Ecohealth component | Component explanation | Corresponding project elements | Source of information |
---|---|---|---|
Participation | - from the beginning, stakeholders (including affected population) collaborate on various research stages using local knowledge and addressing some of their priorities; also refers to participatory action research | - participation from member of local institutions and community members consisted of providing information for the researchers’ project and helping them collect data | - interview theme: “limited participation” (Table 4) |
System | - understanding the whole and its parts (issues, interactions, key actors, components, and interrelationships); includes systems science | - not be evaluated at the time of this study1 | N/A |
Multidisciplinary | - more than two disciplines working together in their traditional roles | - More than one discipline was involved (epidemiology/public health, environmental engineering) but all were allied health professions | - project documents (Table 3) |
Action-oriented | - results in something done to solve or mitigate the research problem under study | - no interventions or changes were planned at the time of this study but they intended to address this in the next phase of research | - interview with project lead (interview transcript, not shown here) |
Complexity | - made up of many interrelated parts; where ecohealth is best applicable | - the project was designed to address several dimensions of the sanitation problem and made efforts to share results and perspectives across disciplines and stakeholders | |
Long-term | - ecohealth requires a time-commitment; improvements/outcomes might only be seen in the future; difficult to contain within a single project | - data collection started in 2008; next phase of research was expected to last until 2013 | - project documents (Table 3) |
- project involved multiple components | |||
Indicators | - measures used for study outcomes and monitoring should be developed by involved stakeholders and may be different according to each group | - community-identified indicators had not been discussed with the researchers or addressed at the time of this project | - “community identified signs of improvement” (Table 5) |
Adaptive management | - an iterative learning process with stakeholder participation involving monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting the plan based on the information generated in the process | - could not tell at the time of this study1 | N/A |
Transdisciplinarity | - collaboration between researchers and practitioners from complimentary disciplines/sectors and/or other stakeholders on a problem; uses multiple methods/tools that facilitate the generation of new frameworks, concepts, methods, institutions, etc. from the knowledge sharing and/or interaction | - integration of research components was not clear; integration of results was anticipated, but how this will happen was not clear | - interview theme: “integration is not clear” (Table 4) |
Equity | - addresses differences between groups affected by research problem; gender (roles, responsibilities), power (decision making, access to resources), and trade-offs (who benefits) | - statistical analysis of data had been stratified by gender | - interview with PhD student on health research component (interview transcript, not shown here) |
Sustainability | - meeting the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations; the outcome or goal of ecohealth, also refers to sustainability of the environment and/or of interventions/projects | - could not tell at the time of this study1 | N/A |
Socio-ecological | - understanding the human and environmental components of a problem and their interaction | - health component quantifies human health risks and exposure | - project document (Table 3) |
- social component examines perceptions & behaviours | - interview theme: “integration is not clear” (Table 4) | ||
- environmental component quantifies nutrient flows in agricultural & sanitation system | |||
- the interaction between components not addressed yet, as integration is not clear | |||
SOHOs (self-organizing, holarchic open system) | - characterized by holarchy (interactions between nested hierarchies), feedback loops (consequences for another part of the system – positive or negative), self-organization (combination of feedback, boundaries, and openness) | - could not tell at this point in the project1 | N/A |
Negotiate | - a process in which the decisions on objectives, methods, and indicators are made with stakeholders | - the research was conducted according to researchers’ priorities, mainly driven by a conceptual framework developed a priori | - interview theme: “priorities” (Table 4) |
- project document (Figure 1) |