By: Lydia Collas
From left to right: Ryan Plummer, Mica Trimble and Sheila Young (Associate Director, International Support Director and ILO)
This March saw the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre’s (ESRC) postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Micaela Trimble, visit Brock University following the recent publication of her research.
Trimble spends most of her time at the University of Uruguay (UDELAR) but collaborates closely with members of the ESRC where she holds a postdoctoral fellowship. The Centre’s Director, Dr. Ryan Plummer, explains,
“The Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainability Science is an important element of our Transdisciplinary Hub initiative to engage emerging scholars of excellence as well as leverage research funding. The support enabled Dr. Trimble to undertake some illuminating research. Her involvement at Brock serves as an excellent example of our commitment to internationalisation as well as enhancing the vibrancy of our research culture”.
Trimble first came into contact with Plummer when he was the external examiner on her PhD thesis at the Natural Resource Institute, University of Manitoba. Trimble was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainability Science by the ESRC in 2015 and agrees that the partnership has been hugely rewarding,
“The collaboration with the ESRC has benefited my work in multiple ways. The interaction with Ryan throughout the project has particularly furthered my professional development. I have also made close connections with Drs. Marilyne Jollineau and Julia Baird; we share some research interests and we are planning new collaborations. In addition, I have been involved in a few classes and events of the Sustainability Science and Society (SSAS) graduate program when visiting Brock, which provided me with the opportunity to share and discuss findings of my research with eager graduate students.”
During her visit, Trimble presented a seminar reporting the findings of her recently published research which investigated ways to evaluate collaborative approaches to governance.
“My postdoctoral research is about evaluation of adaptive co-management, a management approach which combines the learning characteristic of adaptive management with the linking characteristic of co-management, bringing together resource users, government and non-government stakeholders.”
This led Trimble to study a council for small-scale fisheries in coastal Uruguay in addition to the council of a marine protected area in Parana, Brazil.
“Through interviews and participatory workshops, among other methods, the multiple stakeholders involved identified strengths and weaknesses of the councils, as well as ways for improving the operation of these boards.
One of my findings showed that the participatory evaluation initiative helped improve the relationships between the fishers and the government, and it also fostered learning among them. A series of operational agreements for the council, proposed and discussed by participants at the workshops, are among the outputs of the participatory evaluation.”
In the future, Trimble plans to delve further into this area of research,
“In Uruguay, the number of multi-stakeholder councils for small-scale fisheries co-management has been growing (there are eight right now), but they are facing several limitations. These are related to the limited (or no) experience that the government and the fishers have in multi-stakeholder collaborations. Future research can explore how the councils can learn from one another.”
“I look forward to continuing the collaboration with the ESRC once my postdoctoral fellowship ends since the Centre develops cutting-edge transdisciplinary research on social-ecological systems and sustainability science.”
