Negotiating structural barriers to environmental collaborations in doctoral programmes

Abstract

This commentary reflects on the experiences of a cohort of human and physical geographers in enacting environmental collaborations during their doctoral studies. The authors identify three key structural barriers encountered whilst attempting a collaborative approach: (1) doctoral funding priorities, (2) doctoral resourcing and (3) assessing doctoral collaboration. The authors discuss how the negotiation of these encounters came to frame their understanding of collaborative approaches to environmental knowledge creation. Competitive application processes for doctoral studentships can encourage the overpromising of the impact of planned environmental collaboration, potentially co‐opting the voices of partners/communities to satisfy doctoral funding requirements. Given insufficient funding of collaborations, the authors argue that this overpromising of doctoral research's impact can later result in difficult trade‐offs between undertaking additional commitments at the expense of the career progression of the doctoral student, contributing to educational inequalities and scaling‐back the initial plans at the cost of collaborators encountering environmental crises. The trade‐off is further problematised by institutional assessment procedures that do not adequately recognise the more nuanced contributions of environmental collaborations and a prevailing culture promoting peer‐review publishing. Overall, the commentary argues that these barriers help to reproduce inequalities in the distribution of voice in environmental scholarship, undermining efforts to democratise environmental knowledge creation in doctoral research. The authors call for specific structural reforms of doctoral programmes to help address these challenges and support a broader resistance to the inadequate resourcing and evaluation of environmental collaborative research in UK higher education.

Geography and environment: New conversations, new communities

“…At Geo, we are keen to widen the scope of what is publishable to include issues around PhD processes; career progression; Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; fieldwork practices and so on. A recent piece by a group of PhD students at Exeter University (Lait et al, 2024) offers a great example of the sorts of issues we are keen address. The authors reflect on the experience of undertaking environment-facing collaborations as part of doctoral programmes and some of the systemic challenges presented by this studentship pathway.…”