Preliminary results of photovoice research for SP6

In this blogpost Laura Kmoch shares reflections and preliminary results from her first fieldwork for our research unit’s subproject six. Having spent the past months in the project’s study landscapes, she just returned to Kigali – ready to share her experiences with you. 

The glittering paths of Rwanda

Did you know that Rwanda’s paths and clay houses glitter? Neither did I when approaching Kigali just over five weeks ago. After brief meetings with our colleagues Ping, Verene and William, as well as Beth Kaplin and Venuste Nsengimana from our partner university, Gaelle and I set out to the field in Rwanda’s Western Province.  We’d come for data collection in four rural villages that share common traits: Two of them – in Nyabihu District – are lake adjacent, implying wetland access for local residents. The other two – in Rutsiro District – border the Gishwati-Mukura National Park. It is tightly protected and part of a larger UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.   

Research questions and aim

The aim of my fieldwork was to appraise restoration’s contribution to people through the lens of Western Rwanda’s rural residents: How and why do they experience restoration differently, in their everyday lives? Which benefits do they derive from different restoration types? Do detrimental contributions arise, as restoration interventions change their habitual landscapes? And how can restoration’s contributions to people best be classified? These are the questions I’d come to ask.

Laura Kmoch, Jeannette Uwitonze, and Gaelle Ndayizeye during fieldwork in Nyabihu District. Photos: Gaelle Ndayizeye and Honore Bahizi.

Photovoice: Seeing restoration through the lens of rural residents

My strategy of choice was “photovoice” – a participatory research approach, combining photography with semi-structured interviews. I’d never used it before. Fortunately, its implementation proofed to be fun and enriching for everyone involved. Having talked to key informants from each community, my research assistant Jeannette Uwitonze and I settled on the following approach: We met our research participants for initial group discussions, shared our research plans, and distributed tablets that would be used to take photographs. Eight to nine research participants then set out in each village to capture images, illustrating the intersection of restoration with their everyday lives. We met again in the evening to reobtain all tablets, and prepared for two-on-one interviews, through which we engaged with each photographer’s work in subsequent days.

Preliminary results

What about the results of this work, you ask? From a methodological stance, photovoice aims to empower research participants to express their personal concerns and everyday experiences through visual media and accompanying narratives. Shall we see some raw-data examples of what those are?

Title: “Alnus trees preventing soil erosion”

Image explanation:
“You see, this is Alnus trees.”

Beneficial contributions:
“The benefit from this tree – it helps to fix the soil. […] when the rain comes the soil are not falling down.”

“And also, […] it gives me a stick for using [with] the beans.”

“When it grows – becoming bigger – I also get a timber. And that timber [is] used to make furniture, like chairs, table…”

“It is also one to protect the environment. It provides a clean air.”

Evoked feelings:
“I am happy […]. Mostly, when there is much sunny, I [rest] under the trees to relax my mind.”

Title: “Trust”

Image explanation:
“In this picture, you see, there is a cow, a sheep, and me giving grasses. […]. I’m like – a cowboy for others – taking care for their livestock and then they pay me later.”

Detrimental contributions and challenges:
“To find grasses is very difficult.”

Links to restoration:
“There is a connection because this is a planted grasses, and that grasses help to avoid erosion.”

“There is also another connection, because – you see – there is a planted trees around, and that trees help to attract rain.”

“This animals also need rain.”

“Because I don’t have my own land [to] plant this grasses, sometimes I buy it to them […].”

Title: “Nyirakigugu Lake”

Image explanation:
“This is another beauty of this sector – Jenda Sector. […]. I was born in Mukamira, and this lake comes as new. I don’t know where it comes from.”

Beneficial contributions:
“You see that there is many people that are not eating meat. But now […] those who are not eating meat are able to eat fish that are coming from this lake.”

Detrimental contributions:
“There is land – and once this lake grow – all land disappears because of this. It was an agricultural land for people.”

Link to restoration:
“[…] now they have security, because they planted trees around the lake […]. When we didn’t plant that trees – this lake, it will continue to grow.”

