Volume 25, Number 2, 2025 Action Research for Eco-Justice and Climate Action (Part 1) Guest-edited by Blane Harvey

EN:

Over the past decade, Kichwa communities in San Martín, Peru, have faced growing tensions with environmental authorities over conservation and climate policies affecting forest access and use. Through a participatory action research project, we co-created a collaborative mapping methodology to document Indigenous visions on these transformations. This paper examines how critical mapping—integrating hand-drawn maps, storytelling, timelines, and digitalization—crystallizes Indigenous territoriality, enabling both internal reflection on territorial struggles and claims-making. Rather than being merely a response to imposed environmental governance, mapping becomes a practice that generates Indigenous agency and territorial autonomy. By enabling communities to represent their landscapes, history, and rights on their own terms, critical mapping becomes a powerful tool for grassroots political action.

EN:

Community-based action research (CBAR) is designed to facilitate community members’ identification of challenges in their lives, as well as to collaboratively develop ways to confront those challenges. It is also designed to be an inherently ethical and justice-oriented paradigm for social change and inquiry. When working with community members in areas such as the Peruvian Andes and North India, the problems community members now identify inevitably include the effects of environmental degradation and climate change on the community, as well as challenges with economic opportunities. When engaging in collaborative action to address these challenges, tensions can arise regarding community land-usage and its economic implications. Inherently, there are ethical implications when tensions arise between different facets of community identified needs and the possible effects of solutions. In this paper, we reflect on two projects that have had ethical tensions and consider ways CBAR can transform tensions into constructive ways forward.

EN:

Jharkhand state in India has high levels of air pollution posing severe health and environmental hazards especially in mining districts. Ten grassroots women leaders undertook community-participatory research to track air quality in their neighbourhoods. Through this research, they assessed people’s perceptions on neighbourhood sources of air pollution, health impacts and responsiveness of the government health system to ailments linked to that air pollution. Their findings reveal poor air quality in places frequented by women, children, and vulnerable populations and further highlights adverse health impacts and the inadequate capacity of the government health system. This research enabled the women to initiate dialogues with different stakeholders on severity of the issue and corrective action needed, leading to initiation of measures to tackle air pollution at the neighbourhood level.

EN:

In this paper we share the story of our participatory action research project to create a lunchtime program to support elementary school students in building reciprocal relationships with the land, enhancing collective wellness. An emergent pond that suddenly dried up due to unseasonably warm temperatures, leaving tadpoles stranded, became the focus of much of our learning. The children worked tirelessly to restore the pond and care for the tadpoles. Through this research, we learned how impactful environmental education can be when it is guided by love (verses logic), involves thinking with (rather than thinking about) more-than-human kin, and when children actively participate in knowledge creation and mobilization through digital storytelling. Our study illustrates how action-research serves as a generative approach to participatory planetary health, inspiring both individual and collective action to address the multifaceted environmental crisis.

EN:

This article takes the form of a conversational text in which we as five adult educational researchers reflect on our varied and intersecting experiences in conducting eco-justice education research with elementary school students as co-researchers. Drawing on a theoretical and rhizomatic foundation of children’s rights, sociology of childhood, and eco-justice, we describe our engagement with a Grade 5/6 class on a participatory research project centered on vermicomposting. We situate ourselves within the action research spiral of ‘plan-act-reflect’ as we dialogue and think together about our experiences as co-researchers with students and look ahead to future opportunities to fully realize children’s rights and justice in environmental education and research. We center our discussion on three guiding questions: 1) What is eco-justice education and what might it look like within the context of participatory research with children? 2) How can adult researchers empower children’s autonomy and active citizenship in ecological research while engaging as co-researchers with them? 3) What are the strengths, challenges, and possibilities for children’s participation as eco-justice and climate action researchers? Our reflective text contributes to a body of knowledge around the meaningful engagement and empowerment of children in eco-justice and climate action explorations and activism.

EN:

Sustainability researchers and non-academic actors are working more closely than ever to drive deep structural transformation toward just and sustainable futures. This paper illustrates how embedded researchers in South Africa navigate the political nature of institutional spaces through transdisciplinary action research. We propose radical incrementalism as a guiding philosophy and analyse seven cases using a collaborative autoethnographic approach. The analysis identifies four strategic choices: whether to embed, how to engage critically, when to maintain distance, and how to sustain long-term commitment. These insights illuminate the ethical and political complexities of shaping—or failing to influence—policy change within government institutions.

EN:

As climate change becomes a pressing issue, there are many concerns about the vulnerability and autonomy of small island developing states like the Caribbean, and relatedly, for the meaningfulness of the initiatives that are being designed and implemented to build community resilience. We use a decolonial framework and semi structured interviews with nine governmental and non-governmental community-based climate change actors in Trinidad and Tobago to explore the issues impacting community resilience. Thematic analyses point to community resilience constructions as bottom-up initiatives built on principles of participatory action, access, and co-creation of initiatives. Implications for community-based resilience are also addressed.