Environmental Governance

Current projects

AgriLink - Agricultural Knowledge: Linking farmers, advisors and researchers to boost innovation (2017-21)

AgriLink is a project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project aims to help stimulate the transition towards more sustainable agriculture by improving understanding of the role played by agricultural advisors in strengthening knowledge flows, enhancing learning and boosting of innovation on the wide variety of different farm types that exist in Europe.

It is being implemented by a diverse consortium of academic and non-academic partners that cuts across classical boundaries in research, policy and practice.

ARCLIGHT - Action Research Community Led Initiative Guyana Health Team (2019-20)

This research project is funded by the British Academy’s Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects Programme. It will develop, implement and evaluate a capacity building and intervention programme for addressing the challenges of mental health in Guyana. In particular it will identify, record and share successful local practices for building community mental health resilience that have evolved to cope with challenging cultural, organisational and environmental conditions, and devise mechanisms to promote these in low resource settings within Guyana and worldwide.

ESBA - Research partnership for an agroecology-based solidarity economy (2019-21)

This AHRC/GCRF funded research partnership will:

• identify and strengthen community capacities for an agroecology-based solidarity economy
• develop, combine, test and refine research methods for making those community capacities more visible, as a basis to strengthen them through multi-stakeholder knowledge co-production (diálogos de saberes)

The participatory research method will enhance community organisations’ capacities. Their wide participation will enrich multi-stakeholder knowledge-exchange for such capacities. Lower-income agroecological communities will formulate and demand support measures, enhancing their capacities for an agroecology-based solidarity economy.

Completed projects

CADWAGO - Climate change adaptation and water governance (2013-16)

CADWAGO was a consortium led by the Stockholm Environment Institute that aimed to improve water governance by developing a more robust knowledge base and enhancing capacity to adapt to climate change. The project brought together 10 partners from Europe, Australasia, and North America with extensive experience of climate change adaptation and water governance issues. More about the CADWAGO project is available.

Lead OU researchers: Chris Blackmore, Kevin Collins, and Ray Ison

COBRA:Community Owned Best practice for sustainable Resource Adaptive management in the Guiana Shield, South America (2012-15).

This Project involved Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in London with OU and others brings together key South American and European Civil Society Organisations that have extensive experience in enabling and disseminating grassroots solutions to complex problems in the Guiana Shield region of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The research institutions on the project have scientific expertise to rigorously evaluate these grassroots solutions and determine their impact, while the commercial enterprise brings with it the business and technical expertise for promoting the financial viability of these initiatives. More details about COBRA are available. While the COBRA project itself completed in 2015 the actual implementation is ongoing through the Cobra Collective (Cobra Collective).