“It is a new challenge every time you coproduce with a country you’re not embedded in.”

The faculty of Geosciences is working on a strategy to collaborate with the Global South in a meaningful, inclusive and mutually beneficial way. We interviewed people who currently work with the Global South to explore their experiences. Today we speak to PhD candidate Carmen Mallqui Caballero, whose work focuses on the marginalization of climate scientists in tropical countries of the Global South.

In which way do you currently collaborate with the Global South?

“My current project focuses on the causes and consequences of marginalization of knowledge systems and climate scientists from tropical countries in the Global South. The project has representation from not just one continent, but from countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

There is an unequal balance in the production of papers between the Global South and the Global North. That doesn’t mean that the Global South doesn’t also produce papers, but because it is very expensive to publish open access (although some journals have decreased the Open Access fee for the Global South), often they can’t afford to do so and, as a result, they are not cited. When researchers from the Global South collaborate on papers led by the Global North, it increases the visibility of those researchers. Likewise, most of the journals are also housed in the Global North, while many of the Global South journals are not connected to the databases that are peer reviewed. Peer reviewers might not want to work for a journal without prestige.

My personal experience, being from Peru myself, is that usually the Global North uses its contacts for fieldwork and data collection in the Global South, and then that’s it, they only collaborate at that phase. In my project, I would also like to publish about the fieldwork results together with those research partners in the Global South. And even before the fieldwork starts, I want to know what is relevant for them because sometimes priorities in the research agenda can differ a lot.”

Why do we need to collaborate with the Global South?

“Open science needs to be inclusive science. There are two levels to non-inclusion: leaving out scientists and leaving out knowledge systems, such as indigenous communities’ knowledge. There is a tendency in research to be extractive, not just in the Global North. Historically the direction of research and knowledge production has been North to South, not the other way around.

Many voices are currently not well-represented and, for instance, a lot of climate data is extrapolated to entire countries that are very diverse. Sometimes, the data that researchers come up with isn’t detailed enough to represent an entire country, and then policies based on that data are made for the entire country. That causes a spatial mismatch between local and global policies. People tend to look down upon local policies, even though they are often most fitting for that area. To hear these local voices it helps to open the conversation, as we all have our own interpretation of data.

Something I’ve noticed is that it is not very common for researchers who are originally from the Global South to do research in other countries in the Global South that are not their homelands. I can still feel like an outsider as someone from Peru doing research in Mozambique, for example. We need to remember that it is a new challenge every time you coproduce with someone in a country you’re not embedded in.”

What do you need to create a meaningful collaboration?

“Coproduction is the ideal way to work in collaboration. Include your research partners in the entire research cycle, starting from objectives and questions and the design of the fieldwork to the publication of results. It takes time to create a meaningful collaboration. You need to ask the questions: what can I do for the people with the project? Is the research relevant to them beyond my own research agenda? You need to become embedded into the environments that relate to the country you want to work with by making connections and learning about a country’s agenda, for example by visiting conferences and participating in educational programmes in that country. It can be challenging to meet the objectives of all disciplines, but in the end, it will be rewarding to build bridges between groups because we benefit from diverse perspectives.

If you push only your objectives, you will not get openness from the community. You need to be open to change your questions and objectives, but sometimes the academic system is not really set up for those changes. Ethical procedures are important and set to protect  people participating in the research, but they can be in the way of flexibility when things change.”

What can Utrecht University and the faculty of Geosciences do better when it comes to collaborating with the Global South?

“Lately, I see that collaborations are becoming more interdisciplinary than before with the inclusion of international researchers. But there are places where we can still learn from. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs can be a good example for Utrecht University. They give funding to water-related projects that include researchers from the Global South and North, but the leading institution has to be from the Global South. Where the Global North institutes often have more funding, labs, access to software, etc., the Global South sometimes does not. The idea is to share infrastructure and educational programmes in both directions . This is a good way to coproduce by giving the agency to the Global South to lead the programme and allow them to develop management skills. It empowers those institutions and gives them agency, and it pushes students and researchers to not only go for fieldwork but also to learn in a more contextual environment.”