Title: “Go up”

Image explanation:
“You see, this is beans. It falls down but the way I used sticks – to pin to the soil – and that beans growing, climbing up.”

Beneficial contributions:
“Even in my life beans […] helps in body building, body protection.”

“When I harvest these beans, I sell it to the market. […]. When I got that money, it helps me with my family. In my family we need to buy clothes. That is the important benefit I get from that bean.”

Links to restoration:
“You see, I use this bamboo as a stick for beans and I planted bamboo at the field too – it is not around my house.”

“I have a land. I make a terracing. And I planted bamboo around the terracing. Around the terrace.”

Reflecting on the photovoice approach

Compared to interview methods that do without visual probes, I thoroughly enjoyed co-generating data for this photovoice project. Similar to walking interviews on community land or farmers’ fields this technique enabled research participants to show – and not just tell us – what they wished to share. For instance, explanations about places we couldn’t reach during one-hour interviews, and restoration practices on land that our interviewees did not own.

Dissipating early-stage fieldwork concerns, all photography equipment was returned to us timely and in good condition, with a sufficient number of images captured by each participant. Older photographers, who’d never before used a smartphone camera, quickly acquired the necessary skills and confidence to take photos on their own. Often following enthusiastic instructions from their young, tech-savvy relatives.

Most research participants also expressed that the captured images evoking feelings of happiness and pride about own land-use achievements, as we reflected upon them. This likely explains interviewees’ eagerness to take all printed images that we prepared for them to their respective homes.  

Newly build road (left) and glittering paths (right) in our study area. Photos: Laura Kmoch.

Next steps

With the first fieldwork in Rwanda completed, I’m looking forward to analyzing the co-generated data on interviewees’ perceptions of restoration, and restoration’s contributions to rural life and livelihoods in Western Rwanda.

Ooh, wait! You still want to know about those glittering paths? I haven’t found a satisfying explanation yet. They certainly arise from shiny, thin mineral flakes that are common in the region’s soil environments. But what type of mineral are they? And is their ubiquitous presence linked to volcanic processes in the region?

If you know – or share my interest in restoration benefits and photo-based research, please get in touch. You can reach me by email: laura.kmoch[at]uni-goettingen.de or via X: https://x.com/laurakmoch.

 

Read more about photovoice and our subproject six activities here:

Huber, J., Bieling, C., Garcia-Martin, M., Plieninger, T., and Torralba, M. (2023). Photovoice: Participatory research methods for sustainability – toolkit #8. GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, Volume 32, Number 4, pp. 386-388(3). https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.32.4.10

Ndayizeye, G. (2024). Plural Values, Rules, and Knowledge in Rural Landscape Restoration: Insights from Rwanda. People, Nature, Landscapes Blog. Medium. https://t.co/DbSSFhpGYV

Vögele, S., Bohn, S., Ndayizeye, G., and Kmoch, L., (2024). Appraising livelihoods, food security, and nature’s contributions to people from restoration landscapes in Western Rwanda. agrar aktuell. Newsletter der Fakultät für Agrarwissenschaften, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. pp. 22-23. https://t1p.de/umyor

Interview with Marina Frietsch, Leuphana University Lueneburg

In this interview, Marina Frietsch introduces us to the hopeful and dynamic world of ecosystem restoration. Marina is part of the subprojects for coordination and integration within the DFG research unit. She has explored the different temporal and spatial scales of restoration in her PhD and highlights the complexities of restoration, including the critical role humans play in both the degradation and recovery of ecosystems. Learn about innovative approaches to sustainability, the integration of social-ecological systems thinking, and the collaborative research going on in Rwanda.

In your PhD, you’re working a lot on restoration. What is restoration all about as a topic?
That’s a nice question because I think people have very different opinions, or perspectives on what ecosystem restoration actually is. I use the word ecosystem restoration quite frequently because I think, it tells you a lot about what we want to restore. It’s about different ecosystems, it’s not only about trees; it’s about different systems, where usually people interact with nature. We have not only ecosystems but actually social-ecological systems where restoration is happening. I believe ecosystem restoration is a lot about identifying degrading practices and then finding ways on how to respond to this degradation and develop or create ecosystems valuable both from an ecological point of view, but also for the people that are living in these ecosystems or close to these ecosystems.

