Huelva 2007 - Participative research-action activity

Good governance needs a kind of knowledge on territory that generates global visions on the main problems that can affect the sustainable territorial development. Nevertheless, the scientific knowledge about territory is a complex knowledge as it is difficult to identify and quantify causal links among lots of potential factors. Besides, it is an uncertain knowledge because of the scarce information, the measure errors and the undetermined results. Consequently, the knowledge about territory is usually ambiguous and different legitimate interpretations based on observations or valuations of similar data are used to coexisting.

In this latter case, values have a special importance when we make the results interpretation. To get a knowledge that favours governance, the territorial actors’, and even the actions recipient people’, participation is fairly necessary. Indeed, territorial actors and recipient people emphasize different kinds of knowledge and explicitly underline different values systems from which the scientific results can be interpreted.

On the other hand, during their own actions, the territorial actors can neither generate this knowledge set that is necessary for good governance.

The problems complexity, actions sectorialization and urgencies that are linked to the actions requirements usually prevent the actors from generating the global visions necessary to solve the territorial problems and which need scientific knowledge and methods to develop.

The actors and especially those which work at the closest level of the actions recipient people, often do not have the basic tools that are usually used in the scientific field to gather, analyse and rarely share the information that they are used to managing.

In other cases, the information is available but they do not have the theories, methods, instruments, space and time to interpret this information and convert it into useful knowledge for action.

All these problematic worsen when the actors involved in the information generation and management are numerous and different.

In this approach that underlines the scientific world and territorial action complementarity, the participative research-action activity can be defined as a kind of research activity in which researchers and territorial actors are involved to reach a double objective: a scientific one that is improving the knowledge on a concrete aspect of the territorial structure and/or dynamics and another one that is acting on a concrete problem of the concerned territory.

In this context, the stake for territorial intelligence is to design and diffuse research methods and tools that facilitate the multidimensional approaches that are able to involve actors who have very different nature (partnerships) and that allow generating and managing knowledge in a participative way, by intensifying the dialogue between science and society, research activity and action, by favouring the appropriation of this knowledge by the territorial actors and by the people and eventually by contributing to improve territorial governance.