Researching Without “Methods”: An Experiment in Socio-Ecological Sustainability Research With Rural Communities

Introduction

This paper describes the first phases of an exploratory project that redefined the roles, responsibilities, and practices within interdisciplinary sustainability research ¹ in rural Uganda. We present an improvisatory approach to research that eschews many normative assumptions within natural and social science research models but reflects a genuine commitment to the context-specific nature of accountability, impact and sustainability. Through the use of images, quotes, and commentary, this paper offers contextual detail of the locations of the research, examples of the data that was generated, and discussion of the emergent outcomes. Supported by this context, the focus of this article rests on the theoretical foundations and research practices that form a methodological framework.

The study began as a collaboration with partners in the Global North (UK) and the Global South (Uganda); from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts; and from civil society organisations. Prior to engagement with rural communities, the study was motivated by the objective to understand how rural community members make sense of their relationship with sustainability issues such as food security, energy, water, and socio-economic wellbeing (Riley & Chilanga, 2018). Additionally, the team shared a commitment to research and engagement that resisted neo-colonialism. In other words: challenging inherited power and economic dynamics to implicitly, or even explicitly, impose external value systems, practices or currencies; challenging uni-directional approaches to research – assuming that only the perceived vulnerable need development or intervention; and refusing narrow or single-disciplinary conceptions of complex socio-ecological issues. To this end, the research objectives were held contingent, ready to shift or evolve as communities took up collaborative roles in the project. The team purposed to step ‘outside the box’ of traditional Eurocentric research methods (Khupe & Keane, 2017).

The ‘box’ in our collective work has come to be a metaphor for all manner of normative and established practices in international development related research; in the case of this inquiry, the box stood for pre-determined methods. Exploring the notion of ‘outside’ existing research structures, and drawing on Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image, Jackson (2017) writes, ‘thinking without method relieves qualitative inquiry from the twin forms of epistemological imperatives of knowledge production and a conventional dependency on procedural method. Freedom from this reliance gives us a new starting place: the outside of method’ (p. 666). In this project, thinking outside of traditional methods not only allowed us to use a responsive approach to data generation and knowledge production, but also enabled us to navigate the different types of ‘procedural methods’ that become entangled -- with varying degrees of harmony -- when working across multiple disciplines and cultural contexts. Working in the ambiguous borderlands between disciplines, continents, cultures, and languages, the three authors of this paper can attest to the implications of the plurality of ways of knowing the world. From three different cultures and backgrounds, we experience the world differently from one another and we rely on more than one ‘real’ science in understanding it. Methods are designed and justified from epistemological positions that also determine valid ways of knowing and understanding a particular phenomenon. There are limitations to the application of natural and social science methods that are largely defined by the Global North, given that people engage with the world with very different epistemological lenses (Arndt & Tesar, 2019; Sajnani, 2012; St. Pierre, 2019; Singh, 2017).

Mahmood Mamdani argues that Western knowledge production tends ‘to relegate Africa to providing raw materials (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa’ (Bob-Milliar, 2020, p. 56). We set out to do something entirely different from this. Not only did our team seek to engage local knowledges on the subject matter, but in a negotiated approach that would bridge the gap between academia and rural people. To pursue these aims, established qualitative research frameworks, or as coined by Brinkmann, ‘good old-fashioned qualitative inquiry (GOFQI)’ (2015, p. 620) held too many conflicts; based as they are upon premises that fell far from the epistemologies of the communities invited to participate in this study. We acknowledge the multidisciplinary scholarship in sustainability research that interacts with indigenous knowledge systems, with community engagement, and with multiple disciplines (e.g., Moyo & Moyo, 2013; Odora-Hoppers, 2002; Pullanikkatil et al., 2016). We bring previous experience in frameworks such as Participatory Action Research (e.g., McIntyre, 2007), Participatory Rural Appraisal (e.g., Chambers, 1994), and Community-Based Research (e.g., Boyd, 2014) to support and contextualise our exploratory departure from pre-existing research frameworks. The accumulated knowledge and experience in this field is in part what brought these authors together within the wider community of practice of the Sustainable Futures Global (SFG) Network (www.sustainablefuturesglobal.com). However, the focus herein lies in our departure from established methods (Arndt & Tesar, 2019; Bridges-Rhoads, 2015; St Pierre, 2019; Sajnani, 2012). An intention to think ‘outside the box’ provided the impulse that began and directed the journey of this project.