Can you speak a bit about the role that humans play in these systems?
I think humans play a very central role in restoration, because on one side, they are the reason for degradation in many cases. And because they have practices that lead to ecosystems being not as ecologically sound as they could be. But I also think that people are a solution to these degrading practices because together with the people that work and live in the ecosystems that are being degraded, you can, of course, also develop solutions through ecosystem restoration that are sensitive to the needs and to the values of these people. So, I think, people do contribute to degradation but at the same time, they are the solution and they are the ones who then put restoration into practice in the end.

What got you interested in ecosystem restoration?
When you interact with sustainability in general, you come across a lot of very depressing topics like climate change, biodiversity loss and so many more. And I think for me, it was very nice and valuable to find an approach to sustainability that is very, very positive and where you can find a lot of enthusiasm for developing solutions that benefit both people and nature. So, for me, it’s a very positive way of responding to sustainability crises.

What do you want to find out about restoration? What’s the motivation or the research gap you’re looking at?
I want to bring together different scales at which restoration is happening. In my thesis, I’m looking both at a local and at a global scale and I’m also looking at the present and the future. I think it’s very important, to not only think about restoration in this simplistic way of “oh, what can we do today?“. But to also incorporate future challenges that might lie ahead, future values, future needs that people might have. So, I want to integrate spatial and temporal scales to better understand what can be good approaches to restoration that are actually sustainable in the long run.

The socio-ecological ladder of restoration ambition (Frietsch et al. 2024).

In a recent paper, you’ve proposed a ladder of restoration ambition. Can you tell me more about this concept and how it relates to these different scales?
That’s something that came up when we were travelling through Rwanda. We thought a lot about how restoration developed there and we saw that, over time, restoration really changed a lot because people had different values and different needs. And what we propose with the ladder of restoration ambition is just this very simple thought actually, that over time and in different areas, people have different needs. It’s very valuable to acknowledge that restoration can also change and that we don’t have to stick to one specific way of doing restoration or to one specific restoration aim. We can also say: “what do we need now? What do we maybe need in 20 years or in 100 years? How can we bring this together?“. This paper really shows that restoration is very dynamic in its essence and not something that is static.

What makes Rwanda so interesting for this kind of research?
Rwanda is an excellent place to study restoration and there are many reasons for it. One of them is that Rwanda has been active in restoration for a couple of decades now and globally is one of the restoration leaders. And when you get to the country, you can really see this. There are many NGOs, and the government is also very active in putting restoration into practice. There are of course also many challenges concerning ecosystem restoration. We have governance issues and power inequities that need to be considered in ecosystem restoration, and this also applies to Rwanda. We also have large scale degradation that happened over the past century and a really dire need to respond to this and there are, of course, financing issues. A lot of big restoration challenges that apply to Rwanda, at the same time also apply to many different countries and systems all over the world. So, it’s very nice to study restoration in Rwanda to better understand the challenges and to find solutions that then also apply beyond.

 You mentioned working with NGOs and other stakeholders. What does that look like?
We’re still in the starting phase of the research project. We’ve already met quite a few people and it was always very inspiring to talk to the people who actually put restoration into practice. You can also see that there’s a lot of motivation, enthusiasm for restoration with these stakeholders. That’s very, very nice. What we aim to do with our research project, is a co-development of knowledge and of understanding. We let the people who do restoration guide what we specifically look at. Ideally, you want it to be a cooperation and it’s a process of working together and sharing the expertise that everyone brings to the table. Through this we want to develop solutions for ecosystem restoration to work in the specific context that we have in Rwanda.

On the other hand, research in the global South is often accompanied by questions about power dynamics and justice. How is this reflected in your research?
That’s a very good question and I personally have spent quite a lot of time thinking about this issue. Because I think that, of course, you have a responsibility when you come from a country like Germany with a lot of money, as we have from the DFG, that is funding our project. You, of course, have this responsibility: how do you act in this context, how you use the money. It’s a challenge, that’s for sure. I think it’s extremely important to be sensitive to the context in which you’re working in and to actually talk to the people, and not just about the people. We really have to be attentive and reflect on these issues. In our research, we want to find a way to engage with stakeholders in Rwanda that is truly collaborative and respectful and that is sensitive to the power inequalities that exist in such a context.

