Collaboration and co-creation in coastal communities: perspectives from the Global South
Free and open to all.
Coastal communities across the globe are faced with multifaceted, interconnected challenges with competing environmental, social, and economic needs. In rural coastal communities of the Global South, the challenges presented by climate change are complicated by those related to development, resource management and sustainable livelihoods. The rapid growth of such coastal communities exacerbates these challenges and reinforces the need for effective and sustainable governance. Such governance requires a move from top-down approaches to human-centred approaches. Human-centred coastal governance engages multiple stakeholders and combines multidisciplinary knowledge, participatory approaches, co-creation of solutions and multi-institutional partnerships.
This webinar will present case studies from several coastal communities in the Global South. These illustrate several of the complex challenges facing such communities, and the collaborative and empowering strategies that have been used to meet them. Based on these case studies our speakers will present a transdisciplinary framework to inform the co-creation of coastal management strategies that meet interconnected human and environmental needs. They will also take a deeper look at a bottom-up governance framework that has been developed in West Africa in consultation with coastal stakeholders and communities.
Our speakers
Professor Sian Davies-Vollum is a Professor of Environmental Geoscience with expertise and qualifications that span Earth and Environmental sciences. She has worked in Higher Education in the USA and UK and is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has extensive leadership experience in universities and is currently Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Education, Arts, Science and Technology at the University of Northampton. She is a trustee of the Geological Society and Chair of Universities Geoscience UK, the organisation that represents Geoscience in UK Higher Education.
She has broad experience of coastal and fluvial environments and has worked in Europe, North America and West Africa. Her background is in sedimentology and river/coastal processes. As she has embraced multi-disciplinary approaches and worked with researchers from across natural and social science, her work has evolved to include impacts of climate change, and sustainable coastal governance. Sian founded and leads the Resilient Lagoon Network, which brings together coastal researchers from across West Africa. She chairs the IES Marine and Coastal Science steering group and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Anthropocene Coasts. She is also a member of the Europe-based “Rethink Blue” COST-Action, and the Association of Commonwealth Universities oceans expert group.
Dr Debadayita Raha is an environmental social scientist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. With a background in Sociology and a PhD in International Development, her work focuses on sustainability, policy implementation, and how environmental change shapes people’s lives. Her doctoral research at the University of Reading examined gender dynamics and rural development policies in Public–Private Partnership projects in Rajasthan and Orissa, India. She later held a postdoctoral position at the University of Nottingham on a major EPSRC–DST project involving 15 UK–India institutions, where she analysed barriers to smallscale biomass energy and its potential to address energy poverty through wholesystems thinking. Her research has since expanded to explore climate change and natural resource management in coastal regions of the Global South. She studies the social intersectionality and interconnectedness with changing environments. As a qualitative and ethnographic researcher, she investigates policy discourse, social intersectionality, and the persistent gaps between sustainability strategies and local implementation.
Banner image credit: Sian Davies-Vollum
