The seminal State of the Tropics Report launched by Aung San Suu Kyi in June 2014 simultaneously across the tropical cities of Rangoon, Singapore and Cairns contains some important statistics: that by 2050, some 50% of the world's population and 67% of the world's children will live in the tropics. The question the report posed is this: what sort of tropics will these children inherit – one of opportunity, or one of calamity?
At James Cook University (JCU) where I work, the University's mission since 2007 has been to ‘create a brighter future for life in the tropics’ through research, learning and engagement. To demonstrate its commitment, the University has set up new research institutes such as the Cairns Institute, and has appointed several research professors who are designated as Tropical Leaders. The aim is to undertake strategic research and development responsive to the opportunities and challenges facing the tropics. A process of institutional restructure resulted in two distinct academic divisions, being ‘Tropical Environments and Societies’ and ‘Tropical Health and Medicine’. There are seven associated colleges, all of which have been carefully designed to drive the implementation of the tropical agenda. The University is also leading a consortium of academic institutions producing the State of the Tropics Report series to draw attention to the significance of the tropics as an ‘expanding geo-political region’ (in the words of the Vice-Chancellor), deserving global recognition (Harding, Reference Harding2011).
While the climatic, ecological and associated infectious diseases aspects of the tropics are reasonably straightforward to conceptualise and work with in research and teaching, the same cannot be said of the social dimensions. Researchers and teachers alike often struggle to define, let alone convey, the social and psychological dimensions of the tropics. Is the term ‘tropics’ synonymous with climatic conditions, or are there other unique ways of understanding the tropics? Elsewhere, I have suggested that climatic conditions and histories of colonisation are two defining features of the tropics. Accordingly, it is important for those interested in the tropics to take history more seriously because the links between the past and the present are often stronger than most would like to believe (Tsey, Reference Tsey2013).
What is even more worrying is the tendency among some faculty to view the JCU tropical agenda simply as a branding or marketing exercise; a mandatory ‘tick box’, which one acknowledges upfront in the introductory sections of research grant applications and teaching curricula before reverting to business as usual. Part of the problem is a lack of understanding that successful companies, institutions and teams are those that understand brand as a ‘promise delivered’ (Bean, Reference Bean2009). In other words, whether as a team or a whole organisation, you make a promise through branding to your constituencies, stakeholders or customers and you try, as best as possible, to deliver on the promise. Another part of the problem is that like any difficult to define social phenomenon such as sustainability, capacity building, community engagement or empowerment, the notion of creating a ‘brighter future’ for the tropics can feel daunting and even overwhelming as researchers and teachers struggle to know where exactly to start (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). There's clearly an ethical responsibility on the parts of those driving the new global tropical agenda to ensure that questions regarding the future of the tropics are taken seriously or approached with integrity and are not treated merely as a tick box exercise.
This article draws on my experience in working with research teams and networks in translating difficult to define constructs such as empowerment into practical research (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007) to propose some steps for translating the JCU brighter future tropical mission into reality. Using the first person, I focus on JCU College of Arts Society and Education (CASE) in order to illustrate the points being made. The approach is, however, applicable more broadly to institutions and teams and networks aiming to translate big picture institutional visions and brands into practical and feasible research questions. If our goal is to facilitate a ‘brighter future for life in the tropics’, there are some questions we will need to answer about the role of CASE and indeed all JCU colleges and divisions. The more we can answer these questions, the more that the social dimensions of the tropics will emerge as a leading academic discipline within JCU and will produce national and international leaders.
Some questions one might ask are: what constitutes a brighter future for the tropics? How do we recognise it when we come across one? What are the underpinning attributes and value systems? How do these attributes and values manifest across different communities of people across diverse social groups and settings? How are these attributes described and measured qualitatively and quantitatively? Which people are responsible for building brighter futures for the tropics? What are the dilemmas and choices confronting them? Is there a role for research in assisting them make better choices? If so, what type of research?
