants. ¹

Context

To align with central state policy, city governments across China are turning 20% of land that falls within municipal regions into urban ecological protection areas (Rodenbiker, 2019; UNDP, 2016). The bulk of these new conservation areas are being zoned along the peri-urban fringe of cities and include rural land within municipal jurisdictions. As the majority of urban ecological protection areas are on the peri-urban fringe, I aimed to determine how peri-urban villagers were being affected as village land and housing were included into conservation projects. I identified a group of provincial and municipal-level government officials and environmental scientists as key policy interlocutors. These individuals either had formal roles in government or were involved in the technical planning and management of conservation areas. As such, they had vested interest to learn more about the social effects of the environmental management practices they governed. Prior to carrying out photovoice research, I determined that I would not have a public exhibition of the photos. Instead, a team of researchers from an environmental protection bureau and I decided to co-write a report that detailed our findings and advocated for appropriate changes to policy and environmental management. We made this decision to align with China’s context of policymaking, which privileges research reports internal to the state. Collectively, we identified peri-urban villages to conduct the study based on the environmental bureau’s involvement in overseeing environmental management and villagers’ willingness to participate. I conducted preliminary interviews with villagers in two sites, both individually and with state scientists. These interviews queried interests of participants and defined initial questions and concerns related to conservation zoning. At the time cameras were distributed in the fall of 2016, I had conducted interviews and ethnographic fieldwork for over six months over a two-year period. Participatory research in China remains novel for many government agencies (Chang et al., 2019). This was the first participatory visual research project for the state scientists I partnered with. Within this context, state scientists expected participation to align with rote procedures outlined in cases where the method developed in Southwest China (Wang and Burris, 1997).

It is crucial to point to several factors related to land-based sustainability projects in China. Land in China is a socialized asset. Yet, which entities are able to utilize and profit from land is constitutionally and legally underdefined. This ambiguity shapes the terrain of engagement between would-be land users. State-led drives for environmental protection are enrolled in forms of intergovernmental competition for land control, social displacement from rural land, and the uneven inclusion of rural people (Rodenbiker, 2020, 2021). Disputes over land and natural resources are often couched in state-sanctioned discourses of rights (O’brien and Li, 2006), and, increasingly, forms of media advocacy (Mertha, 2014), environmental protest (Steinhardt and Wu, 2016), and resigned activism (Lora-Wainwright, 2017). None of these had yet occurred in the research sites I discuss in this article. Villagers were being compensated with annual payments for leasing their rural land for conservation purposes. Many villagers expressed that this as a favorable arrangement. However, in focus group discussions with villagers and state scientists, it became evident that some participants did not feel they could fully express themselves. After a particularly quiet photovoice focus group discussion, several villagers indicated that they wished to discuss something outside the focus group and without other researchers. This prompted me to reflect on omissions and silences within focus group discussions. In the following sections, I discuss reflexive adaptations I undertook to adapt participatory research methods.

What is said and unsaid

In this section, I contrast verbal expressions in photovoice focus group discussions when multiple researchers are present with individual one-to-one follow-up interviews. The juxtaposition between expressive content illustrates features of uneven power relations embedded within participatory methods. At this site, a treatment wetland was constructed on villagers’ agricultural land to mitigate non-point source pollutants. State envirnomental scientists posed questions to villagers about social and economic changes since the farmland was transformed for conservation purposes. The positive verbal expressions within the photovoice group discussions contrasted starkly with individual interviews that followed. To illustrate the difference, I compare a quote from the focus group discussions with content from open-ended interviews.

One participant showed two photos they took within the newly constructed treatment wetland. One photo exhibited a sign that noted the importance of ‘sacrificing for ecology’. The other photo showed a sign that read ‘everyone should pay attention to hygiene’ (see Figure 1). The participant held up the photos side by side and said:

Our country has put so much investment into improving the environment so the water quality will meet standards. Previously we (laobaixing) did not have a conscious awareness of this. . .Since the environmental project began, more than 95 percent of people think that this way is better. Our minimum environmental hygiene has risen, and at present those people who have not recognized these improvements are very few. (Feb. 2017)

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Figure 1.

Village house with a slogan written reading ‘everyone should pay attention to hygiene’ on the wall.

Statements of approval, such as this one, were isolated to focus group discussions involving researchers from the enviromental protection bureau. This suggests that, within their presence, participants felt compelled to express statements of approval – particularly since, in individual follow-up interviews, verbal expressions were starkly different. Villagers expressed discontent with uneven environmental management processes and related socioeconomic inequalities.

