“Our counterparts in the Global South need to know what it means to collaborate with the diverse Geo faculty”

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 professor Ajay Bailey, whose work includes inclusive transport, ageing, and public health in India.

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

“One of my current projects is EQUIMOB, which is about inclusive mobility for the vulnerable population in India and Bangladesh. The project involves a research group from Utrecht University, BRAC University and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, and the Institute for Social and Economic Change of Bengaluru in India. We had one PhD candidate or postdoc per institute, and we hired all the positions for this project locally so that people can continue to work where they live.”

Why do we need to collaborate with the Global South?

“Being from the Global South myself and collaborating with the Global South, I see the culture of institutions, the project-based extractive research, and the impact those things have on the people in countries where we do research. I’ve been a part of both groups. We need to balance theses unequal relations to have meaningful impact on the communities we study. The perception of the Global South is changing a lot. Whether it’s big countries or smaller places, each have very different contexts and infrastructures. When we build relationships across, you have to look where they stand within these geopolitical connections that exist.”

What do you need to create a meaningful collaboration?

“In my projects I make sure there is a clear understanding of the goal of the project. We do this whilst we’re writing the proposal. Different people have different goals and ambitions and understandings on how things should be carried out. We lay it out to show it is okay to have a diverse set of goals.

You don’t want to start collaborating and building trust just for a project. If you only go for one project and then come back to the Netherlands, it doesn’t really work. My collaborations in Manipal started when I was giving workshops there so that I could understand their researchers and research communities, which took me about two years to fully understand. After a few years I received  an endowed visiting professorship there to train public health researchers in qualitative research and we built a research centre “together”. People working there then become your collaborators. Those relationships you build and keep for life. When you’re just going in for data, there won’t be trust in the long run.

It takes time to build rapport and a relationship, and to find out about hierarchies and structures. You have to find out what your approach is, what the other’s approach is, and how to find a middle ground. That is only possible when the collaboration is beneficial for both parties. Each of the partners also needs to know what they want out of the collaboration. You have to lay boundaries and might need to rethink the process when it doesn’t work.

Across projects, co-ownership is very important. I try to involve people across the whole project cycle and make sure people feel responsible for the tasks and deliverables that are included in that particular project.

Something I’ve learned over the last years is that in collaborations the focus shouldn’t be on personalities, but on institutions and topics. People are important, but the person you’re collaborating with shouldn’t be the main reason to collaborate. When that person leaves the project, you have to rebuild that relationship with someone else. If the project falls apart when you or any of the other collaborators leave, it is not set up the right way.

At the same time, a network across the different collaborators, and particularly the PhD candidates and postdocs, can really help. This is something that we built in our projects: every Friday PhDs and Post-docs in our projects can log on and discuss their topics, which creates a network where they can help each other wherever they are in the world.”

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

“We have a great amount of expertise and we need to use our interdisciplinarity as a way to build these bridges with Global South partners. The faculty of Geosciences has already done so much in so many different ways, but we don’t show and benefit from it enough – both internally as well as externally. Our knowledge that is generated here is linked to all these different places we do fieldwork. Our counterparts in the Global South need to know what it means to collaborate with Utrecht University and the diverse Geo faculty.”