caENTI establishes a draft letter of quality
The second International Annual Conference of Territorial Intelligence will be the setting for the presentation of the draft letter of quality on research-action applied to sustainable territorial development of the groups made up of researchers and territorial actors who are members of the caENTI Project.
This conference will be held at the University of Huelva (Spain) next October under the title "Territorial Intelligence and Governance. Participatory research-action and territorial development".
The starting point for the preparation of a draft letter of quality is the aim of answering the question "What is a research-action applied to quality sustainable territorial development?"
For the caENTI members, this quality must be considered taking three criteria into account: the results as regards the content of the research-action, the results associated with the process followed, and the results in terms of governance:
- As regards the content, quality will improve as far as the solutions provided by the research-action best suit the territorial problems relative to sustainable development.
- Regarding the process, a research-action will have higher quality as far as its methodology increases the territorial actors’ competences for the action, as well as the specialists’ abilities of analysis in the research, especially as regards the use of resources offered by the current knowledge society.
- Regarding governance, quality will be associated with the research-action process ability to translate into a greater democratisation of the decision-taking processes in the territory.
In short, it must be a research-action that promotes empowerment of the territorial actors, involving them in the diagnosis, proposal of solutions, and development of actions to solve their own problems.
The letter of quality is being prepared in the form of a Decalogue and contains the principles and recommendations inspired in the best practices of research-action among the experiences in the territory gathered along the last fifteen years by the Project partners. However, several questions are still open: What indicators can be used to adjust this quality? Or, is it a question of everything or nothing? What kind of requirements must a research-action project meet in order to achieve quality objectives? How are these objectives actually put into operation? And the most basic one: What degree of importance do all these questions have for the promotion of sustainable territorial development?
This is the debate that the Huelva Conference will try to promote not only among the caENTI partners, but also among all other territorial partners and research groups involved in these processes or interested in their development. We encourage you to participate in this interesting debate which, in our opinion, is highly relevant for promoting the alliance of scientific research with territorial projects within the context of the knowledge society.
