Insights from a design-led inquiry about rural communities in Brazil

Introduction

We wish to begin by answering the sort of question that first-time listeners ask travelers—what brought you here? Our starting point was a shared concern: how could the gap between the world of research and the world of practice be bridged? We had separately witnessed an apparent disconnect between social contexts focused on research, where the polished PDF reigns supreme, and another kind of social context, focused on practice, where resources are allocated and spent, trade-offs faced, lives changed. In practice, the three of us had felt the lost potential implied by this gap. We had experienced and discussed it in diverse work scenarios, within academia, the public sector, and civil society organizations. The “research-practice gap”, as we soon started calling it, became an intellectual and practical obsession for our team when we started working together as public policy postgraduate students at the Hertie School in Berlin. Our journey began with a shared consciousness of this gap and of the need to demonstrate its urgency, and act upon it (Figure 1). In 2014, when this journey began, we felt—and still do—that the actual audience of academic research seems quite limited compared to the potential audience that could find such research useful or relevant. Research findings reach much less people than those that could benefit from them in practice. The difference between actual and potential audiences of research seems particularly pressing in the so-called “Global South”, where, in our experience, people immersed in worlds of practice beyond academia—notably, public managers and officials, CSO/NGO members, and diverse business folk—seldom engage with researchers or directly learn from their work. Academic knowledge seems to remain constrained to academic circles, even though research findings could permanently support practitioners for better decision-making, and in designing, implementing, or advocating for a given action or policy.

Figure 1.

The ‘research-practice’ gap that exists between researchers and practitioners is illustrated here as individuals with stereotyped elements (note, e.g., the PDF and the “action box”). Source: authors and Bárbara Marra.

When we started working on this gap, a parallel interest, rooted in and emphasized by our shared Latin American experiences, became the centerpiece of the content space that we wished to explore together first in our efforts to bridge the research-practice gap: the (dis)connections between urbanity and rurality, between the worlds of the city and the worlds of the land, the field, and the forest. This common interest, still present in our professional lives, ties closely with an interrogation of the relations between humans and nature, and of the possibility of justly and sustainably inhabiting this planet.

Design —or more precisely, design principles, approaches, and tools—became the most important means for our collective exploration. Elements of design allowed us to link both interests—research/practice, urban/rural—together, in ways that fundamentally questioned ourselves and our initial assumptions and that led us to both successes and failures.

Initially, we realized that researchers together with intermediaries between them and practitioners, constitute the human nodes of a complex system representing an indeterminate situation, in Dewey’s sense (1938). In other words, and following Dewey, we found it to be a situation worth inquiring into— by “inquiring” we mean engaging in an ongoing, observation and test-based process to better understand how and why the situation occurs and to experiment with ways of acting upon it. Dewey’s suggestion that such an inquiry should become the basis for human intentional action became an inspiration for an influential strand in the field of design (Buchanan 1992): one from which we seek to learn and in which we wish to act.

In this paper, we describe the main elements of the first long phase of this design-led inquiry, which revolved around a research project on sustainability in agrarian reform communities in Brazil (2014 - 2015), and reflected upon the key insights that we gathered in the journey. We interpreted this project as the first prototype for OndaPolitica, an organization that extended in time, with several turns and pivots, until 2018. We decided to focus here on this first phase, given its direct connection with a relevant question from The Design, After (Cumulus Bogotá 2019): how can information extracted from rural and urban spaces be used?

The paper is organized into the following sections: (2.) a presentation of the research project in which we inquired into the research-practice gap (our meta-space) and focused on understanding sustainability challenges in rural Brazilian communities (assentamentos) and generating insights in response (our content-space). We (2.1.) describe the methods we followed, emphasizing the importance of design principles and approaches, and (2.2.) present a summary of the results. We then (3.) propose a series of afterthoughts on the failures and contributions of this journey, discussing how design played a role in “going beyond the PDF”, what went wrong, and some of the unexpected spillovers that came about.

Going beyond a PDF about sustainability in rural communities

Methods

The roots of Brazil’s extremely unequal structure of rural landholding trace back to colonial times, when the Portuguese authorities divided the vast territory into large stretches of land and granted control and exploitation rights over them to a relatively small number of wealthy members of the nobility on a hereditary basis (Faoro 1958). Since that period, the Brazilian agrarian model has been deeply marked by inequality, environmental degradation, and orientated towards commodity production (Furtado and Iglésias 1959). In this context, agrarian reform has been presented as a key strategy to deal with land inequality and promote economic and social development in rural Brazil. Assentamentos are rural settlements resulting from the particular Brazilian process of agrarian reform (for more details, see Paschoal et al. 2015).

