New chair to build community research capacity in the global South

UNESCO will inaugurate a chair on Community-based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education on 1 September, which will provide new opportunities to build community research capacity in the global South. University World News spoke to co-chair Budd Hall, a professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, about his role.

Hall, who is director of the Office of Community Based Research at Victoria and secretary of the Global Alliance on Community Engaged Research, represents higher education sector while co-chair Rajesh Tandon, founder of the New Delhi-based Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), represents the civil society sector.

UWN: Why is there a need for a chair on Community-based Research and Social Responsibility?

Hall: There is this idea of the co-construction of knowledge. It’s the recognition that knowledge is being created by non-governmental organisations, by local governments, by small-scale businesses and so forth – by people who are trying to get something done in their communities.

Universities are trying to make sure the knowledge they are creating has more impact in the local community as well as being part of the global body of knowledge – that’s the knowledge mobilisation side.

The other side is community-based research, where universities and civil society groups, organisations, networks and movements work together on some of the complex issues facing communities. This is what we call community-based research.

UWN: Why has UNESCO become involved in this area of university activity?

Hall: In general, all the UNESCO chairs have one common principle – to build research capacity in the global South in the particular theme of the chair. Many are context-specific, such as sustainability, open information systems, curriculum development and so on. But there had not been a chair that would look at the academic, scholarly and community-based practices of community-based research and social responsibility.

UNESCO, in the aftermath of the World Conference in 2009, put a lot of emphasis on social responsibility. When they found out about the work that Rajesh Tandon and I are associated with – the network called Global Alliance on Community Based Research – they encouraged us to put in a proposal for a chair in this area.

UWN: Why co-chairs? It’s not so common among UNESCO chairs.

Hall: Most of these chairs are just a single person. But we wanted to emphasise, first, North-South collaboration and, second, civil society-university collaboration. By proposing a partnership between a research-intensive university in Canada and a civil society research institution in India, we thought that would demonstrate what we believe in, in the very structure of the chair.

UWN: What can you achieve together as co-chairs?

Hall: Our focus will be on building research capacity and advocacy work in the global South. As with other higher education trends, much of the writing, the communication, the insights, come out of the United States, Japan, England etc.

You get the idea that these places must be the centre of these ideas and activities, and in many cases that’s not true. What’s true is that often the historical development of higher education in most of the global South has been much more community-oriented because many of the universities have come into existence along with [anti-colonial] grassroots independence movements and so forth.

They have seen a lot of struggles. What we want to try to do is increase the visibility and the work being done in the global South and increase its influence, so that funding bodies would support and increase investment in the kinds of structures and networks and training that are needed to allow institutions in the global South to be equal partners in this global movement.

UWN: From the universities' side, what kind of research do you envisage?

Hall: There are two broad streams of research.

One is innovation in community-based research, methods and approaches. Over the past decade quite a lot of work has been done by universities and community partners, and what we are looking for is those kinds of innovations where relatively modest kinds of investments in terms of research partnerships can deliver big impact on some of the issues that people are facing in their communities – poverty alleviation, sustainability and social justice.

We’ll also be looking at social responsibility. In a world where resources are tight and there are a lot of demands. If higher education is going to be publicly supported then there has to be new evidence of social responsibility. So we are looking at institutional approaches to social responsibility – how they are articulated, what sort of support they need.

UWN: Will there be a geographical focus of this work?

Hall: We’re working all over the global South. But Africa is a part of the world where there is less networking, though there are some national networks. We want to work with key universities and leaders in Africa that support the building up of networks and exchanging information.

We’d be working on this by identifying the people who are already doing this kind of work in a number of places – Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal and South Africa. The first step will be to hold a meeting, which we think will be held in February 2013, probably in Uganda.

A number of key people are leading the field now and we will move as they feel it’s important to move, not coming in from outside to tell them what to do.

We are working in Asia because that is where Rajesh Tandon is based and his network PRIA is an Asia-wide organisation with 30 years of work with civil society doing capacity building on the civil society side.

Many of these organisations don’t have research capacity. If they’re going to be partners in a more active, organising sense, we need to help civil society build capacity.

There are a number of community-based research institutes in Asia. Malaysia is very interesting, and is wanting to play a regional role. They have supported a couple of networks such as AsiaEngage.

UWN: Not all countries have strong NGOs. With this approach how do you make sure countries that need help, have it, even without civil society on the ground?

Hall: Civil society is always changing, always expanding, and gains strength in some places, loses strength in others.

In North Africa and the Middle East, until a couple of years ago you would have seen hardly any NGOs. Now there’s been an explosion of different kinds of civil society structure as those societies struggle to become more democratic, so that region is going to be a place [to research].

In Burma, a unit in a university that is sensitive to community needs could be playing a kind of proto-NGO role. In the context of doing research, it could be contributing to building neighbourhood organisations or organisations interested in particular aspects of work.

Whatever kind of regime or country, there is always something interesting to be done.

UWN: What are the needs of higher education institutions and in what areas do they need this type of UNESCO and global support?

Hall: There needs to be investment support to transform higher education institutions into places that are working much more in partnership with civil society.

Higher education used to be seen as a producer of elites. That view has changed over the past 10 years. It has moved up the regional investment priorities of regional development banks, the World Bank, and UN agencies.

There need to be surveys in different countries. We’re providing some training capacity and we’re also working on some policy development to do this kind of work – it requires additional institutional investment.

At my university, we’ve got an Office for Community-Based Research, where people from the community can come to find a partner. They have the same thing at Macquarie University [Australia] and Stellenbosch University [South Africa].

This is a new field and working with civil society as a co-creator of knowledge requires some reorientation and new training.

As academics, we’re trained to produce scholarly articles and to publish them in certain kinds of places, so within universities themselves there’s work to be done around the policies of recognition of this kind of community work – policies of merit review and promotion and so forth of individual academic staff members.

UWN: How do you match dispassionate university research with the advocacy approach of NGOs?

Hall: We also need to build research capacity in civil society. What we’re saying is that scholarship needs to be engaged rather than detached, so we need to be working together. We don’t need to be afraid of advocacy if it’s based on evidence.

What we’re trying to do is strengthen the evidence base of some of these kinds of issues, from an academic point of view. We are taking the theme of the research from the community itself.

Most NGOs are putting in [research] proposals and they need a literature review, but it may be 10 to 15 years since they were in university and that’s where a postgraduate student, for example, could be a great help working with the NGO. Or maybe they need some ideas about [research] methodology, and we have all kinds of professors who do that.

If you are working in areas like sustainability or rights of children, or housing affordability, as a scholar you may be very on top of the latest theories but you’re never going to be as well informed on the details of day-to-day life as the people who are living them and experiencing them.

So I would say that this kind of new way of doing research is going to increase the credibility of the university and will also end up contributing to better theory, because people will be working from a more informed perspective.

In a number of issues, the civil society organisation has certain credibility because of its closeness to the grassroots. But the university has credibility because of its expertise in knowledge management. If you put the two together, the theory is that it will accelerate the pace of positive change.

The principle is that knowledge exists distributed throughout society in many different ways, and we need to find that universities are becoming aware that they are seen by society as having a monopoly on knowledge creation. With the kinds of issues we are dealing with, we need to ensure we’re tapping into knowledge to the full as much as we can.

* Q&As are edited for length and clarity.