Leveraging integrative research for inclusive innovation: urine diversion and re-use in agriculture

Abstract

This report describes the evolution of a qualitative research design used in a study that integrated academic and non-academic expertise and involved multiple stakeholders concerned with the diversion of human urine from the waste stream for its re-use in agriculture. The study took place in two regions of the U.S., New England and the Upper Midwest (most specifically Vermont and Michigan) and suggests the importance of ethnographic perspectives in a participatory action research framework going forward. This manuscript presents a novel mix of researchers, from a grassroots organization to R1 University teams, and explores the perspectives of a wide range of research participants with whom we conferred to understand whether and how fertilizers made from nutrients recovered from diverted urine might be accepted, adapted, and scaled in agricultural use. Our manuscript thus articulates new territory for such interpretive social science work (focus groups, interviews and participant observations) neither within basic ethnographic research, nor within the kind of “rapid ethnography” widely used in business, engineering and international development fields. We describe how our research process entailed the modifications of our methods, and we consider the overlapping and sometimes opposed knowledges and attitudes of multiple stakeholders who are crucial to the uptake and scale of such new technologies for closing loops in our waste and water processing infrastructures and our food production systems. To best leverage these diverse knowledges, we suggest incremental steps for teams like ours towards an inclusive research process.

Keywords

• agriculture
• sustainability
• innovation
• inclusivity
• collaboration