In individual follow-up interviews, participants challenged the notion, implicit in the quote above, that rural people should be sacrificing for environmental protection. Instead, many participants suggested polluting industries should sacrifice first. They also expressed discontent with how environmental management roles were organized in the newly built treatment wetlands. Environmental management within the village was largely monopolized by a single individual hired by the local government. Participants characterized this environmental manager as the head of a company with seemingly endless ways of drawing in business opportunities (tianya gongsi). As the primary manager, this person profited from harvesting and selling fish and lotus from the treatment wetlands. When wetlands were drained, this environmental manager netted all of the profits from the sale of lotus and fish. One respondent estimated that a large catch of fish from the wetlands was worth 50,000 RMB (~8,000 USD) and the lotus harvest was worth approximately 100,000 RMB (~16,000 USD). Only a few other villagers were hired to work as environmental surveyors and garbage collectors by the local government and were paid 600 RMB (~95 USD) a month.

While participants expressed overwhelming praise for conservation efforts in focus group discussions with state scientists, in individual follow-up interviews many expressed what they perceived as newly emerging inequalities related to the limited opportunities for employment in environmental management and uneven profiteering from natural resources produced within the treatment wetlands. This discrepancy indicates that within focus groups, participants refrained from expressing inequalities linked with the conservation project. This may be because state scientists have power to influence who is employed as environmental managers, which incentivizes a performative level of support and tacit compliance. The discrepancy may also be related to interpersonal relationships between villagers or the fact that participants may convey the information shared within the focus group to others. Each possibility concerns the uneven social positionality inherent in focus group discussions.

As a white Mandarin-speaking cisgender male researcher, I was a clear outsider to this rural community in China. Many participants made it clear that they wished to communicate issues they found problematic with me in hopes that I could share them with international research communities and government entities not present during focus group discussions. I was able to fulfill the latter through research reports that identified forms of social inequality precipitated by conservation-oriented environmental management. It is crucial to note that, although I conducted individual interviews in response to the ‘silences’ of focus group discussions, follow-up interviews created new forms of uneven power relations. Villagers began to view me as a conduit to policymakers. This created new tensions and uneven power relations between my role as a researcher and participants.

Those who had time to meet with me were inevitably those with higher class positionality within the community – predominantly male – and ambitions to enter into environmental management positions. Carrying out individual open-ended interviews conditioned uneven access to the researcher and therefore created novel discrepancies in whose voices I heard and represented in subsequent research reports. Despite these new limitations, follow-up interviews also generated meaningful prescriptions for modifying environmental policies and environmental management. For instance, villagers proposed including a larger number and more socioeconomically diverse set of employees, instead of concentrating environmental management opportunities in the hands of a few. They also stressed that the profits from land-based natural resource production within the treatment wetlands – built on land allocated to the village – should be more equitably distributed to members of the village instead of monopolized by those with managerial power.

Suspended participation

Scheduling photovoice focus group interviews did not pose a significant challenge. However, participant attendance at initial focus group discussion meetings was sparse. Calling participants via phone elicited myriad explanations for nonattendance. Some had work obligations. Others had moved for temporary jobs. Still others were busy with family care responsibilities. Yet, many participants who missed initial meetings did not wish to withdraw. We rescheduled. Then, after a similar outcome, we rescheduled again. In a series of subsequent attempts to gather for focus group discussions, many continued to be unable to attend. But always with compelling and informative reasons. I began to consider these absences and the reasons noted for nonattendance as a kind of ‘suspended participation’—a form of (non)participation that elicits ethnographic knowledge.

Charting suspended participation revealed key aspects of villagers’ socioeconomic transitions and social relationships. Many were unable to come to meetings because of their obligations as temporary wageworkers. Many participants – particularly women – were employed in the seasonal agricultural harvest as temporary laborers, which, alongside household care, are predominantly gendered forms of labor in rural China (Wu and Ye, 2016). I followed up individually with each participant via phone and learned about other social commitments and work demands that prevented them from attending focus group discussions. Tracing forms of suspended participation revealed transitions in labor processes and gendered labor relations that contributed to new lines of inquiry for subsequent focus group discussions and open-ended interviews.

