The Third Eye is a feminist think tank operating at the intersections of gender, sexuality, violence, technology, and education. Created by the organisation Nirantar, Third Eye leverages Nirantar’s three decades of experience producing knowledge for rural and marginalised communities and extends this expertise into the digital realm, creating a feminist learning platform for educators, grassroots workers, policymakers, researchers, and communities across rural, semi-urban, and urban India. Its name is inspired by the pioneering educator Jyotiba Phule, who likened education to the "third eye" through which one perceives the human condition.
Established in 1993, Third Eye's parent organisation, Nirantar, serves as a resource centre for gender and education, initially focusing on empowering women through educational processes. Officially registered in 2000, Nirantar's work initially centred on literacy programmes for adult women in rural areas but later expanded to include Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, and transgender women in both rural and urban settings. Under Nirantar's umbrella, Khabar Lahariya, the country’s only woman-run brand of ethical and independent rural news, was founded in 2002. Comprising women from marginalised backgrounds, including Dalit, tribal, Muslim, and backward castes, Khabar Lahariya pioneers rural journalism, emphasising the connection between livelihood, local language, and education.
In 2019, Nirantar conducted an extensive analysis of contemporary debates, efforts, issues, and experiments in digital media and education, aiming to develop a feminist learning platform. This analysis highlighted the lack of gender, sexuality, and feminist perspectives in the educational technology (or EdTech) space in India, prompting the creation of The Third Eye to address this gap. The initiative aims to fill the identified deficit in open-source, bilingual resources for integrating feminist perspectives into education. Reflecting on the value of this critical learning, one staff member explained,
“That was our main goal when we first started (The Third Eye): to instil in people that feminism is about more than just gender or women. It is a study of power. And once you understand how power moves and where power lies, you will have more agency in your interactions with the world, whether they are digital or real.”
The Third Eye initiative also explores the relationship between images and knowledge, recognising their impact on shaping perceptions. In India's digital space, dominated by Brahmin upper caste male voices, marginalised perspectives are often overlooked. The Third Eye seeks to amplify these voices by bringing them into the digital sphere. Launching its inaugural edition on the theme of work in November 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, The Third Eye aims to transition knowledge creation from established writers to individuals from the field with the support of a Learning Lab. The Learning Lab serves as an arts-based educational platform where various contributors collaborate to critically analyse their perspectives. This engagement helps them further explore and challenge the systems of knowledge influencing them. The Learning Lab is mentored by documentary filmmakers, visual artists, podcasters, feminist researchers, and activists.
Currently, The Third Eye works as both an online platform, designing multiple kinds of reading-writing-listening-viewing experiences, and an offline space for learning, conducting training and co-creating materials to change the status quo around knowledge production.
Informed by feminist principles, Third Eye’s engagement approach integrates critical self-reflection, experiential learning, and inclusive storytelling. This framework empowers marginalised voices, challenges power dynamics, and reshapes narratives. They amplify grassroots vocabulary and co-authorship, with community involvement reshaping power dynamics in research. Gradual power shifts from mentors to mentees foster transformation over time.
Their Learning Lab, consisting of diverse individuals from different backgrounds, delves into experiential knowledge through interactions, readings, and discussions. They explore various forms of media, including documentary films and audio productions, to convey their stories and perspectives. The Lab's interdisciplinary nature facilitates guest classes by filmmakers and theatre practitioners, enriching the learning experience.
The primary participants in The Third Eye's work are team members, including mentors and rural community members acting as mentees. Leveraging the trust established through Nirantar, The Third Eye facilitates entry into rural communities, although initial power dynamics may be influenced by predominantly urban mentors. The overarching vision is to instigate a gradual power shift, with mentees transitioning into mentors upon completion of the programme, thus perpetuating a cyclical process. Over time, relationships evolve beyond mere camaraderie, with mentors being perceived as skill providers rather than solely based on personal attributes. This transformation occurs through continuous engagement and evolves individuals into empowered storytellers, enabling them to develop and share their narratives.
Embedded within the Learning Lab's structure are digital educators linked to field organisations, embodying a core feminist research principle that researchers must immerse themselves in the process. Self-inquiry is vital for understanding the community's knowledge articulation, prompting The Third Eye to pose the central question: "How do you embody the world?" This question drives introspection into personal involvement in patriarchal, neoliberal, and violent systems while engaging with others in transformative pursuits. As one staff member explained,
“In feminist research, one must always implicate the researcher. There is no such thing as objective research in feminism. Your perspective and criticality shape your research. As a result, the central inquiry of the Learning Lab for everyone we worked with in the field was that unless you investigate yourself, you will not be able to understand what is going on around you, right? So the knowledge we claim is community-based. We all claim that communities have knowledge, but how will this knowledge be articulated? It is always expressed by people like you and me, right? We go, document, and come back. How does the community express its own knowledge?”