In the next section we highlight existing work in community-based and context-specific research methods. We then introduce socio-ecological sustainability in the context of Uganda. From here the article focuses on the study contexts, followed by the research methods that emerged in response to them. We go on to discuss the lessons learnt and challenges encountered. We intend this article to contribute knowledge to the work of decolonising and localising research methods, and the Africanisation of socio-ecological research.

Responding to Context through Research Methods

In the search of context-based approaches to research, an ever-increasing range of research methods have been developed (Bob-Milliar, 2020). These draw on cultural frameworks including improvisation (Lees, 2019; Medina, 2021), indigeneity (Drawson et al., 2017; Themane, 2021), creativity (Lees, 2019; Schoon et al., 2020), and African ubuntu (Muwanga-Zake, 2009). References to culturally specific (Drawson et al., 2017), flexible and innovative (Drawson et al., 2017; Kramer et al., 2019; Bob-Milliar, 2020), and post qualitative research (Kramer et al., 2019) are now commonplace. What emerges as central across this range of approaches is the endeavour to make research meaningful to the research participants. Methodological improvisation informs ‘creatively-driven enquiry, and involves risk and open experimentation (Lees, 2019, p. 11). Relatedly, Bob-Milliar, 2020; Reiter, 2018 speaks of decolonising methods as those that address the asymmetrical power relations between Principal investigators from the Western World and Research Assistants from the global South. In doing so, the work creates space for participants as well as researchers to equally engage in and benefit from knowledge creation. To this end, Muwanga-Zake adds that ‘decolonising research decentres the focus from the aims of the researcher to the agenda of the people, and advocates a research relationship that engages the subjects’ (Muwanga-Zake, 2009, p. 418).

Scholars have advocated specifically for Indigenous Local Research (ILR), that ‘recognises and acknowledges social contexts in which research takes place by being sensitive to it and using it’ (Themane, 2021, p. 63). In the African context, ILR speaks of the Africanisation of research methods as a trade-off between Western research methods that allow generalisation of findings, and contextual rich data that addresses local needs. Africanist researchers, states Bob-Milliar, 2020, ‘can best address the issue of quantification through innovative interdisciplinary research approaches’ (p.65). Khupe and Keane (2017) describe African research methods as being transformational and participatory, and able to recognise cultural identities and diversity through language and cultural norms. One such approach is described by Muwanga-Zake (2009) as the Ubuntu research philosophy.

‘Essentially, Ubuntu as a research philosophy gives the research process a human face, as opposed to some top-down imposed research processes, and advocates collaboration with the participants and community humanely, with respect to their spirituality, values, needs, norms, and mores.’ (Muwanga-Zake, 2009, p. 418).

Muwanga-Zake (2018) later coined the Ugandan concept of obuntubulamu that relates to the Southern African Ubuntu concept in that they both refer to ‘humane and collective actions and relationships’ (Muwanga-Zake, 2018, p. 208). He differentiates Obuntubulamu from ethnography, whereby ‘while ethnography seeks to investigate cultural processes, Obuntubulamu provides already known procedures of conducting research in Bantu communities’ (Muwanga-Zake, 2018, p. 217). In general terms, the noted concepts speak of context-specificity and relevance to indigenous communities (Drawson et al. (2017). However, Drawson et al. (2017) stress that context-specific methods are not necessarily mutually exclusive with Western methods but can also enhance each other.