You’re working in a large research unit with lots of scientists from different institutions. What’s your role in the team and what’s your perspective that you want to bring to the table there?
I am a postdoc in the coordination subproject. Our responsibility as a coordination team is to overview the whole process and make sure that everything goes smoothly. We’re also the point of connection for everyone else. And I’m also part of the integration subproject where we towards the end of the research project aim to integrate the different insights that were gathered by our colleagues. This is really amazing in my opinion because we have so many great people that are part of this research project and look at so many different aspects of ecosystem restoration. We have this very nice combination of a lot of expertise and very motivated PhD students who are still learning and who are still in the process of engaging with social-ecological systems research. It will be a privilege to then take all of this data and look at overarching patterns and look at dynamics that emerge from the more detailed findings that our colleagues are producing

An impression from this year’s kickoff workshop in Kigali from which the forthcoming paper emerged.

Looking forward, what are the next steps in your research?
In the next few weeks and months, we want to focus on a manuscript that talks about different visions for the future of ecosystem restoration in Rwanda. This manuscript is based on a workshop that took place in Kigali at the beginning of this year. I’m very much looking forward to it because that’s a paper that brings together close to 40 co-authors. It’s a team of Rwandan restoration experts and the DFG research unit members. I think that’s going to be a very nice collaborative product, talking about different visions and different ideas for what restoration in Rwanda might look like in the next decades.

What’s your favourite part of your research? What excites you about it?
I think the nice thing is that I like everything of it: I really like data collection, I really like data interpretation, I really like writing. And I really, really like being in contact with researchers and other stakeholders. So, the good news is I like all of it! I think what I love most about it, is when I’m talking to people who are also excited about restoration and who share their motivation and enthusiasm. And these little conversations that sometimes happen on the side where you can see the people are so motivated and people want to make a difference and want to contribute to finding solutions that then benefit nature and benefit people. And I think that’s very motivating also for me to keep putting my energy into this topic.

Interview by Felix Schaaf.

Read more about ecosystem restoration here:
Frietsch, M., Fischer, J. Kaplin, B. A., & Martín-López, B. (2024). The relevance of international restoration principles for ecosystem restoration practice in Rwanda. Restoration Ecology 32(3): e14085. DOI: 10.1111/rec.14085.

Frietsch, M., Loos, J., Löhr, K., Sieber, S., & Fischer, J. (2023). Future-proofing ecosystem restoration through enhancing adaptive capacity. Communications Biology 6: 377. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-04736-y.

Frietsch, M., Pacheco-Romero, M., Temperton, V. M., Kaplin, B. A., & Fischer, J. (2024). The social–ecological ladder of restoration ambition. Ambio. DOI: 10.1007/s13280-024-02021-8.

Half-year Meeting on May 2nd

On May 2nd, members of the research unit gathered at Leuphana University in Lüneburg to discuss the state of their work, including successes and setbacks. To this end, participants shared what they have accomplished in the initial project phase and coordinated further steps. At the centre of the meeting were updates from all eight subprojects. This also provided a valuable opportunity for PhD students to get in-depth feedback on their dissertation projects and sparked lively discussions on methodology and more. The presented updates were certainly impressive, including even the first drafts of manuscripts to be submitted for publication in the coming months. One of those will be a paper on the KickOff in Kigali and the three horizons approach used therein.

Another theme of the workshop was the finetuning of collaboration between different subprojects, e.g., through data sharing. This is especially relevant for the spatial data which is currently being analysed and compiled in a database. Here, a lot of synergies became apparent which will help further interdisciplinary collaboration between natural and social science research.

After a long day of academic exchange with some organisational discussions, there is a shared sense of excitement to get more deeply into the research. Accordingly, there are already many plans from the various subprojects to return to the field in the coming months to gather data as well as engage with local stakeholders.

