RECOMS is a Marie Sklodowska Curie (MSCA) Innovative Training Network funded by the European Commission. It is comprised of a transdisciplinary consortium of scientists, practitioners and change agents from eleven public, private and non-profit organisations located in six European Union countries. RECOMS will train fifteen Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in transdisciplinary approaches to supporting resourceful and resilient community environmental practice. Through individual doctoral projects, collaborative learning and guided training, the ESRs will develop advanced skills and expertise in tackling social-ecological challenges such as how to transform urban and rural environments for the health and wellbeing of vulnerable communities.
Drawing in parallel on visual and creative methodologies and forms of communication RECOMS will enable the ESRs to instigate transformative thinking and practice across a full range of stakeholders, as well as socio-cultural, geographical and environmental settings.
Fundamental to the scientific training within RECOMS is the application of a coupled social-ecological and critical lens to community resourcefulness and resilience, as complex, dynamic and process based, denoting the capacity of a system to change.
Restrictions in access to, exclusion from, or depletion of local resources, and retained or increasing problems of energy poverty, environmental injustice and food insecurity, are just some of the consequences of the unsustainable patterns of living, production and consumption provoked by processes of globalisation and uneven development. Climate change adds further complexity and vulnerability to this picture. It is the reason that a relational framing of community resourcefulness and critical evolutionary resilience constitutes the conceptual pivot of this training programme.
By critically engaging with the interlocking concepts of resourcefulness and resilience the scientific training will support the ESRs in advancing societal understanding of how to nurture the inherent potential of all local stakeholders to become involved in creating adaptive and transformative sustainability pathways.
Co-supervised by academic and non-academic partners, the fifteen ESRs will be supported in undertaking doctoral research projects on differing dimensions, cases and contexts of resourceful and resilient community environmental practice. These projects will be organised around three interconnected themes: Unlocking and Empowering; Adapting and Transforming; Collaborating and Connecting. That is:
- Empowering and unlocking the potential of vulnerable communities to become more resourceful
- Strengthening the adaptive and transformative capacity of local groups through resourceful environmental practice as critical to building community resilience
- Encouraging a more just and inclusive approach to stimulating community resourcefulness by nurturing broader participation in resourceful environmental practices.
A cross-cutting theme featuring across all consortium training events and ESR doctoral study programmes, will be the use of visual and creative research methods and techniques as a means of enhancing societal engagement, knowledge transfer and research impact. The consortium encompasses lead thinkers and practitioners in the development of socially innovative and participatory forms of creative and visual investigation and communication.