Improvisatory methods and post qualitative methods join broader community-participation approaches aimed at prioritising the needs of the community (Drawson et al., 2017). Ibanga lists conceptual frameworks with potential to ‘illuminate Africannes in community-based research, including ‘(i) Ethnophilosophy, (ii) Sage Philosophy, (iii) Conversational Philosophy, (iv) Conceptual Mandelanization, (v) Eco-Afrocentricism, (vi) Indigenous Language Analysis, (vii) Eco-Afro-feminism (viii) Conceptual Decolonization (ix) Storytelling Philosophy, and (x) Cultural Adaptionism’ (2018, p. 126). These are examples of how ‘African worldviews of knowledge, as embedded in the collective of oral and literary traditions, [can] be used to conduct research in science and humanities?’ (Themane, 2021, p. 62). Nonetheless, these conceptual propositions remain to be contingent upon authentic and ethical practices.

Researching with(in) communities has always been a contentious issue in academic research. The contention has been on the level of community voice or how research represents the communities’ views and beliefs (Back, 2009; Janes, 2016; Marker, 2003). Communities, especially in the rural global South, are often characterised by low print literacy levels, low socio-economic status, powerlessness, marginalisation and vulnerability (Monyake, 2018). As a result, researchers coming from outside the local communities are considered powerful, resourceful, and often seen as potential donors or aid givers (Bananuka & John, 2020). Being an outsider has scales: for example, researchers from an urban context but sharing the same nationality (as with Bananuka and Kadoma) are outsiders to the community but considered related through sharing heritage, politics, and culture, and better understood by rural community members. Researchers from the global North (Perry) are positioned by the community not only as different, but also as unrelated, as resource rich, and authoritative in matters relating to progress and development. These dynamics may be based on lived experience of receiving outsiders’ interventions in communities, but also on collective imaginaries fuelled by the endless narratives of outsiders bringing aid in the form of agricultural supplies, water, or infrastructure into the communities. These interventions are predominantly based on national policy or Northern science that assumes particular preconceived needs and proposes solutions based on outsider knowledge and external resources. Notably, there are many cases in which Development Assisted Countries (DAC) like Uganda have partnered with outsider interventions with unintended and detrimental consequences. Buildings, wells, and technologies that are left unused, un-serviced, and unrepaired for example, have become irrelevant or a reminder of imbalanced partnerships (Ndou, 2012; Rwakakamba, 2009). In addition, non-indigenous crops or animals provided from external initiatives have disrupted agricultural production, eco-systems, and livelihoods due to their impact on existing practices and conditions (Moyo & Moyo, 2013). Finally, an increased provision of English and Swahili education is resulting in the disappearance of local languages, and along with them, ways of knowing and interacting with the world (Defourny & Šopova, 2019). The outsider then, has an inherited status, he or she inspires a certain amount of expectation, but not always trust or shared objectives. Consequently, it is not surprising that outsider researchers face a substantial challenge in building trust or establishing common ground with communities and a genuinely participatory approach to research. Without a common ground, the research endeavour is limited, and unlikely to reveal anything more than superficial impressions and enactments of expected assumed roles. This dynamic is not unique to rural communities in the Global South but is heightened in this context due to the often-extreme extent of perceived power and resource divide between the researchers and the community members (Back, 2009). A general consequence of this dynamic is a tendency for community participants to act and respond in a manner intended to please researchers or to satisfy their expectations, in order to economically benefit from the interaction (Bananuka & John, 2020).

Extensive theoretical and practical work has been done over the past 50 years to counteract extractive and exploitative research, and as discussed earlier, there are models, tools, and discourses to support participatory, decolonial, and reflective research practices (see for example, Caretta & Riaño, 2016; Zarowsky, 2011; Ziai, 2007). This work often revolves around foregrounding participants’ opinions and perceptions. However, coincident with important developments in research methodologies, academia recognises definite processes, practices, and procedures for what counts as credible research. The Academy, globally, is disproportionately influenced by Northern institutions, funding systems, colonial language and normative discourses. This imbalance of influence has implications for what research receives funding; for the requirements of institutional ethical approval processes; and for peer review and publication processes. Thus, the issue of epistemic privilege and violence (De Lissovoy, 2010; Spivak, 1994) looms heavily within international research. The extent of the relevance of knowledge generated through conventional international research collaborations, and the benefit of that research to participant communities, cannot be taken for granted.