This approach aims to disrupt power imbalances by transforming researchers and documentarians into subjects, thus fostering a more equitable exchange of narratives.
The impact of Third Eye’s work is multifaceted. By empowering individuals to investigate their own perspectives and express them through various media, the organisation aims to help communities reclaim their narratives. The impact is both personal, through self-awareness and self-expression, and communal, by providing a platform for marginalised voices to be heard. One of their success stories is the remarkable transition of a mentee who went from not being able to write a single line to composing a 10-11 part episodic narrative marked by a continuous exchange of ideas and introspective reflections, which went on to become very popular.
Carrying out such community-focused and embedded work is anything but easy. Value and compensation pose significant challenges for the organisation, primarily due to financial constraints, which hinder their ability to offer adequate compensation for participants. This often leads to difficulties in sustaining engagement as many individuals fail to perceive the immediate value of their contributions. Another obstacle is the high dropout rate among participants, stemming from the demanding and intensive nature of the work. Ensuring content quality remains a continuous challenge, particularly in the digital realm saturated with diverse media sources. This necessitates the implementation of content standards to ensure they can effectively engage readers and viewers amid stiff competition. Moreover, the organisation's approach relies heavily on individualised and intensive mentorship, which is both time-consuming and resource-intensive, making scaling their model challenging. Navigating legal complexities, such as FCRA rules, adds another layer of challenge. This is amplified due to their commitment to working with individuals who possess varying literacy levels, ranging from low literacy to formal education, and who struggle with knowledge access and production.
The Third Eye’s method of engaging with communities disrupts traditional research approaches, as can be seen in their Caseworker’s Dictionary of Violence. This project aims to create a language and terminology to deepen understanding of gender-based violence in India sourced directly from grassroots perspectives. The lexicographers behind this dictionary hail from Lalitpur, Lucknow, and Banda in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, bringing with them extensive experience acquired over years, including embedded knowledge of countless cases that might have otherwise been forgotten. The 12 caseworkers who are the co-authors of the Dictionary are actively involved in addressing various forms of violence such as murder, rape, abduction, child sexual abuse, dowry deaths, and domestic violence. Originating from the very communities they serve, these caseworkers have themselves endured violence, acquiring their expertise through lived experience supplemented by limited legal training.
A pivotal aspect of The Third Eye’s community engagement strategy is the notion that researchers must immerse themselves in the learning process by reflecting on their own roles within patriarchal, neoliberal, and violent systems. They advocate for researchers and documentarians to openly express their feelings throughout the research process, thereby challenging traditional power dynamics and blurring the lines between researcher and subject.
Sangath, founded in 1996 by Dr. Vikram Patel and six others, is a Goa-based nonprofit organisation that aims to address the holistic needs of children, including developmental, behavioural, and emotional aspects. Sangath's mission is to promote the overall health of children, adolescents, and families, particularly from underserved communities, while scaling up evidence-based mental health interventions. Its values include respect for community knowledge, building trust through transparency, collaboration with communities, empowering communities in research, and grounding interventions in scientific evaluation.
When it was founded, Sangath operated as a child guidance clinic that offered specialised services such as speech therapy and psychiatry, inspired by the care model commonly used in the UK at the time. However, challenges arose in delivering this mode of care, including resource intensiveness and a mismatch between families' expectations and the clinic's approach, which focused on unlocking children’s full potential rather than providing a quick fix to a single issue. To adapt, Sangath shifted towards a home-based and collaborative model, training local lay counsellors to deliver evidence-based interventions across the life course. As part of this shift, Sangath also transformed from a service-oriented organisation to one focused on conducting research to improve the delivery of services. This change enabled Sangath to reach a wider audience more effectively.
Sangath’s key objectives include building trust with communities, educating them about research, involving them in the research process, and ensuring community voices are heard in research findings. Over time, Sangath's objectives have evolved to address changing community needs, with a growing emphasis on power and equity in research.
Sangath works closely with marginalised and underserved communities, focusing on addressing mental health challenges within these populations. Their operational approach involves active engagement with the communities they serve, acknowledging their social position, unique experiences, needs, and perspectives. Reflecting on the necessity of working closely with the communities they serve, a Sangath staff member explained.
