Twentieth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The urgency to comply with the Sustainable Development Goals has led to discussing the need for useful knowledge to make decisions and coordinate actions. Added to this are the constant statements about the importance of incorporating different actors, as well as different types of knowledge, in the co-production of knowledge and in decision-making. This has occurred in particular ways in sustainability issues. For decades, various models of participatory research, or interactive research, have been designed, where academics coordinate with actors from other social sectors – such as businessmen, rulers, and civil society organizations – in the production and mobilization of useful knowledge. Given this context, the purpose of this work is to explore alternatives that are based on the participation of heterogeneous actors and present potential to build useful knowledge and to build frameworks for sustainable action. To this end, two cases of interactive research structured in Mexico are analyzed: the case of “Community and Biodiversity”, an organization that practices participatory research, monitoring and intervention; and the case of the “Participatory Socio-Ecological Observatories”, local laboratories where participatory methodologies are applied and where action frameworks are also explored in a participatory manner. From this analysis, it is pointed out how these participatory methods enable the building of courses of sustainable action based on local and public knowledge. It is also suggested how the recognition and equal treatment of different types of knowledge – public, local, encoded, tacit, specialized– leads to conceiving these participatory mechanisms as democratic processes.