Last month Stone Soup Consulting celebrated the 5th edition of its Award on Research in Social Innovation, this year dedicated to the theme of “Collective action to solve complex social problems”. The academic research chosen is “Ecosystem governance in the Tropics: A policy analysis and evaluation of collective action in the Atlantic forest of Southern Bahia” by Paulo Sanjines Barreiro, who won the 7,500€ fund to support his work.
The Award on Research in Social Innovation was launched in 2012 to support postgraduate research initiatives on social innovation around the world. To do so, a special fund was created with a percentage of the income generated by Stone Soup Consulting’s projects.
This year awarded research aims at investigating the collective action emergence, evolution and adaptability of a civil society organisation acting within a watershed in the Atlantic forest biome. The Esperança-Condurú ecological-corridor of Southern Bahia is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally recognized for its high biodiversity of vascular plants, with a large number of endemic species, and for housing the Serra do Conduru State Park conservation unit. The region's poor and peripheral population, which mostly lives in Bairro Novo, is composed of black people and solo mothers, who suffer from the absence of public policies, violation of human rights, suffering from critical societal challenges of food insecurity, water pollution, environmental injustice and lack of income.
Bairro Novo grassroot leaders and families founded in 2012 the Bairro Novo Neighbours Association (ASMOBAN) to address the aforementioned critical societal challenges through social, environmental and economic initiatives. In this context, Barreiro’s research will use policy process survey and analysis methods to investigate the 11 years of emergence, evolution and adaptation of the current self-governing mechanisms of a civil society organisation (ASMOBAN) rooted in the marginalized Bairro Novo neighborhood, and two of its initiatives, namely the Community fair and the Vegetable Garden Network. According to Barreiro, his investigation “will unveil unique ecosystem governance strategies for civil society organisation led collective action at the watershed level in the tropics”.
According to Clara de Bienassis, Stone Soup’s People and Well-being Director, “this research will help rise the sociological awareness of environmental organisations. Also, its results will inform policy making at the regional level and provide capacity building tools for collective action planning and evaluation across the global tropics.”
Previous editions of the award can be found here.