Following up on forms of suspended participation prompted new insights into the social effects of environmental management. Follow-up interviews and phone calls provided insights into the daily lives of people moving across sectors of employment due to the loss of access to farmland. Some moved from agrarian production to other agrarian sectors. Others began temporary waged employment. Still others became day laborers. Some participants noted that the land rents associated with the conservation area land lease provided socioeconomic stability and flexibility to try new economic endeavors.

Milne (2012) has illustrated how forms of nonparticipation and alternative participation should be considered integral to ethically sensitive research. In contrast with Milne’s study where (non)participation reflected a conscious refusal to produce images that may reproduce societal norms associated with marginalized communities, the case of villagers’ suspended participation illustrated crucial shifts in place-based and gendered labor relations. In the following section, I turn to other forms of reflexive adaptation to (non)participation, including delayed refusal to participate in photovoice focus group discussions followed by open-ended interviews, which shed light on uneven social positionality, questions of access and social needs related to conservation projects.

Delayed refusals and open-ended interviews

In this section, I highlight a case where a participant agreed to join photovoice focus group interviews, but later expressed a preference for open-ended interviews. Upon meeting to collect the camera, the participant explained that they decided not to take photos. The context surrounding their reticence to participate became clear in a series of follow-up interviews. The participant had relied on farming and still needed to grow food for sustenance. But the participant no longer had access to agricultural land, which was zoned for conservation. The participant’s children provided minimal support. Elderly subsidies from the government and low-income state subsidies (dibao) were hardly enough to get by. The participant started growing in the open tracts of land within the ecological protection area, essentially guerrilla gardening to supplement their diet. Their guerrilla agricultural plots were removed multiple times by environmental surveyors. Despite this, the participant continued to grow vegetables in the interstitial spaces of the conservation area out of necessity.

Mitchell (2019) details the risks inherent in producing images for visual participatory research. This includes risks to individuals producing images. There is a potential that the images may negatively affect the image-maker, contribute to their vulnerability, or promote interventions against their own interests. For this participant, a delayed refusal was influenced in part by past experiences with enforcement of environmental policies that impinged on subsistence agricultural practices. In order to meet basic needs, the participant transgressed new environmental protection policies. In addition to growing vegetables in the conservation area, the participant collected scraps from rural-themed restaurants (nongjiale) that cater to urban tourists within the conservation area, dried them and ground them into powder for chicken feed. Delayed refusal was a way to safeguard against exposure to risk. I highlight it here to bring attention to how images produced through visual methods may engender new vulnerabilities.

Importantly, open-ended interviews highlighted how environmental managers’ enforcement of conservation policies created additional hardships for those with acute socioeconomic need. The methodological adaptation of conducting open-ended interviews allowed the participant to voice needs without image creation. Open-ended interviews illustrated the inadequacy of the social welfare systems for villagers whose land-use rights have been revoked for conservation purposes. They also highlighted productive strategies without access to land and how subsistence strategies are constituted in relation to the waste products of conservation-based tourism. Additionally, open-ended interviews elucidated uneven relations of power in environmental management practices. Instances such as this prompted me to continue to adapt visual participatory methods by individualizing photovoice interviews across a broader range of participants.

From focus group discussions to individual interviews

Individualizing photovoice interviews can be thought of as a form of photo elicitation (Harper, 2002), wherein the interviewee produces photos with the express purpose of discussing their significance in an individual interview context. In this section, I consider examples from individualized photovoice interviews and reflect on what they revealed about the social and economic effects of conservation projects.

In one example, a participant highlighted several photos they took of an industrial dairy farm recently built within the area zoned for conservation (see Figure 2). In the discussion, the participant noted that conservation mandates prohibited animal rearing and agricultural production within conservation area boundaries. Despite this, those with high-level roles in environmental management were able to operate an industrial dairy enterprise within the conservation area. Accounts from individualized photovoice interviews, such as this, illustrated the unevenness in environmental governance oversight. Additionally, the account pointed to alliances formed between corporate entities and environmental managers.

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Figure 2.

A dairy production facility that is located within the boundaries of an ecological protection area.

A different participant in an individualized photovoice interviews explained how they considered the newly made ecological area to be a ‘privatization of rural land’. The participant held up several photos they took of different businesses operating within the ecological protection area saying:

This is their big hotel. . .built by a national investment corporation, which is nominally saying it is protecting the environment. In order to build this, they say they have to remove us. But they come again and build these structures, rent them out, and open these big restaurants. It’s totally irrational.

