Persona: Ajates González, Raquel
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raquel.ajates@poli.uned.es
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Ajates González
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Raquel
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Publicación Opening science to society: how to progress societal engagement into (open) science policies.(The Royal Society, 2024-05-29) Wehn, Uta; Ajates González, Raquel; Mandeville, C.; Somerwill, L.; Kragh, G.; Haklay, M.A broad understanding of the aims and objectives of the international open science movement was recently adopted with the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, expanding the focus of open science to include scientific knowledge, infrastructures, knowledge systems and the open engagement of societal actors. In response, recent discussions on science policy practice are shifting to the implementation of open science via national policies. While policy instruments to support some aspects of open science are well-studied, guidance on the emerging ‘social’ aspects of open science has lagged, prompting UNESCO to generate guidance. In this paper, several authors of the UNESCO Open Science Toolkit guidance document on ‘Engaging societal actors in Open Science’ synthesize the scholarly underpinnings behind its recommendations. This work draws upon a targeted search from academic, policy, and grey literature in the fields of open science and community engagement, with a special focus on citizen science, to derive guidance on how to overcome barriers to the uptake of societal engagement approaches. The results present building blocks of what an enabling environment for the open engagement of societal actors could look like, identifying key considerations and reflecting on opportunities and challenges for progressing and evaluating sound open engagement of societal actors into regional & national (open) science policies.Publicación Innovative Food Systems Teaching & Learning: Overcoming disciplinary and teaching silos to fix the food system(Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, 2017-06-21) Ajates González, RaquelWhile inter-university and interdisciplinary research projects are very common in Higher Education (HE), inter-university and interdisciplinary teaching programmes are still very rare. This paper reflects on the first year of the Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning (IFSTAL) programme. IFSTAL is a three-year project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) with the aim of bringing together postgraduate students from very different programmes to learn about food and farming beyond their own disciplines. IFSTAL creates learning environments and activities that encourage students to think systemically about the transdisciplinary challenges facing the food system. IFSTAL combines both face to face events and an inter-university virtual learning environment (VLE) that was created from scratch for this project. At the end of its first year, a survey was carried out to evaluate the programme and inform the structure for year two (Y2). Survey data revealed students preferred interacting at face to face events over the shared VLE. The programme for Y2 was re-designed to incorporate more flipped classroom features with an andragogy-based approach.Publicación GROW Citizens’ Observatory: Leveraging the power of citizens, open data and technology to generate engagement, innovative datasets and action on soil policy and soil moisture monitoring’(IOP Publishing, 2020) Woods, Mel; Hemment, D.; Ajates González, Raquel; Cobley, A.; Xaver, A.; Konstantakopoulos, G.Citizens' Observatories (COs) seek to extend conventional citizen science (CS) activities to scale up the potential of citizen sensing for environmental monitoring and creation of open datasets, knowledge and action around environmental issues, both local and global. The GROW CO has connected the planetary dimension of satellites with the hyperlocal context of farmers and their soil. GROW has faced three main interrelated challenges associated with each of the three core audiences of the observatory, namely citizens, scientists and policy makers: one is sustained citizen engagement, quality assurance of citizen-generated data and the challenge to move from data to action in practice and policy. We discuss how each of these challenges were overcome and gave way to the following related project outputs: 1) Contributing to satellite validation and enhancing the collective intelligence of GEOSS 2) Dynamic maps and visualisations for growers, scientists and policy makers 3) Social-technical innovations data art.Publicación Agricultural cooperatives remaining competitive in a globalised food system: At what cost to members, the cooperative movement and food sustainability?