The next section introduces the socio-ecological context of the project, followed by the community contexts that hosted our collaborations. We then outline key theoretical and discursive tools that we have used to develop our no method ² approach.

The Socio-Ecological Challenge in Uganda

Human interaction with nature is purposeful and intentional (Howard, 2018). Even where human actions towards the environment appear destructive, there is a gain or profit motive. This implies that humans do weigh the losses against benefit in their relations with nature to the extent that we understand them. Within human made systems (social, economic, industrial) these decisions multiply in impact. ‘The system in its narrow pursuit of profit—and on ever-greater scales—increasingly disrupts the fundamental ecological processes governing all life, as well as social reproduction’ (Foster, 2021, Foster & Clark, 2016, p. 2). What remains key to every society is how to regulate individual and societal actions against the common good (Yurchenko, 2021). ‘For Marx, man’s relationship to nature is twofold (subjective, objective)’ (Fuchs, 2006, p. 11). In other words, whereas human existence is dependent on nature, humans also have capacity to sustain and co-exist with nature in sustainable ways.

Africans have had a deep sense of consciousness of their mutual and symbiotic relationship with nature or their environment. ‘Much as the continent is famously known to be having the widest biodiversity (biological diversity) and eco-diversity, it has been and is still losing this natural heritage at a high rate due to anthropogenic interference precipitated by the global economic order’ (Kamugisha, 2018, p. 290). As a result, African societies have long improvised ways to preserve the environment. Africans for example, used taboos, totems, folktales and proverbs to strengthen understandings of the connectivity between human and environmental behaviours. Strauch et al. (2008) reports on the example of the Sonjo people of Tanzania who use a combination of traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge to ensure harmonious relations with ecosystems such as forests, swamps and water resources. Unfortunately, recent efforts in sustainable development particularly in the global South have rarely tapped into local indigenous knowledge. The challenge for our research team as outsider academics was to create a methodological approach that could be adapted to engage genuinely with indigenous knowledge. Any debate about environmental sustainability in African societies ought to raise consciousness but not by means of didactic messages from elsewhere of what ought to be done.

The research contexts and methods described below focus entirely on a community level engagement. It is important to note that this is not due to an assumption that sustainability challenges begin or end at a community or local level of practice. To the contrary, the interconnectedness of local and global actors, individual and societal systems, geopolitical and biodynamic forces are central to a broader agenda to interrogate how knowledge is constructed and by whom. That being said, the research approach is described and applied herein with a focus on the community and local level relationships with the immediate environment. As previously stated, the study was motivated by the objective to understand how rural community members make sense of their relationship with sustainability issues such as food security, energy, water, and socio-economic wellbeing.

The Study Context

The agrarian communities invited to this study are located in Apala and Abia Sub-counties in Alebtong district and Kibanjwa, Kitoba Sub-county in Hoima District. The Apala and Abia communities are healing communities recovering from 20years of internal conflict, primarily instigated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel military outfit. By the time peace began to return in 2006, approximately 90 percent of the population had either been internally displaced and living in camps, or moved out of the country, with hundreds of thousands tortured, raped, or killed (Dolan, 2009). This healing community is the home of the Apala Widows and Orphanage Centre (AWOC), established to assist widows and orphans in coping with and recovering from the effects of the LRA that saw many of the men in the community either killed or forced to join the rebels.

In contrast, the community of Kibanjwa has been affected by the recent discovery of oil in the area, which has resulted in intense investment in the area due to research and the increase in opportunistic settlements. Consequently, the majority of local people have not only been forcibly evicted from their lands, but forced to sell at very low prices, and exposed to exploitation and harsh treatment (Tumusiime, 2014; Tumusiime et al., 2018). Nevertheless, Kibanjwa community has enjoyed relative peace and stability for more than 30 years and is representative of an agrarian community in Western Uganda. Significantly, both participating communities were homes to at least one member of the academic research team. These pre-existing relationships provided an important bridge to the partnerships and relationships that formed the foundations and motivations of the research.