As always, stay tuned for more updates on this website!

An Introduction to Subproject 7

Aside from the assessment of already restored sites that forms the main focus of this research unit, subproject 7 will be focussing on live restoration in co-creation with local stakeholders. From 2024 through 2027, a Living Lab will be implemented in Northwestern Rwanda within the four nW districts,(Rutsiro, Nyabihu, Ngororero and Rubavu, a region known as a high risk soil erosion zone with Ngororero being at the top and Rubavu at the third position after Muhanga District). Here we are developing round tables of restoration practitioners to build up a network of key actors and exchange experiences. WhatsApp groups are being used as a starting point for this. The living lab will probably be set up across two to three different cells and villages where one village involves more traditional restoration activities (typically performed by ARCOS), another village involves typical ARCOS activities as well as our own additional actions, and a third village carries out restoration by a bottom-up community approach within a village.

With the aim to create actionable knowledge on how to design and implement restoration activities on the more ambitious side of the restorative continuum in different socio-political contexts, the Living Lab will be used to carry out scientific experiments together with stakeholders, using a transdisciplinary approach, to integrate science and practice towards positive social and ecological outcomes. The Living Lab will help foster local capacity building, empowerment through action, iterative learning, and capitalization on experience in a process-oriented way. Thus, the outcomes of this sub-project will be of direct relevance to sustainability transitions on the ground for a higher reproducibility as generalizable model for up-scaling of restoration practices as well as to boosting the academic understanding of which factors best leverage sustainability transitions.

Impressions from the KickOff in Kigali

Ecosystem restoration is now centre-stage in terms of providing potential options for restoring biodiversity as well as mitigating or adapting to climate change. It is also a global challenge given multiple demands on limited land, particularly in Rwanda, a country that is currently facing serious climatic pressures in a face of economically limited capacity of local communities to build resilience. The German Research Foundation is funding a new research project that is investigating the social and ecological outcomes of ecosystem restoration in Northwestern Rwanda, in in collaboration with many Rwandan stakeholders, including scientists from academic institutions, practitioners from governmental and private organizations, the civil society and representatives from local communities.

During their stay in Rwanda, researchers also had the opportunity to go to the field and further explore the study area. This now proves useful for the research design.

To get the research project off the ground, the consortium organised and led two important kick-off workshops in Kigali-Rwanda at the end of January (30th and 31st January 2024) to explore key concepts in social-ecological restoration to review the past, present and future of restoration science and practice with emphasis, as well as focussing on how the future could be shaped so that ecosystem restoration in western Rwanda could increasingly benefit both human well-being and ecological integrity and biodiversity in the long run. The first workshop focussed on scientific aspects of restoration in Rwanda (and participants were local scientists from Rwanda as well as the German team involving Leuphana University Lüneburg, Humboldt-University Berlin and University of Göttingen) also enabled initial networking to start within the broader collaboration in the context of the project. During the science-focussed kick-off workshop, the research team as well as the research were introduced to the participants at the workshop, and aside from an overview of the Restore Rwanda project, different methods typically applied in social ecological systems science were introduced and discussed in breakout groups and their scope applied to the Rwandan situation.

The second day was under the auspices of restoration practice, and many local and national practitioners, including local and national government officials from Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA), Rwanda Forestry Authority (RFA), Rwanda Water Board (RWB) and Rutsiro, Rubavu, Ngororero and Nyabihu districts, World Resource Institute (WRI). Albertine Rift Conservation Society (ARCOS), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Rwanda Space Agency (RSA), World Agroforestry (ICRAF), Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) and the Internation Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Here the group used the 3 Horizons method to analyse in smaller groups Horizon 1 (the current situation regarding restoration in Rwanda), Horizon 3 (where do we want to get to in the future) and then came up with key transformational tasks and paths needed to move from Horizon 1 to 3.  The exercise proved very successful, enabling a deep exchange between local and international participants as well as the compilation of a list of key transformation steps. Publications are being prepared based on the two workshops, with coauthors from Rwanda partners as well as the German-based consortium (that includes scientists from Rwanda and Burundi).