(Sage Publications, 2019-11-27) Ajates González, RaquelThere are more than 40,000 agricultural cooperatives in Europe with 9 million farmer members and over 600,000 workers. Due to the democratic nature of the cooperative form, it is assumed agricultural cooperatives empower their members and allow small farmers to have a stronger voice in the supply chain. However, much of the academic literature on agricultural cooperatives focuses on the economic analysis of their performance, while hardly any research has been done on analysing the impact that policy, long supply chains and the internationalisation of the food system have on members and labour dimensions. This article contributes to covering this gap by analysing how agricultural cooperatives are being shaped and misshaped by European farming policy and the architecture of global food systems. Following Schneiberg’s thesis on social movements being a condition for processes of diffusion and mutualism, this article reflects on critical issues in organisational studies related to agricultural cooperatives, the cooperative movement and sustainable food systems. Case studies from Spain and United Kingdom are used to illustrate the Northern and Southern European perspective. The concept of deviant mainstreaming is applied to discuss how agricultural cooperatives are being co-opted and losing their transformative potential as a result of pressures to remain competitive, with effects on members, social justice and the environment. The findings suggest policy changes at the European level, and the increasing internationalisation of the food system is fuelling the amalgamation of agricultural cooperatives, which is threatening their local embeddedness and creating organisational tensions between the local, co-operative space and the global, capitalist space.Publicación The solution cannot be conventionalised: Protecting the alterity of fairer and more sustainable food networks.(Routledge, 2017) Ajates González, RaquelPublicación Local Action with Global Impact: The Case of the GROW Observatory and the Sustainable Development Goals(MDPI, 2020-12-16) Ajates González, Raquel; Hager, Gerid; Georgiadis, Pavlos; Coulson, Saskia; Woods, Mel; Hemment, DrewThis article reports on Citizen Observatories’ (COs) potential to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), reflecting on the experience of the GROW Observatory (GROW). The research aims to take the first steps in closing the gap in the literature on COs’ potential contributions to the SDG framework, beyond quantitative data contributions for indicator monitoring. Following an analysis of project activities and outcomes mapped against the SDG framework, the findings reveal GROW’s potential contributions across two dimensions: (i) Actions to advance the implementation of goals and targets through awareness raising and training; participatory methods; multi-stakeholder connections; and supporting citizens to move from data to action and (ii) Data contributions to SDG indicator monitoring through citizen-generated datasets. While earlier research has focused mostly on the latter (dimension ii), CO activities can impact numerous goals and targets, highlighting their potential to relate global SDGs to local level action, and vice versa. These findings align with the growing literature on COs’ ability to bring together policy makers, scientists and citizens, and support changes to environmental policy and practice. Furthermore, this research suggests groundwork activities that address the goal and target level can also enhance sustained data collection to contribute to indicator level monitoring. We conclude with future trends and recommendations for COs wishing to contribute to the SDGs.Publicación A future workforce of food-system analysts(Nature Research, 2019-12-16) Ingram, John; Ajates González, Raquel; Arnall, Alex; Blake, J. Lauren; Borrelli, Rosina; Collier, Rosemary; Frece, Annabel de; Häsler, Barbara; Lang, Tim; Pope, Harley; Reed, Kelly; Sykes, Roger; Wells, Rebecca; White, Rebecca; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6335-0759Publicación Impact Assessment of Citizen Science: State of the Art and Guiding Principles for a Consolidated Approach(Springer Nature, 2021-09) Wehn, Uta; Gharesifard, Mohammad; Ceccaroni, Luigi; Joyce, Hannah; Ajates González, Raquel; Woods, Sasha; Bilbao, Ane; Parkinson, Stephen; Gold, Margaret; Wheatland, JonathanOver the past decade, citizen science has experienced growth and popularity as a scientific practice and as a new form of stakeholder engagement and public participation in science or in the generation of new knowledge. One of the key requirements for realising the potential of citizen science is evidence and demonstration of its impact and value. Yet the actual changes resulting from citizen science interventions are often assumed, ignored or speculated about. Based on a systematic review of 77 publications, combined with empirical insights from 10 past and ongoing projects in the field of citizen science, this paper presents guidelines for a consolidated Citizen Science Impact Assessment framework to help overcome