One might also ask the following: why are some tropical societies already thriving with creating brighter futures while others are not? What are the social, environmental and genetic determinants of brighter futures? What are the barriers and opportunities for creating brighter futures for life in the tropics? How do we operationalise facilitating brighter futures in our teaching, research and engagement across our college (and indeed other JCU Colleges and Divisions)? What are the costs and benefits of such a task, from the points of view of different stakeholders such as university staff, the communities with whom we work and society more broadly? Is there value for money? How can evidence-based approaches to creating brighter futures add value to and strengthen the work of others across JCU and beyond? Can such approaches help address local, regional, national and even international priority issues, such as achieving food security, reducing youth unemployment, protecting endangered languages and species, preventing obesity, alleviating poverty, decreasing drug and alcohol abuse, eradicating violence and abuse, overcoming religious fundamentalism or achieving energy efficiency?
If ‘creating brighter futures for life’ is central to the economic sustainability and social cohesion of the tropics or indeed any other society, then we need to know the proportion of the regions and communities of people with whom we work, for example that meet our brighter future criteria. Is it 30%, 60% or 70%? If we can establish this, then we need to ask: what evidence-based efforts are required to lift the proportion of communities of people meeting the brighter future for life criteria by say 10%, 20% or 30% over say 5 or 10 years? What will it cost society to do this? What will the benefits be in terms of sustainable economic development and social cohesion? What will the picture look like if the gains of brighter future communities of people are extended across particular local, regional, national and international regions of the world? What will this mean for our search for global peace? What will this mean for forced migration and the growing refugee populations?
Next, we need to know which of these questions have already been answered and which ones remain unanswered. For those already answered, how is the information being used to generate impacts or benefits for ourselves and our stakeholders? For those yet to be answered, how can we take advantage of our teaching, research and engagement activities in order to answer the questions and create benefits for our research communities? Which other questions are clearly beyond our existing capacities? What new partnerships do we need to form in order to attract the necessary resources and expertise to address them? Who else needs to be involved?
In answering these questions, it is crucial that individual team or network members have the autonomy to work on any topic based on their interests and expertise, with the understanding that each contribution constitutes a ‘baby step’ towards the bigger picture vision. This approach as illustrated in Box 1 encourages teams to complement rather than compete with each other (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). It encourages CASE to collaboratively work with relevant people across JCU Divisions and Colleges and beyond rather than being siloed. The approach also overcomes the often unproductive tensions and conflicts within disciplines over qualitative versus quantitative or other methodological wars. All the different research and development types are necessary and valued; from theoretical to descriptive, interventionist, measurement-based; and from reviews to opinions and commentaries (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). The important point is to demonstrate the extent to which each output contributes to facilitating actions towards the bigger picture of creating a brighter future for the tropics.
We will need to organise the types of questions proposed in this article into realistic short, medium and longer term timeframes (Box 1) and make them as visible and accessible as possible, so that the whole world can precisely understand our position. We will also encourage others to develop their own questions, provided that they can demonstrate how they will contribute to the bigger picture brighter future agenda.
Taking integrated teaching, research and engagement approaches, we will as much as possible encourage students from undergraduate through to doctoral candidates to focus their learning and research activities on the questions relevant to their interests and aspirations. Equally important will be to attract and support postdoctoral researchers and other CASE faculty members to develop niche research around questions of interest to them. We will need to create safe and supportive environments for teams and networks to routinely reflect on progress and ask questions such as: how are we going with strengthening the evidence base for a brighter future for life in the tropics? How compelling is the emerging evidence base? What is working and what is not? What lessons are we learning? What do we need to be doing differently? (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007).
Box 1:Putting research into practice: a 10-year programme of empowerment research
Colonisation, racism and discriminatory policies have long been accepted as critical factors contributing to the relative powerlessness and poor health of Indigenous Australians. Despite ongoing efforts to understand and improve this situation, there remains little practical evidence of informed community empowerment programmes and services. The evidence to date has focused on describing the extent of health problems, rather than evaluating what works.