Given our research purposes, we decided to adopt a broad understanding of sustainability not just as the “capacity to endure”, but also to “meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987). This is a “malleable” definition that signals the many disagreements that may arise in the practical implementation of the concept (Kates, Parris, and Leiserowitz 2005).

How to foster sustainability in assentamentos? This was our guiding question. We chose to follow a qualitative field methodological approach. We believed that our question required us to “lay our hands on the institutions” (Mead 2005) and have direct contact with elements of agrarian reform policy. In order to gather data, we opted for a collective instrumental case study. Although embedded in different contexts and having different characteristics, the communities we chose to investigate had two elements in common: they were rural and evidenced an interest to translate the concept of ‘sustainability’ into practice. Also, we believed that researching ecovillages—as a “contrast case” to assentamentos—could lead to a better understanding of our research question.

Our research was experimental as the state of prior theory and research in the field (sustainability in rural agrarian communities) is still limited or nascent. “Identifying patterns” became our main goal, suggesting ties with theory and outlining recommendations as “an invitation for further work on the issue or set of issues opened up by the study” (Edmondson and McManus 2007).

Furthermore, our research was inspired by a strong constructivist approach. Although some preconceived ideas were present in our research project design, we tried to go into the field without preconceptions, frameworks or even theories to understand our data. Inspired by the Gioia Method and grounded theory, we designed our research to allow “revelation, richness, and trustworthiness”. As Gioia suggests, we tried to “pick people’s brains” and “figure out how they make sense of their organizational experience” to elaborate descriptive narratives that could capture what we think they know and explore salient themes based on their experience (Langley and Abdallah 2011).

We felt that in order to collect data and insights on selected cases and to later present them to our readers in novel ways, multimedia material would have to be collected. Following an increasing interest in incorporating a visual dimension to policy research (Meyer et al 2013), we collected videos, photos, and sketches, and incorporated these into our research description and analysis.

In total, we visited six assentamentos and six ecovillages (two of these in Germany) (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Scenes in an assentamento in Brazil (left) and a German ecovillage (right). Source: authors’ photographs.

We visited each community for different periods of time during May-October 2014. In each case, we collected data through in-depth interviews, situated interviews, and direct observations. Interviews were semi-directive: although we had general points of interest, there was no fixed list of questions. In each community, we conducted at least one “situated interview” (Jones, Bunce, Evans, Gibbs, and Hein 2008), which occurred in spaces linked to the context of the interview. Table 1 below presents an overview of the data.

Table 1.

Overview of collected data (by community and method) (2014). Source: authors.

We prioritized in-depth video interviews as our main source of information. After transcription, we used QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) software (Atlas.ti). Inspired by Corbin and Strauss (1990) and Mair, Marti, and Ventresca (2012), we pursued an analytical process consisting in successively “coding” our data in order to make sense of patterns and identify salient topics and questions. Using insights from theory and our interactions with the data, we realized that sustainability challenges could be clustered and that they were deeply connected with each other.

As part of the inquiry into bridging the research-practice gap, we produced a poster depicting the visual story of our journey to bring multimedia and interactivity into research production and communication (Figure 3). The poster uses the metaphor of a “research map” as a device for the user to navigate the journey. It can be explored and read in detail in a dynamic online presentation that uses Prezi (see Werneck et al 2015).

Figure 3.

Poster presented at the #FORCE2015 conference at Oxford University. Source: authors.

Results

Challenges for sustainability

We defined ‘sustainability challenges’ as situations that need to be addressed in order for an assentamento to meet its present needs and endure in ways that can support future generations’ ability to do the same. After applying the methods described in the previous section, we found that sustainability challenges could be categorized into five clusters:

1. Moving towards sustainable production

Figure 4.

Terra Vista, an assentamento in Bahia, Brazil. Source: authors and Lucas Rached.

The production of agrarian goods can be recognized as an essential component of life in the assentamentos for two different reasons. The production of food for self-consumption constitutes a key element to support subsistence under conditions of scarcity—it upholds food safety. But the production of agrarian goods is also the chief economic activity of the vast majority of assentados. The decision on what goods to produce and how to organize production is first discussed collectively by assentados when they establish the settlement. This decision depends on the particular setting (climate, environment, etc.) and influences the spatial distribution that the assentamento will have. Given their particular contexts, how could assentados move towards sustainable agrarian production?

2. Building infrastructure for sustainability

Figure 5.

Sieben Linden, an ecovillage in Beetzendorf, Germany. Source: authors and Rodrigo Levy.

Infrastructure matters for assentamentos because it provides the basic physical resources to support the livelihoods and activities of their inhabitants. This is as true in assentamentos as it is in any other human settlement; however, the salience of infrastructure-related challenges for assentados is remarkably intense, and the repercussions of lacking or having inadequate infrastructure are particularly important for the prospects of fostering their sustainability. As expressed by one assentado, “without infrastructure, what occurs is what has happened in Brazil until today […] people without infrastructure end up leaving the land and moving to the city, to try to find a job for themselves and for their kids. This is the story of my family.” [11:68].