Research, Enquiry, and Engagement with “No-Method”

The remainder of this paper describes our process of research despite the heavy history, culture, and constraints that we carry as academic outsiders in two rural Ugandan communities. This research tackles the compromises and negotiations made with pre-determined regulations including for example, institutional financial processes, funder requirements, and project timelines. Suspicious of the ethical and practical implications of normative research practices in complex community contexts, we join many research innovators in striving for flexible approaches, relevant and responsive discourses, and opportunities to unsettle status quo, to see what else might emerge (Pierre, 2014; Wiles et al., 2013). The growing field of post-qualitative research rejects the inevitability of traditional humanist and empirical frameworks of reference such as the authority of coding, the legitimacy of member-checking, the logic of triangulation, and so on (Strauch et al., 2008; St Pierre, 2019). In this study, we put these ideas to work in conjunction with decolonial theories that challenge extractive approaches to research (Strauch et al., 2008) that take data from one context (for example a rural community) to benefit another (for example an academic conference presentation). We resist the epistemic violence (Spivak, 1994) that underpins the subtle and blatant ways in which colonial frameworks and discourses silence or obscure other ways of knowing and being (for example interpreting and describing cultural practice in a community through academic discourses that translate and transform one reality into something else). This approach foregrounds the ethical and ontological dimensions of research, that emerge through less familiar and often surprising avenues of practice and engagement. In this paper we commit not to interpreting the reality of others, not to extracting the data from communities to present to you; but rather, to demonstrate the methodological outcomes of putting decolonial and post-qualitative approaches to work and to indicate the plural outcomes that this enabled.

Outcomes: The Strengths and Limitations of the No Method Approach

“At the beginning, when [community researchers] were asked whether they know what they were going to do about the environment, it looked like they were looking more for external solutions. However, by the end of the day, people started talking to each other” (Academic researcher)

It would be an exaggeration to say that the research team shared a methodological common ground from the outset. On the contrary, we had far more questions than conclusions, and far more uncertainties than expectations. However, as a team we shared a willingness to work outside of our comfort zones of expertise and outside of familiar research practices – this willingness was critical. The methodological findings are explored in the following section in relation to: research accountability; impact; and sustainability.

Conclusion

We conclude by highlighting the transformative learning process that this project has enabled (Merriam & Ntseane, 2008; Robinson & Levac, 2018), and continues to reveal. It has been a process of new insights and self-discovery, not least through the new levels of awareness of the insights and innovations that have been possible through genuine engagement across different knowledges. This approach to research is a dynamic process that recognises and responds to the changing and unpredictable times and situations in which research takes place.

The no method approach achieved its objectives of unsettling the traditional categories, hierarchies, and design practices of qualitative research design, through pursuing active collaboration with community members as co-researchers. Institutional disciplinary knowledge divisions were tempered, in favour of community-led constructions of topics, contexts, and questions. The involvement of community researchers which allowed the research to begin from shared topical issues rather than pre-determined research objectives and questions, increased the level of trust between the academic and community researchers. The research problem was co-created as a community problem, and not the researchers’ perception of a problem. We take cognisance of the fact that unequal power relations still persisted through the collaborative process, whilst the team worked to renegotiate power whenever possible through valuing lived experience and local knowledge systems.

This paper has demonstrated that there is a growing movement against extractivism and the imposition of academic research disciplines in community-based research. We articulate a clearly responsive and ethical practice in the context of community research in sustainability without necessarily erasing methodology; but rather altering the rules to accommodate the unexpected, the unknown, and the other.

Ethical Considerations

Our entrance to the communities was based on prior working relations with a local CSO and the communities. We obtained expressed permissions from local government structures, at district, Sub-County and Local Council 1 (Village) level. Due diligence was ensured in line with standing national research rules and standards. Principles of confidentiality and anonymity were strictly followed, and where photographs and videos were taken and recorded, those concerned were asked for permission and consulted on whether their images could be shared.