“If we were really seeking to extend sustainable models of mental healthcare into the community, we had to work with the community.”
They prioritise the inclusion of community members in their research teams, ensuring that those directly affected by the issues play a significant role in shaping interventions and research directions.
Sangath believes that the foundational work of building trust and rapport with the community is of the utmost importance when engaging with the community. After rapport is built, continuous engagement is required to build trust.
Stakeholders at Sangath suggested that creating more equitable relationships between communities and researchers requires a structured and science-based approach to community engagement. This approach acknowledges the diversity of pathways and approaches for community engagement while emphasising the importance of evaluation and assessment to ensure effectiveness. As one staff member explained,
“The first question we've always asked ourselves is, ‘What is the purpose of doing this? What is the ultimate objective of community engagement? Is it an end in itself, or is it a means to another end?’ And I think the latter has really prevailed in our thinking. That is to say, we have really positioned community engagement as a means towards ensuring the successful scale up of evidence-based health interventions.”
Across its work, the organisation follows a three-step framework for community engagement: acceptability, feasibility, and effectiveness.
While these three domains increase the odds of scalability, it's still not guaranteed. Continuous engagement with stakeholders is vital to navigate challenges and advocate for the adoption of new evidence-based approaches. The engagement process changes as objectives shift from understanding the problem and potential interventions to address it to incorporating a new approach to service provision within budgets and existing resources. Overall, scalability requires ongoing collaboration and implementation efforts beyond publishing research findings.
Overall, the stakeholders emphasise the need for a well-structured, science-informed, and community-inclusive approach to achieve more equitable relationships between communities and researchers. This involves ongoing evaluation, flexibility in engagement strategies, and a commitment to accountability and genuine participation at all levels of the research process.
Sangath believes that their success lies in designing innovations that can be scaled up and adapted across contexts and geographies through primary care and community delivery platforms so that they are able to reach underserved and marginalised communities. The concept of Universal Health Care is a strong underlying principle in all their research directions and interventions.
Their partnerships with policymakers have helped to ensure that their evidence-based interventions are taken up and implemented at scale. For instance, Sangath’s intervention programme for families affected by domestic violence has been incorporated by the Goa State Commission for Women.
Through programmes like EMPOWER, Sangath's interventions involving Non-Specialist Providers (NSPs) have gained traction even beyond Indian borders, finding adoption in the United States and Canada. They consider this a unique instance of an Indian non-governmental organisation effecting change in healthcare practices in North America. They believe that this accomplishment is primarily attributed to their unwavering commitment to evidence-based research as the foundation of their work.
Over the years, Sangath has come to recognise the importance of understanding diverse avenues and methodologies for community engagement, rooted in assessing the underlying principles and evidence guiding their approach. Stakeholders interviewed emphasised the need for genuine engagement with communities, driven by comprehensive understanding, lived experiences, and internal expertise, rather than tokenism. To foster genuine community involvement, they suggest, it is necessary to integrate participation, ownership, involvement, and equitable compensation into all of their research programmes.
Additionally, cultivating trust emerged as a vital lesson, requiring time, patience, and resources, leading Sangath to establish enduring relationships with communities beyond data collection, offering auxiliary support systems like resource centres, regular clinics, and training opportunities. They also acknowledge the need to enhance access to care through partnerships with government and NGOs to extend their reach to larger, underserved communities.
Some of Sangath's recent programmes such as iHEAR (Initiative for Health Equity Advocacy and Research), and Transcare incorporate some of these learnings and epitomises their commitment to fostering genuine collaboration among different research stakeholders and the community. iHEAR serves as a platform that brings together academics, researchers, activists, practitioners, and community representatives to conduct participatory research, advocacy, and educational initiatives, focusing on the intersection of marginalised identities, access to healthcare, and mental health.
Persistent challenges exist, however, in evaluating the impact of their public campaign on mental health awareness, underscoring the need for more rigorous studies to determine its benefits. Furthermore, the lack of emphasis on community engagement in grant allocations from government structures in India makes sustainable funding an ongoing challenge. Funding timelines also often fall short of what’s necessary to cultivate and sustain trusting relationships with communities. Being part of the civil society sector, Sangath is also influenced by various legislative changes at both regional and national levels.
Another key challenge is that Sangath’s interventions remain focused in peri-urban areas and they face challenges in reaching the rural poor with their interventions. The sustainability of their community-driven programmes also faces obstacles due to high turnover rates, especially among youth participants.