3. Creating attractive conditions for youth

Figure 6.

Aldeia, an ecovillage in Itacaré, Bahia, Brazil. Source: authors and Lucas Rached.

Several interviewees stressed that “keeping the youth on the land” is a prominent shared concern among assentados. The problem was usually framed in terms of life in an assentamento being perceived by youth as “less attractive” than life in urban centers—a description consistent with the strong pattern of rural-urban migration that has characterized Brazil and other Latin-American countries during the past five decades (Dufour and Piperata 2004). The presence of youth in these communities is important because it can influence the social dynamics in ways that are potentially conducive to enhanced sustainability. Young individuals function as vectors of new knowledge for the community. An assentado explained that, in order to convince neighbors to stop the “inertial practice” of using “agrotoxics”, they had learnt from experience that it was better to approach their neighbors’ children [17:76].

4. Accessing, using, and disseminating sustainability know-how

Figure 7.

IPEC, an ecovillage in Pirenópolis, Brazil. Source: authors and Lucas Rached.

Accessing, using and disseminating sustainability know-how became an even more salient topic after our interaction with ecovillages. In every ecovillage we visited, we discovered an explicit intention to create practices to disseminate know-how. Two big strands of this know-how were: ecological sustainability—such as bioconstruction, compost/dry toilets, agroforesting, permaculture—and knowledge for community-building. Such know-how can be applied in different ways: as sources of income (through courses and workshops); as enablers for more sustainable infrastructure; and as drivers to create a stronger community.

5. Enabling cooperative collective dynamics through conflict resolution

Figure 8.

Aldeia, an ecovillage in Itacaré, Bahia, Brazil. Source: authors and Lucas Rached.

Throughout their different phases of existence, communities face various situations in which conflicts emerge. Sustained interaction with others in daily life requires disagreements to be settled and actions coordinated, especially when spaces are shared, resources are scarce, and future livelihoods depend strongly on what neighbors can do together. A more cooperative system of social dynamics allowed some of the communities to provide services —restaurants, laundries, and supermarkets— which not only diversified jobs, but also brought income stability. Some ecovillages, such as ZEGG and Sieben Linden, master techniques to resolve interpersonal friction in living and working together.

Afterthoughts: how did design help us to move beyond the PDF?

Inspired by the four orders of design (Buchanan 1992), we highlight contributions derived from reflecting on and acting upon the main hypothesis of this inquiry: namely, that if elements configuring the “research-practice gap” are (re)designed, non-academic readers can better engage with research outputs. Besides producing the classical, formally adequate PDF as a “masters thesis publication” (Paschoal et al. 2015), we tested different strategies combining these orders to guide our exploration.

#Language. We were inspired by analogous communication practices, such as long-form journalism or film documentaries, which tell complex stories to broad audiences. First, we sought more clarity by using plain language that was in line with our empirical methods. The result was a narrative primarily built by interviewees more than academic references. Second, we used visual elements not only to illustrate the communities studied but also to present our findings. Graphic designers helped to craft visual narratives such as the poster and a visual research map (Figure 9):

Figure 9.

Visual research map produced in 2015. Source: authors and Flatland.

#Data-objects. In order to produce more than purely textual narratives, we integrated videos, photographs, and illustrations into the analysis, which was made easier through the use of QDA software (Atlas.ti). Coding and classifying these types of data objects—usually not included in the final paper or report—enabled a different kind of output to be produced, which opened up possibilities to craft a multimedia narrative.

#Interaction. First, with different outputs, we created potentially more engaging experiences for people likely to be interested in the content. Instead of only linear stories, our prototypes provided a broader range of options to access the stories of the interviewees, the contexts of the rural communities, and the methods used. Second, we designed and facilitated several workshops in research institutions, public agencies, and conferences to discuss our inquiry and to encourage other researchers to reflect on their audiences and on how their research outputs could enhance user experiences (Figure 10):

Figure 10.

Workshop at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Source: authors’ photograph.

#Practice-research system. Looking at the fourth order, where the gap most clearly resides, we could not perceive effective change without developing a strategy embedded in specific institutional contexts. Although we formally created an organization (called OndaPolitica) to develop such projects, for personal and professional reasons it was not created de facto. It remained an idea and a foundation statute that was never implemented. Some of us worked professionally in research institutions and developed projects to change the situation from within. However, after having subsequently participated in other projects, we can at least state that in order to change the inquired situation, we need much more than workshops and the disperse application of methods in singular disjointed projects. We need a combination of collective action and genuine parallel experimentation and learning to bring about lasting institutional change.