Guest Post by Kalani Williams, 2024-2025 Sustainability Leadership Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University
Sustainability in a new light
The United Nations defines sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” We typically think about this in terms of natural resources like clean water, viable soil, and healthy ecosystems. But recently, I’ve been thinking about the sustainability of research projects. Houses near water are built to withstand flooding and buildings near fault lines are constructed to absorb shock from earthquakes. But many research scientists are realizing their research projects aren’t structured to handle a sudden withdrawal of funds.
New challenges
In the last couple months, many researchers in the United States have had projects frozen, and even more have grants in limbo due to pauses in review panels. This situation is challenging for everyone, but it poses a unique challenge to researchers working with communities. While many people support the work of scientists, some see them as being out of touch with the concerns and needs of their community. When researchers from the United States work in other countries, this is often further complicated by histories of colonization. My research group has worked with communities that post- colonization have been exploited by western mining companies and are understandably cautious towards outsiders interested in learning about their land. A movement to take a grassroots/decolonization approach to science that takes on the concerns and questions of communities from the get-go has started to take hold, but the recent shocks to funding have put the sustainability of these relationships under serious threat.
Building trust
The first step towards working with any community is to establish a relationship built on trust. This takes time and often several rounds of preliminary meetings with communities. Most research in collaboration with communities is funded based on the interests of scientists. This means that the scientist applies for funding and leads the project, but how they engage with communities is really up to them. Guidelines for how to conduct science in more ethically responsible ways have become increasingly popular, but most of these offer no solutions for what to do when funding runs out or is terminated unexpectedly. When funding is suddenly discontinued, scientists often have no avenue to continue their research and are unable to deliver on community expectations. In some cases, even explaining what happened could be difficult if communication requires costly travel.
Networks of support
At CSU I’ve been lucky to work in a research lab that collaborates with a community in Uganda. Within this community, we work with ambassadors who live near each of our research sites. These ambassadors serve both to report our research to the community, and to share the concerns and interests of the community with us. A few years ago, this program was threatened by shifts in funding caused by circumstances with little connection to our project. While the loss of funding impacted our group, the ambassadors were able to continue their work with researchers we collaborate with in- country. By having a network of relationships, not just with people in the community but with people at other institutions who also have connections to that community, we’ve been able to maintain stronger contact despite fluctuations in funding.
Moving towards solutions
How can we make our projects absorb the shock of these funding earthquakes? How can we ensure that these projects can ride out changing political landscapes and deliver on their promises? For our international research, working with communities as well as within-country researchers was not only both ethically responsible and practical, it also provided a safety net to continue working with communities when funding was scarce. The last two months have made me realize that the institutions that I have long taken for granted are far more fragile than I realized and that we need contingency plans. I don’t know what these would look like. Seeking alternative funding sources? A plan of action for how to handle projects cut short at various stages to manage expectations? Creating strong networks of collaborators who can step in? Some programs have recently been developed to help build community-scientist relationships, such as NIH’s ComPASS. ComPASS is unique: here the community leads the project while partnering with researchers who support its implementation. Programs like these are a huge step in the right direction for encouraging science that serves the people, but they still rely on “top-down” style funding. I’m grateful to be a scientist in a time where there has been so much thought on how to do science responsibly and in which so many guidelines have been published encouraging decolonization of science, but none of these acknowledge the potential for severed relationships due to shifts in funding. It’s time to work on a new set of guidelines: how to build community-scientist relationships that are strong enough to weather the storm.
Photo Credit: Kevin Castle, 2023.