Operationalizing Participatory Learning and Action for Maximum Societal Impacts

Across many indigenous and climate-vulnerable communities, a quiet crisis is unfolding – research fatigue. Most communities that have been repeatedly studied, interviewed, and documented are becoming wary of talking to researchers, largely because they rarely see tangible benefits or meaningful engagement from previous research works. In this Blog post Nuhu Adeiza Ismail dives into how Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) can transform this extractive dynamic – drawing on fieldwork with Guet Ndar fishers and Fulani pastoralists in Senegal.

Learning together in Fero (Photo by: Nuhu Ismail)

In the early phase of my fieldwork with mobile indigenous communities (Guet Ndar fishery community and Fulani pastoralists) in Senegal, I was confronted with remarks like: ‘I don’t want to talk, you people are just coming to steal our knowledge for your benefit without giving us anything in return’ many people like you have been coming to ask us similar questions (on climate adaptation) for years now, but nothing is changing, they will come, ask us plenty questions, raise our hopes, they leave and we never see them again’. Many related stories like these have been reported by various scholars and colleagues. This perceived extractive pattern from research communities risks eroding trust, distorting realities, and ultimately weakening the very knowledge systems researchers seek to understand or build.

This blog makes a clear argument: Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) is not optional; it is essential if research like the CuHeMo (Cultural Heritage in Motion) project is to avoid extractive patterns and generate real societal impacts. Drawing on Robert Chambers (2008)’s work From PRA to PLA and pluralism, PLA is understood as a qualitative, participatory approach rooted in co-learning, pluralism, and community-led decision-making. It goes beyond just data collection to redistributing epistemic power, power that ensures that communities actively shape research questions, methods, interpretations, and outcomes. It is important to note that, within CuHeMo, PLA is not used in isolation. It is embedded within a broader transdisciplinary and interconnected methodological package, including multi-sited ethnography, interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations. This is to address and minimize extractive tendencies and foster co-produced actionable knowledge systems. This is also to avoid maladaptive policy outcomes among vulnerable mobile indigenous groups with adaptive cultural systems where mobility, identity, and climate resilience are inseparable.

(Photos by: Nuhu Ismail)

Comparative case study of two mobile-oriented groups in Senegal

PLA was deployed in two mobile-oriented communities to enhance the co-production of knowledge on mobility, climate adaptation, and cultural heritage rooted in indigenous epistemologies. Some peculiar features of the communities are highlighted in the following table. 

These two CuHeMo case studies have mobility-dependent socio-ecological systems where climate change and other socio-economic challenges disrupt not just mobile livelihoods but entire cultural ontologies. PLA is uniquely suited for the case studies because it foregrounds community-defined realities, making visible the otherwise overlooked intersections of mobility, culture, indigenous knowledge systems, and climate adaptation.

Operationalizing PLA in the case studies:

Societal impacts on and of research outcomes through PLA engagements

Across both case studies, the CuHeMo project attempted to enhance the societal impacts through engaging the communities as partners of the research in knowledge production and not just the objects of research. The societal impacts on and of research outcomes through PLA engagements were observed through the societal acceptance and contributions of the communities, co-definition of research agenda, community satisfaction, raising public awareness, amplifying indigenous voices, and stakeholder engagement and the policy relevance of CuHeMo research outputs. These societal impacts observed across both case studies are based on comments and testimonies from the communities. PLA enabled these priorities to emerge organically, aligning research with community-defined vulnerabilities.

Societal acceptance and contributions: The Guet Ndar fishery community actively engaged in the research via local partners, elders, women, and youth groups. They contributed extensive local fishing and ecological knowledge, solutions to estuary risks and overfishing. Similarly with the Fulani pastoralists, there was an overwhelming support and engagement from elders, women, and youth groups. They contributed extensive indigenous knowledge systems on mobilities and weather forecasting, and their adaptive, resilient strategies. While these societal acceptances and contributions are a plus for the project, most engagements were often dependent on less mobile actors, e.g., elders and youth who are less interested in moving; that is, active fishers and transhumant pastoralists were difficult to engage consistently due to their unpredictable mobility patterns and climate-induced uncertainties. In addition, some participants expected financial compensation before contributing, revealing a risk of participation becoming transactional rather than relational. Hence, sustaining such societal acceptances and willing contributions requires long-term trust-building, flexible engagement strategies, and realistic budgeting for community participation.