In this interview, the participant used photographic images as a starting point to express how companies tasked with environmental management are profiting from newly made conservation land in ways that villagers are excluded from.

Another participant in an individualized photovoice interview took out several photos of village houses and discussed how their village was demarcated as a ‘slum improvement’ (penghuqu gaizao) project when it was incorporated into a conservation area (see Figure 3). The participant pointed to several photos of houses in the village and described how they felt about the village being designated a ‘slum’:

Now on their exhibition boards, our village is marked as a slum improvement project. This means that they would call a village as beautiful as this one, with beautiful homes, a slum. What is a slum? Real slums are crowded areas. They have houses made out of temporary materials. . .They are in danger of fires. That is a slum. . . But now our village flies under this flag as well. . . Look at these good houses here in this photo. We do not live in a slum. Calling this village a slum is just an excuse to make us move.

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Figure 3.

Village house with electric power line and motorbike in front.

These excerpts from individualized photovoice interviews provide a sense of socioeconomic exclusion and state-corporate alliances within conservation projects. Individualizing photovoice interviews brought attention to relationships between environmental managers and corporate entities that contravened environmental policies. Such findings are crucial to understanding the political economic dynamics surrounding environmental policy, rural displacement, and socioeconomic exclusion. Adapting research methods in this way offered opportunities for participants to communicate individually where they felt more secure than focus group discussions. In the next section, I turn to technologies of image-making, surveillance, and digital worlds.

Digital versus analogue

Prins (2010), drawing on Foucauldian insights on the operation of power, has argued that studies often romanticize the liberatory potential of visual participatory methods and neglect the ways participatory research – participatory photography in particular – serves as a surveillance mechanism. I would extend this argument to digital image making and online sharing. Digital image making and online platforms for sharing images and text are common. In China, the popular application WeChat allows people to interface via chat boards similar to Facebook and SMS messaging services, which may be more familiar in the West. WeChat is the most widely used application in China (Lien and Cao, 2014). Online platforms and digital devices are attractive for the ease with which participants can share images and text. With the ubiquitous use of cell phones in China (Oreglia, 2014), making use of digital platforms could simplify many research processes. For instance, sharing images and curating collective discussion could be facilitated by creating an online WeChat group. Online discussions enable interlocution beyond the biophysical and temporal limitations commonly experienced during field-based research. Similarly, the use of digital cameras could simply entail delivering and exchanging memory cards with participants. However, both digital platforms raise concerns surrounding anonymity and locational tracking technologies.

Depending on the context of research, the consequences of utilizing such technologies may outweigh the convenience. All information – images, comments, and locations – shared in online platforms, such as WeChat, would be available to the application administrators. Additionally, any information shared could be made available to outside parties or indiscriminately shared by participants. The reproducibility and shareability of the information through the application makes it nearly impossible to ensure that content created by participants remains within the confines of the group forum. Furthermore, online platforms in much of the West are subject to market-oriented surveillance technologies that would, at the very least, compromise data shared by participants and commodify personal data for sale to third parties (Zuboff, 2019). Across contexts, cameras and phones are equipped with GPS tracking technology that record time and location stamps on the images, which may reveal identifiable information to parties beyond the researcher(s) and participant(s).

In addition to concerns over anonymity, digital discussions happen within virtual space. Interactions between participants within a digital realm are significantly different than biophysically-spatially-coterminous interlocution (Hine, 2000; Pink et al., 2016). Participants’ real-time discussion can further develop themes surrounding shared experiences. This is exemplified below in a two-person dialogic exchange during a photovoice interview. ‘Participant 1’ held up a photo of a newly made treatment wetlands in a conservation area (see Figure 4) and said:

Participant 1: This environment is good, but it is not so good for us farmers.

[Pause]

Participant 2: Yeah, now we have no income and no way to make money. Families with elderly people need to go out and do manual labor every day.

P1: That’s right. Without land everyone is reliant on themselves to figure out what to do. If you don’t do manual labor, the little bit of money they gave you [for land compensation] will be used up quickly.

P2: [Compensation] is not enough even for smoking, not to mention eating. [Shared Laughter]

P1: Don’t even mention if you end up getting sick.

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Figure 4.

An artificial treatment wetland within an ecological protection area.

