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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 September 2021.
Special Issue Editor
Interests: urban food systems; urban food activism; urban governance; sustainable livelihoods; participatory development
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue will focus on urban and rural development.
Persistent poverty and hunger, conflict, climate change, and pandemics significantly challenge efforts at local, state, and international levels to strengthen urban and rural livelihoods. The cross-cutting nature of these challenges requires multidisciplinary approaches using novel methodologies to understand their complexity and identify ‘bottom-up’ development strategies and sustainable solutions.
The use of participatory methods in rural and urban development is well-established across many fields of study and is generally understood as offering a reflexive approach to understanding power and agency. As with any research methodology, participatory methods are subject to limitations and criticisms, for example, being susceptible to co-optation by particular gendered interests. Since the emergence of participatory methods in the 1970s, a variety of participatory frameworks and tools have been developed to give a ‘voice’ to marginalised groups in interpreting and determining their own development needs and solutions, such as Rapid Rural Appraisal, Participatory Rural Appraisal, Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), Focus Group Discussions, and Gender Role Analysis.
The aim of this Special Issue is to present up-to-date methodological and applied perspectives on the use of participatory methods for urban and rural development in countries of the global South and North. Relevant topics include theoretical aspects of participatory development, and methodologies and tools aimed at improving our understanding of obstacles to social, economic, or environmental sustainability ‘on the ground’ as well as at identifying potential solutions.
Papers selected for this Special Issue will be subject to a rigorous peer-review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.
Dr. Alec Thornton
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- participation
- sustainability
- livelihoods
- urban
- rural
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Title: Transdisciplinary Participatory Research Methods for Conservation and Development: Experiences from the Western Amazon
Authors: Stephen G. Perz, Andrea Baudoin, Marliz Arteaga, Martha C. Rosero-Pena, Elsa mendoza, Foster Brown, Leonor Mercedes Perales Yabar, Sabina Cerruto Ribeiro and Galia Selaya
Abstracts: Transdisciplinary participatory action research (TPAR) methods are especially valuable in contexts where there is rapid change, high social inequality, and great uncertainty about the future, which drives stakeholder demand for information on particular topics to serve stakeholder goals. The Amazon offers such a context, for it is the epicenter of a suite of conservation and development issues of global importance, like climate change and new economies, and it is home to diverse stakeholders often in contention with each other over questions of how to improve environmental governance. Topics important to outside researchers, like carbon budgets and biodiversity, have driven a large amount of research in the Amazon. Stakeholder mobilization has however changed the terms by which research is conducted, from the definition of priority topics to the application of findings. Due to stakeholder mobilization, research in the Amazon is now necessarily participatory, for stakeholders routinely issue demands about how research will be conducted and for what purpose. In this paper, we provide an overview of the value of TPAR methods, focusing on the domain of conservation and development work in the Amazon. We present a framework that organizes the research process around key steps, and identifies the contributions of stakeholders and researchers at each step. The heart of the paper then reports on each of six concrete experiences of researchers working with stakeholders in the western Amazon in a TPAR mode in different ways. Specifically, we relate experiences with the following strategic practices for transdisciplinary PAR: 1) capacity building of stakeholders for participatory data collection involving environmental monitoring of forest health, 2) collaboration with stakeholders as co-researchers on interethnic collaboration for greater community incidence in infrastructure planning and governance, 3) investments in indigenous communication capacity and participatory data collection to strengthen community ties for environmental governance, 4) the “knowledge exchange train” as a means to scale up multi-directional knowledge dissemination to inform participatory research and action on priority topics, 5) the “knowledge exchange cart” featuring student researchers working with local communities on community priority topics, and 6) participatory planning and environmental monitoring for civil defense networking to manage risks due to extreme climatic events. These experiences constitute models for TPAR that can be replicated in other places with similar circumstances concerning rapid change, high social inequality, great uncertainty, and mobilized stakeholders.