Co-definition of research agenda: Guet Ndar community priorities shaped the research around Senegal River mouth breaching, restricted access to fishing zones such as Diattara gas platform and Mauritania waters, and the broader decline in fishing livelihoods, and climate storying; while the Fulani pastoralists’ focus on drought, irregular rainfall, mobility constraints, lack of quality pasture, disruption of indigenous knowledge systems and other climate vulnerabilities were co-defined and prioritized by the community. Co-defining research agendas could enhance relevance and ownership, but it is also time-intensive and methodologically demanding. Limited project timelines constrained the depth of iterative engagement needed for genuine co-definition. Also, there is the risk of dominant/respected voices (e.g., elders or male leaders) shaping priorities at the expense of marginalized groups such as women or youth, who often, out of tradition or respect, always allow the elders/male leaders to lead discussions. Furthermore, community-defined priorities often extend into broader socio-political grievances, which researchers may not be equipped to address, creating expectation gaps between research scope and community aspirations.

Community Satisfaction: Community satisfaction stemmed less from material benefits and more from recognition and meaningful engagement. In Guet Ndar, participants expressed appreciation for the project’s role in facilitating dialogue, raising awareness of coastal vulnerabilities, and connecting them with broader stakeholder networks. Importantly, several participants in the organized CuHeMo workshop noted that such engagement was unprecedented. Among Fulani pastoralists, satisfaction was closely tied to the recognition and revitalization of their cultural systems. Efforts to document and support cultural practices, including seasonal mobility and community celebrations, were seen as affirming their identity in the face of climate and socio-economic challenges. It should be noted that community satisfaction is based on their knowledge of the constantly communicated scope, potentials, and limits of the research project, after initial hiccups in addressing their expectations of immediate and more tangible development interventions.

Raising public awareness and amplifying indigenous voices: CuHeMo aims to contribute significantly to reshaping public narratives about the adaptive mobile cultures of both communities through research articles, workshops, cultural celebrations, photo voices, participatory sessions, policy documents, and documentaries. This includes increased visibility of coastal erosion, mobility restrictions, and coastal/climate vulnerabilities of the Guet Ndar community, and raised awareness of pastoral mobility as adaptation, the cultural dimensions of transhumance, and indigenous knowledge systems in the Ferlo region. While amplifying indigenous voices is a core strength of PLA, it is worthy to note that increased visibility does not necessarily translate into meaningful policy change because of other existing socio-economic marginalizations around the communities. This could lead to frustration among research participants.

Stakeholder engagement and policy relevance: A multi-stakeholder workshop in Guet Ndar involving fishers, women, youth, government officials, policymakers, NGOs, and researchers highlighted the failure of top-down interventions (e.g., estuary breach, resettlement projects). For the Fulani pastoralists, engagements with local leaders and regional actors highlighted the sedentary policy biases in climate adaptation that further marginalized the increasingly vulnerable mobile people. Despite these engagements, it’s cautious to acknowledge that translating dialogue into policy impact remains highly uncertain. Power play and politicking between communities and policymakers persist, and there is a risk that participatory spaces are more symbolic rather than transformative. However, addressing existing socio-political structural issues, such as cross-border mobility restrictions or land-use conflicts, often lies beyond the immediate influence of research projects. Hence a gap between identified problems and actionable solutions, which may limit the perceived effectiveness or policy relevance of engagement efforts.