In response to encouraging results from an Aboriginal community empowerment pilot study (Tsey & Every, Reference Tsey and Every2000), a 10-year collaborative programme of empowerment research was developed from 2002 involving several universities, the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health (now the Lowitja Institute), Aboriginal community controlled organisations and groups, and government and other non-government agencies (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). The aim was to determine the extent to which empowerment as a social construct contributes to enabling Indigenous Australians to take greater control over and responsibility for improving their own health and wellbeing (Tsey Reference Tsey2008).
Given the inherent difficulties in defining the term empowerment, and the lack of empirical evidence on the topic, we adopted a ‘phased-approach’ to evaluating complex interventions (Campbell, Reference Campbell, Fitzpatrick and Haines2000 cited in Tsey, 2007). This began with short-term objectives such as: defining empowerment and determining how empowerment manifests in the context of Indigenous Australia; how the attributes and domains of empowerment are described and theorised; how empowerment is operationalised as an intervention programme; and how feasible and acceptable it is in the context of Indigenous Australia. Medium to longer term goals then included how to integrate empowerment into the range of known social determinants of Indigenous health and wellbeing, including health services, education, early childhood development, child protection and workforce development. Other goals included understanding how the process of empowerment spreads or transfers from one setting to another; how to assess the overall costs and benefits of empowerment; and, if the benefits outweigh the costs significantly, how to then upscale empowerment and achieve a wider impact at individual, organisation and system levels.
Efforts to quantify the impact of empowerment (Haswell et al., Reference Haswell, Kavanagh, Tsey, Reilly, Cadet-James, Laliberte, Wilson and Doran2010; Kinchin et al., Reference Kinchin, Jacups, Tsey and Lines2015), its costs and benefits and wider integration are still ongoing. Nevertheless, the achievements to date have been phenomenal. Key achievements include developing a body of consistent evidence from dozens of discrete community and organisational settings which demonstrates that the Aboriginal-developed Family Wellbeing (FWB) empowerment programme for example enhances participants’ control over and responsibility for their physical, emotional and spiritual health and wellbeing (Whiteside et al., Reference Whiteside, Tsey, Cadet-James and McCalman2014). The positive effects of the programme extended further than the individual participants themselves, affecting their ability to work with like-minded people to effect organisational and community level changes. This has resulted in increased awareness, curiosity and demand for the FWB programme across Australia and beyond (Monson-Wilbraham, Reference Monson-Wilbraham2014).
Using each research question as a building block to generate pilot data in support of subsequent research questions, teams and networks have been successful in attracting funding to support elements of the long-term research vision, including, at one time, successful National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) project grants over a period of four consecutive years. The original 10-year programme of research has facilitated a series of ongoing informal networks of groups focusing on discrete empowerment related constructs and applications in a wide variety of settings across Australia.
Above all, charity begins at home, hence we will need to routinely reality check our own academic and practice integrity by asking: how are we role modelling building a brighter future for our CASE family and the JCU community? What does it feel like to be part of a brighter future academic team or community? The more we can answer these questions about ourselves as an academic and practice community, the more we can then expand it to the wider tropical community.
The following suggestions may be useful in starting the process:
1. Develop a working definition of what a brighter future for the tropics means for you.
2. Ensure your research responds directly to the information needs of those responsible for creating brighter futures at local, regional, national or international levels.
3. Brainstorm conceptual, theoretical frameworks and indicators that capture your definition.
4. Decide how you will measure your outcomes qualitatively or quantitatively.
5. Consider how to operationalise your concept in policies, strategies, programmes and services.
6. Determine how you will assess costs and benefits.
7. Consider how the concept applies to your own team.
Using this framework, I believe we have the foundations to help build a brighter future for life in the tropics. But how will we know if this is actually happening? We must look at the extent to which our research participants and communities value our work and increasingly advocate for our type of work compared with that of others. We must also consider the extent to which stakeholders give us the resources we need to do things for them because we are the best among our peers. Finally, we must notice and appreciate the extent to which most people want to become part of our work or make us part of theirs, as it is through collaboration and value adding rather than competition that brightness can flourish.