the dispersion of approaches in assessing citizen science impacts; this comprehensive framework enhances the ease and consistency with which impacts can be captured, as well as the comparability of evolving results across projects. Our review is framed according to five distinct, yet interlinked, impact domains (society, economy, environment, science and technology, and governance). Existing citizen science impact assessment approaches provide assessment guidelines unevenly across the five impact domains, and with only a small number providing concrete indicator-level conceptualisations. The analysis of the results generates a number of salient insights which we combine in a set of guiding principles for a consolidated impact assessment framework for citizen science initiatives. These guiding principles pertain to the purpose of citizen science impact assessments, the conceptualisation of data collection methods and information sources, the distinction between relative versus absolute impact, the comparison of impact assessment results across citizen science projects, and the incremental refinement of the organising framework over time.Publicación Capturing and communicating impact of citizen science for policy: a storytelling approach(Elsevier, 2021-06-23) Wehn, Uta; Ajates González, Raquel; Fraisl, Dilek; Gharesifard, Mohammad; Gold, Margaret; Hager, Gerid; Oliver, Jessie L.; See, Linda; Shanley, Lea A.; Ferri, Michele; Howitt, Camden; Monego, Martina; Pfeiffer, Ellen; Wood, ChrisIn response to the need for approaches to understand how citizen science is currently influencing environmental policy and associated decision making, we devised the Citizen Science Impact StoryTelling Approach (CSISTA). We iteratively designed instruments to be used as tools primarily for citizen science practitioners seeking to understand or communicate policy impacts. We then trialled the CSISTA and associated instruments on four exemplary citizen science initiatives, using different forms of inquiry and collaboration with respective initiative leaders. In this paper, we present CSISTA, with details of the steps for implementing inquiry and storytelling instruments. Additionally, we reflect on insights gained and challenges encountered implementing the approach. Overall, we found the versatility and structure of CSISTA as a process with multiple guiding instruments useful. We envision the approach being helpful, particularly with regards to: 1) gaining an understanding of a citizen science initiative’s policy and decision-making impacts; 2) creating short policy impact stories to communicate such impacts to broader audiences; or 3) fulfilling both goals to understand and communicate policy impacts with a unified approach. We encourage others to explore, adapt, and improve the approach. Additionally, we hope that explorations of CSISTA will foster broader discussions on how to understand and strengthen interactions between citizen science practitioners, policy makers, and decision makers at large, whether at local, national, or international scales.Publicación Going back to go forwards? From multi-stakeholder cooperatives to Open Cooperatives in food and farming(Elsevier, 2017-07) Ajates González, RaquelMany authors have proposed cooperatives as one of the preferred governance structures for realising alternative food systems, being recommended both in farming and also downstream at consumer level. However, recommendations for the cooperative model still draw dividing line between producer and consumer cooperatives. As opposed to conventional agricultural cooperatives (ACs) made up of farmer members only, the multi-stakeholder model brings together producers, consumers and/or restaurateurs under one single enterprise. This paper analyses multi-stakeholder cooperatives’ (MSCs) potential to recreate more sustainable food flows between rural and urban areas and to overcome the limitations of conventional farmer cooperatives focused more on economic than social and environmental benefits. As part of this research, historical data from cooperative archives is used to look at the history and early attempts of multi-stakeholder cooperation in food and farming. Additionally, current supporting evidence from Spain and UK, in the context of European food policy frameworks, is also presented. A four-fold proposal for open cooperatives is discussed and applied to the analysis of the case studies in the framework of global transformative networks and alliances. The introduction of different types of members seems to both complicate and enrich the cooperative mission, both theoretically and in practice. Their networks with other social movements reveal how the MSCs presented are trying to change, rather than adapt to the market economies they struggle to survive in. The findings suggest MSCs in food and farming are striving to achieve more-than-economic benefits and are moving into the arena of the open and pro-commons economy and other global social movements.