Key takeaways and implications emerge from the understanding that the effectiveness and integration of community engagement into research can be influenced by the diversity of perspectives within organisations as well as external factors such as local funding and political landscapes. The definition and involvement of communities are pivotal, highlighting their lived experiences as essential expertise for the development of effective biomedical models. Across their work, Sangath also emphasises the importance of developing strong and grounded scientific evidence rooted in effective community participation and accountability structures. Integrating community engagement with science is paramount, moving away from viewing them as separate domains of expertise.
However, communities' role in driving policy change remains nascent, necessitating their advocacy for mainstreaming Sangath's model. Grassroots mobilisation alone is insufficient; active engagement with political and bureaucratic leadership is essential to influence and sustain change. Thus, community engagement transcends research and delves into the realm of party politics, necessitating careful navigation of these complexities.
The Banyan, founded in 1993, originated as a project to rehabilitate homeless women with mental health issues, evolving into an organisation dedicated to providing health and mental health care for those in poverty and homelessness. The organisation, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, strives to enable access to care through comprehensive clinical and social approaches embedded in a well-being paradigm. The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health (BALM) was established in 2007 as a sister organisation of The Banyan. Its work is intricately linked to the mental health services and programs delivered daily by The Banyan. The Banyan and BALM work together to understand and address distress, deprivation, and exclusion from treatment and care and to foster meaning, independence, family, and human rights.
BALM was established with a vision to build pillars of research, education, training, and advocacy to influence policy change and augment stakeholder collaborations in mental health and social sectors. It began as a knowledge hub to disseminate research on mental health and document best practices of The Banyan. The broader vision was to build a cadre of mental health professionals through training and education, inform policy & implementation programmes through research, and run pilot programmes to find scalable solutions through social action. Through BALM, The Banyan effectively hosts five health research centres with academic staff and active research portfolios focused on social action and research, transdisciplinary research, participatory action and research, trauma studies, and homelessness and social vulnerabilities.
BALM’s mission includes:
The key objectives of BALM are centred around research, scalability, sustainability, and understanding the experiences of socio-economically disadvantaged groups in accessing mental health care.
Successes include initiatives like the Home Again model, where service users have adapted the organisation's programmes in their communities, showcasing the potential of community-driven initiatives. Challenges include reintegration of individuals into families and limited community understanding of research practices. Lessons learned emphasise the importance of integrating users into staff roles, customising participation approaches for specific sectors, and ensuring fair compensation for individuals with lived experience in research activities. This model is also recognised by WHO among the best practices from around the globe in the WHO Guidance on Community Mental Health Services: Promoting Person-Centred and Rights-Based Approaches, where it is recognised as one of the 4 best practices for Supported Living Services for Mental Health.
Additionally, BALM provides training to community-based mental healthcare workers known as Nalam community wellness mobilisers (Nalam means well-being in Tamil), who provide aftercare services to individuals with mental health issues as part of The Banyan’s NALAM program. These mobilisers also work with the general population to promote mental wellbeing, identify at-risk individuals and groups for mental disorders, offer preventive services, and identify and refer individuals with symptoms of mental illness to specialist services. They also offer ongoing social support, including assistance with accessing employment, ID cards, and entitlements. This approach aligns with BALM's mission of holistic mental health care, fostered through a user-led approach to tailoring services to individual needs and creating a supportive, community-oriented ecosystem of care.
Involving individuals with lived experiences in mental health research poses evolving challenges, including limited community understanding of research practices and ensuring meaningful engagement across all research levels. As one staff member explained:
“The process of involving individuals with lived experiences in research, particularly in the context of mental health, is complex and evolving. The challenge lies in ensuring meaningful involvement across all levels of research, from senior researchers to junior associates.”
BALM applies specific strategies to address these complexities, including collaborative agenda-setting, involving peer researchers, conducting recorded consultations in local languages to overcome barriers like memory impairments and language differences, and offering tailored courses and training in research.
While The Banyan initially had an institutional care model, they faced challenges with reintegrating clients back into their families. Sometimes families hesitate to take back the client, or the client hesitates to go back to their families or there are challenges in tracing the family. As a response to this challenge, Banyan and BALM developed the Home Again model of community living, which trains clients to be integrated into a staff role over time, ultimately promoting a participatory and sustainable approach to community-based care.
