Dr. Leanne Phelps is an Associate Research Scientist in the Olo Be Taloha Lab at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Olo Be Taloha means “Elders of the Past” in Malagasy. She is focused on documenting and analyzing land use and land cover change across spatio-temporal scales, with the aim of understanding and supporting resilient land and sea stewardship centred on local knowledge and priorities. She will be delivering our next research seminar, "Bridging the Gap: Co-producing Climate Research," on Wednesday, October 15, 2025 from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm. Refreshments will be served!
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list.
Abstract:
Efforts to support climate adaptation often fall short because they fail to understand and engage with the lived realities – e.g. priorities, practices, and knowledge systems – of the communities most impacted. This presentation brings together a suite of emerging papers and methods developed through long-term, collaborative research with local community members in Madagascar. Speakers reflect on what it means to co-produce climate research in line with community priorities—not just in principle, but in methods and everyday practice.
Speakers will present a three-part framework for rethinking collaborative research. First, they explore how researchers can engage in critical self-reflection on positionality, motivations, and entanglements, acknowledging that collaboration is shaped by power and history, and that centering community priorities requires ongoing reflexivity. Second, they identify key barriers to supporting socio-environmental resilience, particularly the persistent disconnect between institutional approaches to adaptation and the embodied experiences of local communities practicing adaptation. Drawing on the white supremacy culture framework, speakers offer a set of counter-practices to help bridge these ever-present gaps, which hamper effective interventions. Third, it illustrates how applied, integrative methods, co-developed with community members, enable more grounded, responsive, and adaptive research. This toolbox of adaptive method development includes co-produced mapping methods, communication forums, and data collection techniques tailored to local socio-ecological contexts.
Together, these threads propose not a single model, but a flexible, reflective, and relational approach to research that centers community knowledge, needs, and experience. The goal is to offer both theoretical grounding and practical pathways for global researchers seeking to engage in just and effective climate research that does not reproduce extractive or top-down dynamics, but instead supports resilience from the ground up.