Research legitimacy and prospects: Finally, PLA significantly enhanced the legitimacy and potential sustainability of the research itself. Research legitimacy based on validated and co-produced findings and long-term prospects from strong community trust, iterative engagement, and active efforts to revive the annual cultural celebration and preservation of indigenous knowledge systems of the Fulani pastoralists. PLA strengthens research legitimacy, but its long-term sustainability is vulnerable to structural constraints such as limited funding cycles, short project durations, and logistical challenges in maintaining continuous engagement with mobile communities.  There is also the challenge of ensuring that co-produced knowledge continues to benefit communities beyond the project lifecycle, and without sustained follow-up, there is a risk that even PLA-enhanced participatory research may also revert to extractive patterns, undermining the trust and legitimacy it initially built.

CuHeMo filming crew in action at Guet Ndar (Photo by: Nuhu Ismail)

For critical reflection

Fully eliminating extractive tendencies in research is extremely difficult. But being intentional and adaptive to do things differently beyond conventional research norms is a good practical way to begin with. Despite some constraints around doing PLA with indigenous mobile groups, the CuHeMo project was an attempt to do research differently, not as a data extraction process but as a collaborative exchange with the communities. By this, research stops being a one-way process to become a shared process of reflection and meaning-making of topical issues towards exploring solutions or actions.

For Researchers, PLA shouldn’t be just a method; it should be the research ethos. Knowledge is richer when communities are co-producers and, where possible, co-authors, not subjects. Extractive research might not be just unethical; it risks producing poor and illegitimate (scientific) knowledge systems. For policymakers, climate adaptation policies must integrate adaptive mobile cultural heritage and indigenous mobility systems. And ignoring indigenous knowledge systems could lead to maladaptation. It is not feasible nor sustainable to design climate solutions for mobile indigenous groups without them being co-designers from the conception of the solution projects to the post-implementation phase of the projects.

Another important strategy is to be open-minded and flexible to deploy reflexive and adaptive research strategies based on contextual realities. For instance, as experienced in the CuHeMo field realities – mapping on the ground instead of using pen and paper, this was to adapt to the communities’ ways of expressing themselves: most of the research participants have never used pen and paper and were not comfortable using them to map, so the CuHeMo team realized that earlier and encouraged them to map or illustrate on the ground using their hands and sticks as they are used to. This was not a limitation, but a methodological realization that research methods and tools must adapt to communities’ lived realities, and not the other way around. Another practical example is the combination of PLA with multi-sited trajectory ethnography to follow participants on the move. This also includes flexible, mobile-friendly engagement strategies like shorter and casual/unstructured interviews, especially during opportunistic meetings.

Sustaining PLA Beyond the Project: If PLA is taken seriously and meant for maximum societal impacts, it must be cyclically iterative, continuous, and long-lasting where resources permit. Active feedback loops should be embedded in research projects beyond project timelines; this could counter or prevent relapses into extractive research models. For the CuHeMo team, the initiatives to enhance long-lasting societal impacts include:

• Forthcoming transdisciplinary publication on co-creating coastal futures in changing climates
• Community-reviewed documentary films and photovoice outputs
• Open-access datasets grounded in co-produced knowledge
• Policy briefs advocating mobility-sensitive adaptation frameworks
• A methodological reflection book on PLA and transdisciplinary research with mobile indigenous groups
• Supporting local partners to co-present and discuss research insights in international conferences and workshops
• Monitoring and supporting adaptive mobile cultural revival initiatives

To conclude, PLA essentially forces a fundamental shift: from just studying communities to thinking and acting with communities. In contexts like Guet Ndar and the Ferlo, where climate change threatens not just livelihoods but entire cultural systems, PLA becomes more than just a methodological tool, but a moral imperative to tangibly collaborate with research communities towards addressing their challenges. PLA demonstrates strong potential to reconfigure research as a collaborative and socially embedded process. However, these impacts are not guaranteed to significantly address or change the precarious situations of the communities, especially in the light of climate uncertainties and existing wicked socio-political problems. Therefore, PLA requires sustained commitment, reflexivity, and adaptation to the realities of mobile, climate-vulnerable communities.