Roxana Roos – Integration and Implementation Insights

Researcher motivations affect equitable collaboration with local and indigenous peoples

September 8, 2026September 1, 2026

By Roxana Roos.

What motivates researchers in choosing to work with local and indigenous communities? How do these motivations shape how much say local and indigenous people actually get in the research that affects them? What do researchers need to do to ensure that collaboration is equitable?

Here, I describe two clusters of motivations.

The first cluster revolves around verbs such as “understand,” “collect,” “study,” and “know.” Researchers in this group are largely driven by personal interest, curiosity, and a professional identity (“I am an anthropologist. It is my job to find out how people live”). Here, the researcher is the active party: they interview, observe, analyze, and publish. The local and indigenous people, on the other hand, play a more passive role; their practices and narratives are studied rather than being part of a partnership.

Using cross-cultural dialogue to break down inappropriate knowledge hierarchies

March 4, 2025

By Roxana Roos.

How can indigenous, local, artisanal, craft, tacit, counter, gendered and experiential knowledge better inform solutions to complex problems, such as climate change? How—when faced with conditions of complexity, uncertainty and competing tenable knowledge claims—can the actionable knowledge base be pluralized and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality, potentially actionable knowledges and sources of relevant wisdom? What are the pitfalls and challenges ahead?

I start with some cautions for the usual practice of transdisciplinary research and then highlight key aspects of cross-cultural dialogue, alongside pitfalls and challenges.

Integration can reproduce undue asymmetries

Improving how we do research with indigenous and local communities

April 23, 2024April 9, 2024

By Roxana Roos

How can we best include the perspectives of indigenous and local people in global change research? What are the major challenges in doing research with and within local and indigenous communities? How can we best deal with such challenges?

More and more, global challenges like climate change are being felt locally, and indigenous peoples are often the most vulnerable. The inclusion of the perspectives of indigenous and local people when developing ways to respond to societal challenges is increasingly the norm in the scientific world. For response strategies to be effective, communities need to be involved in their development. This is true for a whole range of topics, from social justice to climate adaptation. But getting local communities involved in research by ‘outsiders’ can be a challenge for a multitude of reasons.

I propose eight important barriers to the participation of local and indigenous communities, along with potential solutions, based on the experiences of practicing researchers who have worked with such communities in the Philippines, Mexico, Russia (Siberia), Greenland, Norway (Svalbard), Canada, Germany, Greece, Colombia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Bangladesh, France, and New Zealand.