Justice compass

Identify and focus on a concrete place-based problem and cluster of needs that has a clear constituency/community/network of actors related to them and who have worked on this problem and needs and found out concrete solutions and (development) pathways and strategies to deal with it. own moral integrity of our own actions and worldviews and how they impact upon global biodiversity and the climate

Identify and bring in all the necessary and possible plural sources of knowledge that contributed to such solutions and that can further help learning about addressing the problem /needs.

Create an open, fair and competent process to integrate (or at least map out) these sources of knowledge all to the extent possible and then use explicit equity criteria (e.g. procedural and epistemic justice) to carry it out.

Finally write about it, but with a focus on exploring how your own research can contribute /has contributed further to the existing pool of knowledge, as an additional source of knowledge, and in further improving the equity and efficiency of the strategies developed so far in solving the original problem / addressing needs; or even, as a result of learning, in connecting multiple solutions and solving other problems at the same time -e.g., in building transformative conditions of systems’ change. 

Assess all the learnings with the original actors and others that have been identified in the course of the research-action process.

 If possible, repeat the same process with additional actors and expanding networks of action so as to further scale-out, in and up all such learnings. The key is to contribute to second-order learning -doing things differently under a different paradigm, that of (net-positive) regenerative sustainability. In short, act and learn from action first and the write about it, not the other way round!! This would avoid the ‘knowledge-deficit model’ of science-policy communication which has for decades already been refuted and found insufficient to deal with global environmental change.