The real-time call-and-response interlocution between these two participants was key to developing a sense of shared experiences and socioeconomic hardship stemming from low levels of compensation and inadequate health care services. They collectively identified shared experiences of low compensation, transitions in labor, and inadequate health insurance for rural people. Real-time discussions, such as this, can provide a sense of participants’ collective challenges and shared needs. If researchers choose digital platforms for image sharing or discussion, it is imperative to inform participants about the risks of digital surveillance and take precautions to mitigate such risks.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, I have brought insights from critical accounts of visual participatory methods and my own methodological adaptations to bear on conservation-based environmental management. My reflexive approaches to visual participatory methods included attention to ethnographic moments of refusal, suspended participation, follow-up open-ended interviews, and individualized interviews with and without photos. What I learned during standard photovoice focus groups sampling and discussion provided a limited sense of environmental governance relations, villagers’ experiences and their socioeconomic needs. Triangulating between reflexive methodological adaptations was crucial to developing a broader understanding of participants’ needs, concerns, and lived experiences.

In advocating for reflexive approaches to participatory methods, I bring attention to the need for a critical reflexivity (Foley, 2002), which is apropos calls to decolonize research methods (Kindon, 2016; Milne, 2016; Switzer, 2018) and practices of environmental management (Adams and Mulligan, 2003). Reflexive approaches to participatory research recognize that the interactions between researcher and participants inevitably shape the content of qualitative data. Reflexive approaches to methods are open to aberrations and altered forms of participation. Additionally, they are open to shifting dialogic processes in response to uneven positionalities and recognition of self-silencing. Adopting reflexive approaches to participatory research can allow for forms of interlocution that would otherwise elide standard methodological procedures. As such, they constitute a crucial opportunity to account for social dynamics in environmental management and sustainability practice that other research methods neglect or obscure.

Working toward greater reflexivity entails that researchers maintain iterative approaches to methods as process. This includes reflexive attention to recruitment, moments of refusal, and diverse forms of interlocution with (non)participants on terms they define. As illustrated through examples above, reflexive adaptations offer critical lenses into embedded social relations, localized needs, and socioeconomic inequalities. Reflexive adaptations to method and alternative forms of participation can provide platforms for participants to voice a wider range of concerns and experiences thereby increasing the range and scope of inquiry. Attention to the power-laden processes of conducting research can broaden understandings of and accounting for what is said with the aid of visual images in focus group discussions and what elides the production of the image and the domain of focus group discussions. Cultivating this critical attention makes room for a wider array of voices and forms of participation.

Reflexive approaches to methods detailed in this paper shed light on ways that practices of environmental management intersect with uneven access to and displacement from land, exclusion from opportunities to participate in environmental management, inadequate social services, and partnerships between environmental managers and corporations that contravene state environmental policies. For researchers and sustainability practitioners, reflexive approaches to methods, such as these, can provide a more complex understanding of social, political, and economic dynamics, as well as insights into how environmental management programs are being put into practice and with what effects. Augmenting research praxis in these ways requires critical attention to the actions, embodied meanings, and personal linkages between researcher(s) and participant(s) (Brotman et al., 2019; England, 1994, Serra Undurraga, 2019). In this sense, reflexive approaches to research methods are crucial to socially just sustainability practices.

Critically assessing and adapting approaches to methods can yield insights into the social effects of environmental management. However, it is imperative to recognize that adapting participatory methods may not only reveal uneven social arrangements, silences, omissions, and hierarchies of power – but also produce them anew. The standard ethical dilemmas of conducting research – including but not limited to recruitment, representation, participation, and advocacy – remain. These issues are inherent to the research process and are not simply ameliorated by reflexive adaptation. In fact, reflexive adaptations demand additional considerations. If methodological adaptations include individualizing interviews in addition to focus group discussions, power imbalances between researcher(s) and participant(s) will be reconstituted in novel ways. With the individualization of participation, those with more time, social status, and vested interests in shaping the research findings are more likely to participate. Otherwise ‘hidden agendas’ may come to the fore. As such, elite or otherwise differentiated intra-community interests may be given prominence in the data collected during research. For instance, a participant may misrepresent another actor’s engagements in environmental management intentionally, through hyperbole, or otherwise frame key problems in ways that privilege their own interests or those of a particular group within the community.

Therefore, researchers should not only consider the aims and purposes of the study, as well as the social and political context, but also the ways in which adapting participatory methods may produce new forms of social exclusion, as well as inter- and intra-community divisions. Attention is required to new forms of uneven participation that may arise from reflexive methodological adaptations, particularly to how social positionality – such as class, gender, or race – shape who is participating and how.