Technical solutions aren’t sufficient to guarantee the success of small-scale renewable energy projects in Brazil. But, says 2016 IDRC Research Award recipient Catherine Gucciardi Garcez, that’s where the focus has largely been. “Issues of social inclusion and governance — and enabling local communities to participate in those initiatives — are not as strong,” she says.

“I understand the potential of renewables and some of these technologies are laudable solutions,” says Gucciardi Garcez. “My research shows that the developers were well-intentioned, but they didn't spend enough time getting buy-in from the local community or in getting the community to participate enough to create local ownership. Without engaging the proper stakeholders, we’re at risk of not achieving the kind of impact we’d like to have or that’s needed,” she says.

An engineer, Gucciardi Garcez completed both her master’s and doctorate in environmental policy in Brazil. “I had been living outside of Canada for five to six years before coming to IDRC,” she says. “This was my first professional experience back in Canada after a long time. It's been quite helpful in gaining a professional network, which I had lost.”

Graduate education should challenge traditional modes of learning and create new knowledge. In the field of ecohealth, however, that doesn’t always happen, says Mathieu Feagan, a 2014 IDRC Research Award recipient.

Feagan set out to examine how the knowledge of graduate students, young professionals, and early career academics in Canada and Latin America could be better applied to contribute to ecological sustainability and human health. This inquiry built on his PhD research about how current academic training and research often disregard the experiences and skills of experts-to-be and therefore maintain the status quo.

His IDRC project’s working groups, Feagan says, were made up of “incredibly thoughtful people committed to social-environmental justice.” But, he says, “our position as graduate students, interns, and short-term contract holders puts us, in some sense, in competition for a limited number of jobs, few of which are actually designed to support our aspirations for social-environmental justice. Learning about the different ways that we each come to terms with this and take up action in the North and the South, will continue to be a powerful experience for me,” he says.