Another important lesson involves the need to customise or operationalise the definition and implementation of "participation" for specific sectors, working in consultation with all stakeholders instead of employing a generic approach. This can help clarify its scope and enhance understanding, making a participatory approach more achievable.
Finally, BALM recognises the importance of ensuring fair compensation for individuals with lived experience in research activities. While many feel a moral duty to assist those facing similar challenges, it's essential to recognise their contributions as core researchers. This entails including their names in documents and equally valuing their representation, even if English isn't their primary language. Providing translation support and adequate compensation for their work transforms their involvement into a legitimate job opportunity. Placing this commitment at the heart of Banyan/BALM’s efforts is a priority.
BALM's participatory model empowers service users and peers with lived experiences, fostering inclusive research, scalable programmes, and stakeholder collaborations. This approach ensures that the efforts of both service providers and researchers align with the genuine needs and preferences of communities and users. By including individuals with lived experience in leadership roles, as well as training them as educators, trainers, researchers, advocates, and care providers, BALM and The Banyan recognises their invaluable perspective and expertise in delivering care and producing credible evidence for intervention and care. Moreover, BALM formally acknowledges and compensates communities as co-researchers, providing adequate support for their involvement in research activities.
The Planetary Health Interpretation Centre (PHIC) is an innovative collaborative research centre initiated in November 2020 at the Pakke Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh. PHIC aims to address health inequalities, promote community-based engagement, and explore the connections between public health, wildlife conservation, and the environment. The centre follows an interdisciplinary and intersectoral participatory action research model that involves diverse stakeholders and community members.
The PHIC is currently owned and managed by the Forest Department, whose staff mostly come from the surrounding areas, ensuring they are committed to their communities. The centre is utilised by local schools for educational outings, meetings, and movie screenings. Immersive experiences deepen participants' connection to the environment, enabling their understanding of the interconnectedness of planetary health. The PHIC serves as a multifaceted hub for education, dialogue, collaboration, and conservation.
Learning from the successes of the PHIC and aiming to address the lack of transdisciplinary, community- led research collaborations in northeast India, a group of researchers and practitioners founded the Canopy Collective in 2023. The Canopy Collective is an interdisciplinary initiative working at the intersection of art, science, and action for wildlife conservation and research. It envisions fostering community-owned, multidisciplinary, and inclusive spaces to enable collaborations that enhance community well-being and education in northeast India. Canopy Collective also emphasises the importance of embedding researchers within the study context for a significant period of time before initiating research in order to ensure effective community collaboration and enhance research efficiency and effectiveness.
The Canopy Collective and the PHIC operate as part of a large ecosystem called the Living Labs , which has a larger vision of establishing physical spaces, an online collective, and a wider support structure to facilitate collaboration for community engagement and reflective practices to co-produce and implement the idea of planetary health on the ground. Additionally, Canopy Collective partners with the Institute of Public Health Bengaluru to foster online collective and collaborative support for community engagement in planetary and One Health and partners. The Collective also works with the Green Hub, a well-established youth fellowship programme that uses visual media for biodiversity conservation with indigenous filmmakers. Canopy Collective fosters a partnership between Green Hub Fellows, the PHIC, and the forest department in northeast India to hold events of mutual interest and help in the creation of video materials.
The stories and insights emerging from the work of PHIC and the Canopy Collective illuminate the importance of breaking down barriers, fostering genuine connections, and embracing a diversity of thought and expertise in planetary health science.
The relationship between researchers and the communities, forest departments included, in Pakke is multi-faceted and influenced by factors such as long-term commitment, adaptability, and the evolving perception of their work. Researchers who commit to long-term engagement are more able to navigate the logistical challenges and field conditions unique to the region. The forest department and community also trust and engage with researchers who commit to such efforts, including a group of female researchers who have led several pioneering efforts on hornbill protection and research. Reflecting on what researchers gain from working at PHIC, a staff member reflected:
“If I am a researcher, I’d like this place to help me find meanings and insights from the ground and to be challenged in such spaces - it should ground the researcher and the research”
In terms of relationships, the dynamics between different stakeholders, such as the Forest Department, local communities, and researchers, are perhaps less tense compared to other regions in the country. While complexities do exist, they are tempered by the relatively novel nature of many of these interactions. This can enable the creation of an environment where open discussion and collaboration are possible, even within the premises of the Forest Department, as seen with the establishment of the PHIC. Such collaborations allow for the sharing of ideas and the consideration of novel approaches that might not be as feasible in other areas with more entrenched biases or adversarial relationships between stakeholders.
