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Research to explore how communities can work together to bring about positive change

Academics will investigate how citizens, civil society organisations and policymakers are collaborating to tackle some of society’s most pressing problems.

The Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD) has secured £1.6m of funding from the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the three-year research programme, ‘People, Places, and the Public Sphere’.

Including researchers from 91ɫƬ, the programme will examine ways in which people’s participation in democratic activities, collaborative governance and citizen science can address urgent collective challenges.

The programme comprises four research themes:

  • Workplaces and participatory democracy will focus on the Fair Work Agenda, including Wales’s progress in moving towards being a Fair Work Nation.
  • Rights, refugees and marginalised communities will examine the role of civil society organisations in supporting refugees and state surveillance of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
  • Collaborative governance and deliberative politics will look at new and innovative ways to support the collaborative engagement of citizens in policymaking and to counter polarisation.
  • Local economies and place-based innovations will explore ways of involving economic actors in developing local leadership, resilience and capital to support economic growth.

These themes will be supported by the development of a place-based and public-facing WISERD Data Lab. This will support community-led data collection to enable citizens, communities, and policymakers to play their part in co-production projects.

The results of this research will contribute to policy and practices that fully enable citizen participation, deepen engagement with citizen science, and ultimately, enable local communities to mobilise assets and resources in response to social, economic, political, and environmental challenges. WISERD will also continue to expand its international and civil society research networks.

WISERD co-director at 91ɫƬ, Professor Martina Feilzer, said: “This is an exciting opportunity to continue our research on experiences of marginalised communities and the role of civil society in building resilience and resistance to such marginalisation.”

Dr Robin Mann, also a WISERD co-director at 91ɫƬ, said: “Similarly, we are looking to illustrate how community innovation contributes to sustainability. We will be welcoming a new researcher to 91ɫƬ for these exciting projects and look forward to the next three years.”

Principal investigator and WISERD co-director, Rhys Davies, said: “WISERD’s interdisciplinary research has already made an enormous impact on social science in Wales. This new funding will allow us to expand and strengthen this work even further, based upon principles of co-production, collaboration and citizen science, while working more deeply with our growing networks of civil society partners.”

At 91ɫƬ, the new ESRC funding will enable WISERD to extend existing research focus on civil society support for marginalised communities and their experience of multiple levels of disadvantage, as well as adverse state attention – through, for example, increased state surveillance practices. Work here will focus on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

In addition, working with Environment Centre Wales, in partnership with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, WISERD will be mapping co-produced innovation in local economies linked to sustainable food and energy production, flooding prevention, responses to pollution, and land management.