Building Resourceful and Resilient Communities through Adaptive and Transformative Environmental Practice

Project Information

RECOMS

Grant agreement ID: 765389

DOI

10.3030/765389

Project closed

EC signature date 3 August 2017

Start date 1 March 2018

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 3 878 509,75

EU contribution

€ 3 878 509,75

Coordinated by

COVENTRY UNIVERSITY
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RECOMS (Building Resourceful and Resilient Communities through Adaptive and Transformative Environmental Practice)

Reporting period: 2020-03-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In RECOMS community resilience constituted the capacity of a community to adopt, respond to and embed/normalise practices of resourcefulness into everyday life. This ensures that transformations at the level of the everyday, produce enhanced levels of resilience during acute crises.
The purpose of RECOMS was to train 15 ESRs in innovative, transdisciplinary and transformative approaches to promote and facilitate resourceful and resilient community environmental practice. As a direct outcome in full accordance with the original aims of the project, the 15 ESRs have been:

-Equipped with advanced knowledge, expertise and experience in how to nurture and support the co-production of resourceful and resilient community environmental practice.
-Trained in transdisciplinary scientific techniques supportive of investigating the emergent nature of community-led practices of resourcefulness and resilience, including how they unfold across different social and cultural groupings in space and time.
-Upskilled in applying a multi-method approach with a particular emphasis on participatory and creative visualisation techniques, whilst retaining sensitivity to differentiation at a local level via on-going appreciation of the value of different knowledge cultures, experiences and situated forms of ‘know-how’ in community practice.
-Capable of establishing new forms of creative, visual methods for reviewing, recording, communicating and exchanging knowledge on the outcomes of resourceful and resilient community environmental practice across a range of different audiences.
-Expert critical thinkers on both the conceptualisation and (co-creative) practicing of community resourcefulness and resilience, including as a means of enabling and supporting the engagement of a range of other stakeholders.
-Equipped, as practitioners of sustainability science and innovators in creative forms of communication and visualisation, for their choice of public, private or third sector career pathways.
-Advanced in nurturing transformative practice and thinking, specialized in resilient and resourceful forms of collaborative environmental resource management.
-Capable of playing a leading role in establishing long-term collaborations in research and training and between science, civil society, policy, NGO’s and private stakeholders, extending beyond the lifetime of RECOMS.
-Established in increasing awareness among the general public via stakeholder participation, open access scientific publication, etc.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the period of March 2018 to March 2020, the RECOMS recruited 15 ESRs and through training events, helped them develop the scope of 15 individual research projects. In the period 1 March 2020 and 31 August 2022, the project focused on furthering the training of the ESRs and completing the remaining project deliverables.

Main results include:

-Seven training events; creative skills developed in photography, theatrical skills, art of invitation, storyboarding, design and cartoon making, video editing and video making, exhibition setting and working with various stakeholders. Skills developed in academic writing, ethics and data management, publishing and scientific presentation. Further skills developed in group works, project management, work planning and general communication.
-An online creativity toolkit featuring multiple creative methods for research.
-Thirty four scientific articles published.
-Over 100.000 people reached via over 60 events organized or contributed to, over 50 presentations at scientific events, as well as RECOMS website, social media and ESRs’ blogs.
-An edited book collection on Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship (accessed in excess of 32,000 times).
-An international confex (conference and public exhibition, Brussels June 2021) and a manual on setting up public exhibitions.
-Six policy briefs, a Stakeholder Report, three articles in specialist open access media outlets (with a combined audience of over 30,000 readers), two international policy events (addressing social justice and food policy council dimensions of sustainable food systems), three animated educational film clips.
-Serious Gaming Re-AdjusTool on evaluating urban food strategies.
-Hosting of an interactive display and associated creative methods (story telling) workshops at the European Bauhaus Festival (Brussels, June 2022)
-Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Care-full Scholarship.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The innovativeness and originality of RECOMS was evidenced through: its conceptual framework, combining and advancing three state-of-the-art scientific theories (social-ecological systems, critical (evolutionary) resilience, and community resourcefulness); its three golden threads of transdisciplinary science, participatory action research, and visual and creative research methods; its thematic research structure (unlocking and empowering, adapting and transforming, collaborating and connecting) and its extensive relevance to EU policy, strategies, priorities and associated societal challenges. Socio-economic impact was realised through:

- The production of a new generation of sustainability scientists, trained in transdisciplinary, participatory research and creative methods. The ESRs have actively engaged with and developed the expertise of sustainability scientists and practitioners across a range of different sectors, scales and inter/national settings. Evidenced through the ESR's post-RECOMS initiatives and continued application of creative and participatory methods in their practice.

- Multi-scaler promotion of the importance of re-grounding of environmental policy and re-alignment of climate adaptation and mitigation strategies around embedded and collaborative forms of restorative and transformative environmental resource management and transdisciplinarity, communicated through a range of different mediums in order to ensure that the messages are heard by a full range of policy, practitioner, third sector and wider civil society audiences.

- A number of subsequent funding acquired by consortium members, based on scientific and methodological outputs, related to the RECOMS project. The direct connection with RECOMS is the application and further development of creative and arts-based research methods in partnership with transdisciplinary, place-based approaches.

- The MOOC on Care-full scholarship. Substantively founded upon the doctoral research of the RECOMS ESR fellows, the ambition of the MOOC is to initiate and sustain global community of learning capable of transforming the functioning of academia.

- The community of Fellows. Despite the physical distancing imposed by the pandemic, the experience of having to overcome all the challenges faced (professionally and personally) whilst being based in a foreign country (with the help of additional supporting arrangements put in place– e.g. monthly virtual consortium ‘coffee break’ catch-ups; virtual peer-support writing meet-ups; on-demand supervisory meetings) had the effect of cementing the bond between the fellows. That they have moved on to take up positions in a range of different public, private and third sector organisations gives plentiful reason to hope they will act as drivers of transdisciplinary collaborations and networking initiatives for years to come.

Graphic representation of the struggles caused by COVID-19 Pandemic

Visitors engaging with the Spaces of Possibility Exhibition

RECOMS logo in color

Opening of local exhibition at the Noorderzon Festival during Groningen Training Event 3

Graphic representation of 15 ESRs

Group preparation and discussion during the first training event in Vaasa, Finland

Re-AdjusTool, available on: https://recoms.eu/re-adjustool

Group photo made in Vaasa, Finland, first training event. Copyright: Janne Saukkonen

Participatory video making during training four in Vienna. Copyright: Sole Muniz