Regenerative research practice
Autumn is a season for harvesting and sharing fruits. We take stock before hibernating for winter, and we choose which seeds to nurture for spring. Over the past year, I’ve been exploring what it means to practice research in a regenerative way. Here, I draw together what I’ve learnt so far.
I am in the second year of a collaborative PhD which has grown out of trusting relationships between CoLab Dudley, CIVIC SQUARE and Birmingham School of Architecture and Design. We are curious about co-creating regenerative futures. In other words, we are experimenting with ways social imagination practice might invite people to collectively learn and experiment with changes in their habitat that are more than sustainable. My research draws on co-creative processes from architecture, design and art that invite us to rethink and unlearn everyday behaviours and systems that harm our planet and future life, and instead bring us closer to regenerative futures. I have spent the first year of this four year PhD exploring the systems that connect and disconnect regenerative approaches, co-creative architectural processes and social labs.
My friend and CoLab Dudley collaborator, Lorna Prescott, introduced the metaphor of a rotting log to me this year. A log or branch falls from an established tree, it slowly decays and becomes connected with the mycorrhizal network below. Fungi roots connect and transfer resources between different parts of the ecosystem. This rotting branch becomes nourishment for new life to grow. I realised this relates to research. Research is a fallen branch from previous research. It decomposes and breaks down, sharing resources within a network of people, knowledge and experimentation. New knowledge then emerges, leading to many possible futures.
This could be a regenerative process — something grows, it deteriorates, becomes waste, which in turn becomes sustenance for something else. Nothing is wasted. Everything changes and is never static. This is the natural closed loop system that our planet has thrived on. But this isn’t what we’re seeing today. Colonial legacies and extractive economies with an insatiable thirst for growth have broken this regenerative cycle and escalated the climate emergency. Being regenerative is moving beyond sustainability — doing less damage is not enough to counteract the damage that has already been done to the social and natural infrastructures we rely on. A regenerative approach instead leads us to having a positive impact and contributing to the health of the planet.
This is a big aim. You might be thinking that your really specific learning curiosity or area of research couldn’t possibly give something back to our planet. Leading regenerative practitioners, Pamela Mang and Ben Haggard, argue that the core of climate issues is primarily cultural and psychological, then technological. So how can we learn or research in a way that contributes to regenerative cultures and behaviours? What does this mean for researchers?
In order for a project to be regenerative and bring about change, we first have to develop the capability and potential in ourselves. We can then help to grow the capabilities of the people collaborating around the project, or in our case research, through the process or how it’s carried out, which in turn will enable the created research to improve the health of the system it lies within. We could think of these as the ripple effects of our research.
I’ve been exploring regenerative approaches and how these overlap with research methodologies. What has emerged so far are five principles that identify shifts away from degenerative research practice. These principles build on and combine thinking particularly from Regenesis Institute, Daniel Christian Wahl, Flourish, and Sacred Civics (scroll to the bottom of the blog to see a network map of all literature explored as part of this so far).
You’ll quickly see that you don’t have to be doing learning or research relating to the climate to have an effect on it. These principles can be thought of regenerative behaviours that can contribute to regenerative change. I’m not suggesting these could all apply to your work, but there’s potentially overlaps with some of them. I’m going to take you through a very quick tour of each of these 5 principles with some examples in the hope that some of them might be helpful for you.
Embracing complexity
The first approach is embracing complexity, shifting from pre-determined methods to emergent methods. Our research is often undertaken in messy, complex and ever-changing contexts, so pre-determined methods are not particularly helpful or generative. Our research has to change with the context we are working within. This is encouraged in decolonising research — to grow our plans to the needs and potential of the context, rather than trying to fit the context into a fixed idea.
We need to unlearn methodological habits that guide us to certainty, and instead find methods that are slow and shift from holding truths to holding uncertainties. Complexity and living systems thinking can help us be flexible with our research design — helping us to focus on the connections and relationships within a system and the opportunities that can emerge from these.
One way to help us work in complexity is Principles-Focused Evaluation, developed by Michael Quinn Patton. GUIDEing principles can help us to navigate and adapt to the constantly shifting complexities that surround us, by paying to attention to HOW we do things, not just WHAT we do. They are guiding, useful, inspiring, developmental and evaluable. These five regenerative principles I’m sharing have become GUIDEing principles for my own research. You can read more about how Principles-Focused Evaluation is at the heart of how we make sense of change in our CoLab Dudley work here.
