Principles for place-based community participation

By James A. Turner.

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James A. Turner (biography)

How can a community’s sense of connection and responsibility to care for their place be strengthened? How can this lead to ground-up change, driven by communities, to tackle complex social, economic, and environmental issues? How can such change draw on the deep sense of care and belonging people feel for their communities and environments to tailor solutions to the unique needs and context of a place?

We identified eleven key principles associated with successful place-based community-led projects. These are the first principles to be developed in-country, rather than being imported from overseas and, because these are place-based, they are specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. We share them here to illustrate what specific place-based principles look like.

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Five principles of co-innovation

By Helen Percy, James Turner and Wendy Boyce

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1. Helen Percy (biography)
2. James Turner (biography)
3. Wendy Boyce (biography)

What is co-innovation and how can it be applied in practice in a research project?

Co-innovation is the process of jointly developing new or different solutions to a complex problem through multi-participant research processes – and keeping these processes alive throughout the research.

Our experience has been applying co-innovation as a research approach to address complex problems in an agricultural context, however, the principles apply well beyond agriculture.

Co-innovation is most suited to hard-to-solve technical, social, cultural and economic challenges. Such challenges have no obvious cause and effect relationships, as well as many different players with a stake in the research problem and solution. These include policy makers, industry, community members, first nations representatives and others who are involved in the research as partners and stakeholders.

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