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The seminal State of the Tropics Report launched by Aung San Suu Kyi in June 2014 simultaneously across the tropical cities of Rangoon, Singapore and Cairns contains some important statistics: that by 2050, some 50% of the world's population and 67% of the world's children will live in the tropics. The question the report posed is this: what sort of tropics will these children inherit – one of opportunity, or one of calamity?
At James Cook University (JCU) where I work, the University's mission since 2007 has been to ‘create a brighter future for life in the tropics’ through research, learning and engagement. To demonstrate its commitment, the University has set up new research institutes such as the Cairns Institute, and has appointed several research professors who are designated as Tropical Leaders. The aim is to undertake strategic research and development responsive to the opportunities and challenges facing the tropics. A process of institutional restructure resulted in two distinct academic divisions, being ‘Tropical Environments and Societies’ and ‘Tropical Health and Medicine’. There are seven associated colleges, all of which have been carefully designed to drive the implementation of the tropical agenda. The University is also leading a consortium of academic institutions producing the State of the Tropics Report series to draw attention to the significance of the tropics as an ‘expanding geo-political region’ (in the words of the Vice-Chancellor), deserving global recognition (Harding, Reference Harding2011).
While the climatic, ecological and associated infectious diseases aspects of the tropics are reasonably straightforward to conceptualise and work with in research and teaching, the same cannot be said of the social dimensions. Researchers and teachers alike often struggle to define, let alone convey, the social and psychological dimensions of the tropics. Is the term ‘tropics’ synonymous with climatic conditions, or are there other unique ways of understanding the tropics? Elsewhere, I have suggested that climatic conditions and histories of colonisation are two defining features of the tropics. Accordingly, it is important for those interested in the tropics to take history more seriously because the links between the past and the present are often stronger than most would like to believe (Tsey, Reference Tsey2013).
What is even more worrying is the tendency among some faculty to view the JCU tropical agenda simply as a branding or marketing exercise; a mandatory ‘tick box’, which one acknowledges upfront in the introductory sections of research grant applications and teaching curricula before reverting to business as usual. Part of the problem is a lack of understanding that successful companies, institutions and teams are those that understand brand as a ‘promise delivered’ (Bean, Reference Bean2009). In other words, whether as a team or a whole organisation, you make a promise through branding to your constituencies, stakeholders or customers and you try, as best as possible, to deliver on the promise. Another part of the problem is that like any difficult to define social phenomenon such as sustainability, capacity building, community engagement or empowerment, the notion of creating a ‘brighter future’ for the tropics can feel daunting and even overwhelming as researchers and teachers struggle to know where exactly to start (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). There's clearly an ethical responsibility on the parts of those driving the new global tropical agenda to ensure that questions regarding the future of the tropics are taken seriously or approached with integrity and are not treated merely as a tick box exercise.
This article draws on my experience in working with research teams and networks in translating difficult to define constructs such as empowerment into practical research (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007) to propose some steps for translating the JCU brighter future tropical mission into reality. Using the first person, I focus on JCU College of Arts Society and Education (CASE) in order to illustrate the points being made. The approach is, however, applicable more broadly to institutions and teams and networks aiming to translate big picture institutional visions and brands into practical and feasible research questions. If our goal is to facilitate a ‘brighter future for life in the tropics’, there are some questions we will need to answer about the role of CASE and indeed all JCU colleges and divisions. The more we can answer these questions, the more that the social dimensions of the tropics will emerge as a leading academic discipline within JCU and will produce national and international leaders.
Some questions one might ask are: what constitutes a brighter future for the tropics? How do we recognise it when we come across one? What are the underpinning attributes and value systems? How do these attributes and values manifest across different communities of people across diverse social groups and settings? How are these attributes described and measured qualitatively and quantitatively? Which people are responsible for building brighter futures for the tropics? What are the dilemmas and choices confronting them? Is there a role for research in assisting them make better choices? If so, what type of research?
