Building transformative capacity in southern Africa: surfacing knowledge and challenging structures through participatory Vulnerability and Risk Assessments

Blogpost by Daniel Morchain

ABSTRACT

Click to watch Karen O’Brien interview Daniel Morchain about his and Dian’s work.

‘This is not research!’ was the call for inaction that we needed to overcome to push ahead with this work. Getting researchers and policy-makers (and some lukewarm practitioners) to move away from a love-hate to a love-love relationship with stakeholders is a desperately needed, fundamental transformation.

This is especially important when it comes to research for development. Here, a thick wall between extractive and truly inclusive engagement of stakeholders separates conventional research from hands-dirty research that focuses on solving problems in urgent need of solving. 

Doing research by including stakeholders and genuinely giving them room for participation is hard, unpredictable, costly, time consuming and much messier and exhausting than sticking to the traditional guns. It will lead to chaotic moments, to politics getting in the middle of it all, to power relations threatening to mislead the findings, to the goal-post moving and going off on tangents and more tangents. It will require researchers and other used to leading to share their positions of privilege and authority; giving up some of the power that institutions have and confer to us.

And for all these reasons precisely, this research will matter. Don’t be surprised if the tangents become, after all, the core of the question researched.

We invite you to learn more about this experience by reading our full article article in the Special Issue of Action Research HERE.