Being in relation with place
If we recognise we are part of a complex and interconnected system, we can become in relation with place. A key part of this is decentring the worldview that we are separate from nature and have dominance over it, and instead seeing ourselves and our research as part of nature, and contributing to it. We can learn how to fit in on earth in ways that are collaborative, and cooperative to ‘create conditions conducive to life’. We can do this through valuing, reconnecting with and emulating nature in our methodologies, for example bringing nature metaphors into our work or working with the seasons. For example, harvesting learning in autumn, hibernating in winter with books, and buzzing with activities, connection and events in spring and summer (although I’ve learnt this doesn’t work so well if your body is averse to heat).
Another part of being in relation with place is recognising that research can avoid just being about a place from within an institution, but instead be undertaken within place, with an understanding of that place and co-evolved with the natural or more than human systems of that place, using approaches that are bespoke to that context. For example, at CoLab Dudley, we experimented with using well-established place observation processes but we instead prototyped a more relational and ‘Dudley’ sensing experience called street detectorism. When working like this, we have to build in flexibility with our methods and ethics, which is also where those GUIDEing principles are particularly handy.
“We will not discover how to reimagine and rebuild our world through distanced academic research, separated from society and siloed within the academy”
Maintaining criticality
If we are embedded in place, or even if we are on our own in our learning, we need to maintain criticality, being careful not to become trapped within habits of thinking. Rather than acting as a lone researcher, we can de-centre our own worldviews and embrace multiple perspectives, experiences and ways of knowing. Impact network theory and network weaving can help build relationships and regenerative roles. Our network can be invited for reciprocal conversations to maintain criticality in embedded research, bringing multiple perspectives and truths. At CoLab Dudley, we convene a group of curious researchers whose different research disciplines and practices converge and interact: Growth Edges. It is a space for exchange between disciplines and to explore what can grow from the cross-pollination of our many different knowledges and ethical, philosophical and applied traditions.
We can even co-produce knowledge with participants becoming co-researchers. A key element of this is recognising that regenerative projects need to be done with, not to, people with co-responsibility.
“Co-creation can be a force for participation and democratisation that creates meaning for all, rather than simply creating value through co-opting the skills and creativity of individuals”
Transgressive action research, for example, is a way to move from institutional expert approaches to a decolonised iterative process of collective learning, action and knowledge production. At CoLab Dudley, we are particularly curious about relational ethics and how we can make learning invitations with care, reciprocity and in a way that is generative and not extractive. For my own research, this has involved slowing down and holding tensions between institutional expectations around project timelines and allowing time to nurture relationships while exploring more relational alternatives to interviews and focus groups.
Imagining and acting collectively
Rather than working in competitive and closed ways where we only share our learning when we feel it’s finished and refined, we can imagine and act collectively in open, collaborative and messy ways. We can participate in a gift economy openly sharing incomplete and messy process and findings with our networks (like I’m doing now, and with our Growth Edges notes), but also through non-academic written and visual means. Creativity-based methods can be used for communication, but also a tool for ourselves and co-researchers to discover new ways of knowing, and gain new insights while inviting multiple ways of knowing.
“Arts-based methods are… a gateway to different kinds of information, in contrast to what can be expressed through writing and speech only. They allow individuals to express themselves in a different way than with words.”
Caoimhe Isha Beaulé et al (2021)
Being accountable across time
Finally, being accountable across time is about not seeing our research as a standalone project but a transitional project, embracing long-term thinking. From the very beginning of the research we can think about the long-term transition to future collaborations between everyone involved — seeing our research as an emerging network of relationships and spin-off curiosities.
“A decolonising project dwells on time and moves at a different pace.”
I’d love to hear if any of these principles resonate with your own research so we can collectively experiment with regenerative research practices.
Here is a map of all literature used to inform these regenerative research principles so far:
My research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through Midlands4Cities. It is entangled with my work at CoLab Dudley funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation as part of a group of Pathfinder organisations reimagining and redesigning the world we want to live in to achieve deep, transformative change.
