Resourceful and Resilient Community Environmental Practice (RECOMS)

The central objective of RECOMS is to train 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in transdisciplinary approaches to supporting resourceful and resilient community environmental practice. Globalization and uneven development lead to our unsustainable way of living, producing and consuming. This leads to limited access to, even exclusion from or depletion of local resources. The problems of access to energy are also increasing, as are environmental injustice and food insecurity. Climate change makes everything even more complex and vulnerable. The RECOMS project assumes that creative cleverness and the resilience of communities can be reinforcing in improvement processes.
ILVO hosts two of the fifteen ESRs, namely ESR 14: Promoting environmental justice: enhancing the resilience of local food systems through resourceful engagement of communities and ESR 15: Participatory GIS: Stimulating resourceful community management of open space through dialogue and visioning in a transdisciplinary fashion.

Academic and non-academic partners supervise the fifteen ESRs in their doctoral project. RECOMS comprises a training program, including internships, seminars, tutorials, small-group intervision sessions, integrated action-based exchanges, visual learning and communication exercises, symposia and two doctoral summer schools. A cross-cutting theme featuring across all consortium training events and ESR doctoral study programs is the use of visual and creative research methods and techniques as a means of enhancing societal engagement, knowledge transfer and research impact. ILVO is one of the leading partners in the abovementioned training tools.

RECOMS works in accordance with the principles of transdisciplinary collaboration and open science. Creative and innovative communication and dissemination activities will be designed in a range of different formats and media (including a specific emphasis on visual outputs). This creates awareness, stimulates transformative environmental thinking and drives knowledge exchange amongst public, private and third sector actors, and also civil society more widely. The knowledge and actions generated through RECOMS will be of value to a wide range of target groups, including specialist practitioners, community groups, third sector organisations and interest groups, government officials and other public sector stakeholders.