Around 200 people from the local area are employed by the Forest Department as frontline staff. They play a crucial role in patrolling efforts and are the backbone of conservation initiatives in the area. The fact that both Forest Department officers and frontline staff often come from tribal backgrounds and are recruited locally moderates these relationships, leading to a more nuanced and cooperative dynamic.
One primary challenge that Canopy Collective faces is the lack of space for transdisciplinary collaboration as well as a dearth of accessible platforms for idea generation, innovation, and collaboration in the realm of wildlife and health research. Canopy Collective is refining its governance mechanisms, scope, and relationships to enable more meaningful and sustainable researcher-community engagement, replicating the modes of the PHIC and its relationships in and around Pakke Tiger Reserve. It will naturally require some time before all these partnerships begin to demonstrate tangible impact beyond the site level.
Canopy Collective and the PHIC advocate for a broader approach to involving communities, moving beyond science communication to emphasise meaningful partnerships with diverse trained professionals to create impactful collaborations. As one PHIC staff member explained:
“A good sign of a participatory space is whether it is claimed and owned by a community of diverse stakeholders.”
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when movement was restricted, the newly-formed PHIC found ways to continue to explore the potential of interdisciplinary collaborations despite restrictions on physical gatherings. They convened virtual focus group discussions called Pakke Addas, mainly conducted with the forest officials, community members, artists, field biologists, conservators, film makers, and researchers, along with the design students and team. The purpose of these discussions was to co-develop content and knowledge experiences with the community for the PHIC.
Within the academic landscape, siloed disciplinary fields often hinder holistic approaches to conservation, resulting in fragmented efforts and missed opportunities for synergy. At the site-level, PHIC’s efforts to operate at the interface of wildlife conservation and health has faced significant funding challenges due to the reluctance of both sectors to allocate resources for transdisciplinary collaboration. This hesitancy to invest in transdisciplinary collaboration leads to a lack of mechanisms for effective problem solving through knowledge exchange and feedback and highlights the need to foster collaborative efforts that recognise the interconnectedness of conservation and public health.
Another hurdle is integrating the arts and humanities into conservation work to serve as a bridge between communities and researchers. Despite their efforts, they observe limited engagement from artists who do site-engaged work. For instance, artists are often given a brief only after data analysis is completed in a research project, rather than being involved as collaborators in research design.
Conveying the complexities of their work in real-world scenarios can prove challenging. The Canopy Collective and PHIC emphasise the importance of working in collaborative, mixed groups involving communicators, educators, and artists, to encourage fresh perspectives and address the broader problem of working in silos. Establishing a knowledge sharing platform could bridge gaps in understanding and promote clearer communication of concepts like the broader implications of "planetary health," fostering a more integrated approach to complex challenges.
An innovative aspect of this work is the attempt to build a broader ecosystem around Canopy Collective and the PHIC, with a vision of establishing a physical space, an online collective, and a wider collaboration for community engagement and reflective practices for co-producing and implementing ideas and research. This approach to knowledge exchange, community engagement, and participation stands out as innovative and disruptive due to its genuine commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, breaking down traditional silos, and fostering a more inclusive research culture.
The spaces and models they work within are characterised by their plural and fluid nature, distinct from what is commonly seen elsewhere. Researchers, government officers, educators, and community members can take on multiple roles and responsibilities. For example, the Green Hub Fellows are often also community members. Building on the place-based ways of working of the PHIC, Canopy Collective aims to push the traditional boundaries of roles: Can a government officer also serve as an educator? Can someone from the local community act as a teacher for the Forest Department? They emphasise the importance of mutual exchange and collaboration within these spaces. All individuals, regardless of their background, can contribute, learn, and expect support from one another. This pluralistic approach fosters a dynamic and inclusive environment where everyone's expertise and perspectives are valued and integrated for the collective betterment of the community and the shared goals of conservation and well-being.
The PHIC in Pakke, designed with adaptable purposes, serves as a versatile platform that encourages diverse individuals and groups to gather and utilise the space, leading to countless creative possibilities. The presence of such a centre, along with the resources offered by the broader ecosystem of the Green Hub and Living Labs, brings together a diverse group of people with varied expertise and serves as a valuable asset for the remote community within the Pakke Tiger Reserve and in other places.
As Canopy Collective is a relatively new platform, many of its relationships and knowledge exchange frameworks are still in the process of evolving. Following the journey of an emerging centre for knowledge exchange like this one may provide valuable insights into effective community engagement and equitable research collaborations.