One might also ask the following: why are some tropical societies already thriving with creating brighter futures while others are not? What are the social, environmental and genetic determinants of brighter futures? What are the barriers and opportunities for creating brighter futures for life in the tropics? How do we operationalise facilitating brighter futures in our teaching, research and engagement across our college (and indeed other JCU Colleges and Divisions)? What are the costs and benefits of such a task, from the points of view of different stakeholders such as university staff, the communities with whom we work and society more broadly? Is there value for money? How can evidence-based approaches to creating brighter futures add value to and strengthen the work of others across JCU and beyond? Can such approaches help address local, regional, national and even international priority issues, such as achieving food security, reducing youth unemployment, protecting endangered languages and species, preventing obesity, alleviating poverty, decreasing drug and alcohol abuse, eradicating violence and abuse, overcoming religious fundamentalism or achieving energy efficiency?
If ‘creating brighter futures for life’ is central to the economic sustainability and social cohesion of the tropics or indeed any other society, then we need to know the proportion of the regions and communities of people with whom we work, for example that meet our brighter future criteria. Is it 30%, 60% or 70%? If we can establish this, then we need to ask: what evidence-based efforts are required to lift the proportion of communities of people meeting the brighter future for life criteria by say 10%, 20% or 30% over say 5 or 10 years? What will it cost society to do this? What will the benefits be in terms of sustainable economic development and social cohesion? What will the picture look like if the gains of brighter future communities of people are extended across particular local, regional, national and international regions of the world? What will this mean for our search for global peace? What will this mean for forced migration and the growing refugee populations?
Next, we need to know which of these questions have already been answered and which ones remain unanswered. For those already answered, how is the information being used to generate impacts or benefits for ourselves and our stakeholders? For those yet to be answered, how can we take advantage of our teaching, research and engagement activities in order to answer the questions and create benefits for our research communities? Which other questions are clearly beyond our existing capacities? What new partnerships do we need to form in order to attract the necessary resources and expertise to address them? Who else needs to be involved?
In answering these questions, it is crucial that individual team or network members have the autonomy to work on any topic based on their interests and expertise, with the understanding that each contribution constitutes a ‘baby step’ towards the bigger picture vision. This approach as illustrated in Box 1 encourages teams to complement rather than compete with each other (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). It encourages CASE to collaboratively work with relevant people across JCU Divisions and Colleges and beyond rather than being siloed. The approach also overcomes the often unproductive tensions and conflicts within disciplines over qualitative versus quantitative or other methodological wars. All the different research and development types are necessary and valued; from theoretical to descriptive, interventionist, measurement-based; and from reviews to opinions and commentaries (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). The important point is to demonstrate the extent to which each output contributes to facilitating actions towards the bigger picture of creating a brighter future for the tropics.
We will need to organise the types of questions proposed in this article into realistic short, medium and longer term timeframes (Box 1) and make them as visible and accessible as possible, so that the whole world can precisely understand our position. We will also encourage others to develop their own questions, provided that they can demonstrate how they will contribute to the bigger picture brighter future agenda.
Taking integrated teaching, research and engagement approaches, we will as much as possible encourage students from undergraduate through to doctoral candidates to focus their learning and research activities on the questions relevant to their interests and aspirations. Equally important will be to attract and support postdoctoral researchers and other CASE faculty members to develop niche research around questions of interest to them. We will need to create safe and supportive environments for teams and networks to routinely reflect on progress and ask questions such as: how are we going with strengthening the evidence base for a brighter future for life in the tropics? How compelling is the emerging evidence base? What is working and what is not? What lessons are we learning? What do we need to be doing differently? (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007).
Putting research into practice: a 10-year programme of empowerment research
Colonisation, racism and discriminatory policies have long been accepted as critical factors contributing to the relative powerlessness and poor health of Indigenous Australians. Despite ongoing efforts to understand and improve this situation, there remains little practical evidence of informed community empowerment programmes and services. The evidence to date has focused on describing the extent of health problems, rather than evaluating what works.
