CoActD5.2: Digital Output on Participatory Methodologies. Research Co-Design in CoAct R&I Action #3 on Environmental Justice.

DISCLAIMER:  The present Project Deliverable has been submitted to the European Commission for review. The information and views set out in this report are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein. 

CoAct (Co-designing Citizen Social Science for Collective Action) aims at co-designing concepts, methods and tools for citizen social science (CSS) around “wicked” global social issues. Four different research and innovation (R&I) actions organise the empirical work of CoAct. This report presents the rationale, purpose, structure and content of a video, which constitute the deliverable D5.2 of CoAct, showing the co-creation process to be used in the dissemination of a digital platform developed in the frame of CoAct WP5. This video is especially important to enhance engagement of co-researchers and to foster new collaborations in the platform’s implementation phase.

R&I Action #3 aims at co-designing CSS tools to facilitate actions contributing towards Environmental Justice in the Matanza-Riachuelo river basin, carried out by teams from UNSAM and FARN. The basin covers 64 km-long and 6 million people live there, most of them in vulnerable socio-environmental situations. In particular, we aim at co-designing a digital platform to produce and share data that can contribute to mapping different socio-environmental problems as understood by a diversity of stakeholders and promote concrete actions for addressing those problems.

The production and dissemination of the video is part of UNSAM and FARN teams’ strategy to promote and sustain participation of the different types of stakeholders in the forthcoming activities of the R&I Action #3. The video shows the collaborative efforts in designing R&I Action #3 goals and the co-design process of the digital platform. By showing the platform as a result of a collective effort carried out during the initial stages of the R&I Action #3, we expect to promote participation in future key steps related to platform adoption and use, the analysis of data shared through the platform and the definition of strategies for visualisation to promote transformative actions. 

The Covid-19 pandemic created delays and changes in the activities planned for T5.2 which also affected the D5.2. The former was delayed in six months while the latter was in nine months. We originally planned to co-design research using collective mapping techniques. They implied the organisation of workshops gathering around 40-50 people, from different neighbourhoods which proved to be impossible to implement with social distancing and other Covid-19 sanitarian restrictions. The communities associated to the R&I Action #3 are amongst the most severely affected by the pandemic in the country, in epidemiological and socio-economic terms. In that context, we needed to change research co-design methods to other participatory methodologies, also based on workshops, but of smaller size which could be organised virtually and separately for different neighbourhoods. As a consequence of the change in co-design methodologies, we also needed to change the planned D5.2: from collapsible cartographies, which would have been the result of collective mapping activities to a digital output on participatory methodologies, which also shows the research co-design activities. Within the R&I Action #3 the D5.2 had the purpose of being used as a tool in the platform dissemination plan. This remained unchanged. In fact, in the context of digitalisation of interactive activities imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, a digital output works better as a tool for disseminating the digital platform. Changes in T5.2 and D5.2 were included in the RP 1 Technical Report, which has been approved by the Commission.

The report is organised as follows. Section 2 presents an introduction to CoAct and the R&I Action #3 on Environmental Justice; section 3 describes the stages of the R&I Action research cycle and presents different stakeholders’ profiles and their roles; section 4 discusses the rationale and differential value of a video in Covid-19 times; section 5 describes the main activities that provided inputs for the video, briefly comments on the video creation process and presents the video structure and detailed content. Section 6 describes how we plan to use the video in the upcoming months and section 7 concludes.