In response to encouraging results from an Aboriginal community empowerment pilot study (Tsey & Every, Reference Tsey and Every2000), a 10-year collaborative programme of empowerment research was developed from 2002 involving several universities, the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health (now the Lowitja Institute), Aboriginal community controlled organisations and groups, and government and other non-government agencies (Tsey et al., Reference Tsey, Wilson, Haswell-Elkins, Whiteside, McCalman, Cadet-James and Wenitong2007). The aim was to determine the extent to which empowerment as a social construct contributes to enabling Indigenous Australians to take greater control over and responsibility for improving their own health and wellbeing (Tsey Reference Tsey2008).
Given the inherent difficulties in defining the term empowerment, and the lack of empirical evidence on the topic, we adopted a ‘phased-approach’ to evaluating complex interventions (Campbell, Reference Campbell, Fitzpatrick and Haines2000 cited in Tsey, 2007). This began with short-term objectives such as: defining empowerment and determining how empowerment manifests in the context of Indigenous Australia; how the attributes and domains of empowerment are described and theorised; how empowerment is operationalised as an intervention programme; and how feasible and acceptable it is in the context of Indigenous Australia. Medium to longer term goals then included how to integrate empowerment into the range of known social determinants of Indigenous health and wellbeing, including health services, education, early childhood development, child protection and workforce development. Other goals included understanding how the process of empowerment spreads or transfers from one setting to another; how to assess the overall costs and benefits of empowerment; and, if the benefits outweigh the costs significantly, how to then upscale empowerment and achieve a wider impact at individual, organisation and system levels.
Efforts to quantify the impact of empowerment (Haswell et al., Reference Haswell, Kavanagh, Tsey, Reilly, Cadet-James, Laliberte, Wilson and Doran2010; Kinchin et al., Reference Kinchin, Jacups, Tsey and Lines2015), its costs and benefits and wider integration are still ongoing. Nevertheless, the achievements to date have been phenomenal. Key achievements include developing a body of consistent evidence from dozens of discrete community and organisational settings which demonstrates that the Aboriginal-developed Family Wellbeing (FWB) empowerment programme for example enhances participants’ control over and responsibility for their physical, emotional and spiritual health and wellbeing (Whiteside et al., Reference Whiteside, Tsey, Cadet-James and McCalman2014). The positive effects of the programme extended further than the individual participants themselves, affecting their ability to work with like-minded people to effect organisational and community level changes. This has resulted in increased awareness, curiosity and demand for the FWB programme across Australia and beyond (Monson-Wilbraham, Reference Monson-Wilbraham2014).
Using each research question as a building block to generate pilot data in support of subsequent research questions, teams and networks have been successful in attracting funding to support elements of the long-term research vision, including, at one time, successful National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) project grants over a period of four consecutive years. The original 10-year programme of research has facilitated a series of ongoing informal networks of groups focusing on discrete empowerment related constructs and applications in a wide variety of settings across Australia.
Above all, charity begins at home, hence we will need to routinely reality check our own academic and practice integrity by asking: how are we role modelling building a brighter future for our CASE family and the JCU community? What does it feel like to be part of a brighter future academic team or community? The more we can answer these questions about ourselves as an academic and practice community, the more we can then expand it to the wider tropical community.
The following suggestions may be useful in starting the process:
1. Develop a working definition of what a brighter future for the tropics means for you.
2. Ensure your research responds directly to the information needs of those responsible for creating brighter futures at local, regional, national or international levels.
3. Brainstorm conceptual, theoretical frameworks and indicators that capture your definition.
4. Decide how you will measure your outcomes qualitatively or quantitatively.
5. Consider how to operationalise your concept in policies, strategies, programmes and services.
6. Determine how you will assess costs and benefits.
7. Consider how the concept applies to your own team.
Using this framework, I believe we have the foundations to help build a brighter future for life in the tropics. But how will we know if this is actually happening? We must look at the extent to which our research participants and communities value our work and increasingly advocate for our type of work compared with that of others. We must also consider the extent to which stakeholders give us the resources we need to do things for them because we are the best among our peers. Finally, we must notice and appreciate the extent to which most people want to become part of our work or make us part of theirs, as it is through collaboration and value adding rather than competition that brightness can flourish.