Communicating science from the Arctic: A collaborative protocol to mitigate harm

Abstract

Scientists increasingly engage communities living in researched places as an attempt to mitigate harm and produce more equitable research. However, these efforts are not always successful. This paper focuses on the communication of research to the wider world, a key area of activity that is seldom undertaken jointly. Research communications and outputs may unintentionally reinforce harmful ideas and actions that disbenefit communities. For example, they may represent people as passive victims of environmental change, or call for solutions that appear to resolve one problem but have damaging side effects. Instead, through co-production, communities can assert shared ownership of communications, identify risks and priorities, and control the representation of land, water, and people in academic and public debates and in policy. This paper reports the process by which a communications protocol was developed collaboratively by community researchers and academics, for a study of Inuvialuit youth resilience and innovative adaptation to climate change. It discusses the implementation of the protocol, which we suggest has potential for wider use in scientific research. The paper provides researchers with a template that may be adapted for different studies, issues, and communities. This Collaborative Perspective, co-authored by Inuvialuit, Canadian and UK academic and community researchers, aims to contribute to the growing literatures on science co-production and community self-determination in research and its impacts. The critical discussion is situated in imperatives to decolonise research processes, responding to calls from Indigenous scientists to disrupt the hegemony of western scientific knowledge.

Introduction

Engaging communities in environmental and physical science is now commonplace, especially where the researched places in question are marginalised or at risk (e.g. Gordon, 2017; Mulrennan et al., 2012; Yua et al., 2022). This is driven, variously, by: ethical imperatives to mitigate harm to communities; practical requirements such as requesting access to territory; or intellectual benefits from working with local expertise that can be vital to understanding. Learning from and with lay communities, and Indigenous knowledge in particular, is identified as an area of need in physical geography in Anderson et al.’s (2024) recent horizon scan of the discipline. Different levels, or a spectrum, of participation are variously deployed – engagement ranging from cursory interaction before initiating fieldwork to full co-production at every stage – with many variants, models, and practices in between (e.g. Gordon, 2017; Kershaw et al., 2014; Lane et al., 2011; Whitman et al., 2015; Yua et al., 2022).

Although physical geographers have noted a variety of potential benefits from engagement with local communities, both for their own research and for communities, they are increasingly aware of the potentially harmful impacts of their research, and the ethics of community engagement (Kershaw et al., 2014; Sharp et al., 2022). While this observation is also more widely applicable, it comes into sharp focus in Arctic science (Goldhar et al., 2022; Gordon, 2017; Lauter, 2023; Yua et al., 2022). While there is some crossover between participatory geography and the expanding field of Indigenous geographies (Smiles, 2024), the relationship can be a tense one. Research co-production may seem to provide one answer to growing calls to decolonise science, but this is sometimes charged with masking extractive or harmful practices (De Leeuw et al., 2012; Tuck and Yang, 2012), as community engagement is subverted to bolster the ‘business as usual’ of Western science. Given the sharp human inequities in how the impacts of environmental processes are experienced, as well as in access to the power that knowledge produced by ‘certified experts’ (Lane et al., 2011) offers, scientists have stepped up efforts to address issues of ethics, equity, and colonial continuity in community involvement in research (e.g. Kershaw et al., 2014; Yua et al., 2022). Funders increasingly prioritise it, and its relevance escapes few physical geography projects.

In response to demands from Indigenous communities around their sovereignty over the land that hosts research, the formal institutions and bodies that control Western research and environmental science have begun to introduce controls. Initiatives by Parks Canada and National Science Foundation (NSF) Alaska funding both aim to safeguard northern Arctic and Inuit communities through multifaceted approaches. Parks Canada’s Northern Protected Areas Strategy establishes and manages protected areas while respecting Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices. Community-based monitoring programs ensure local participation in environmental research, aligning scientific efforts with community priorities, while efforts focus on preserving cultural heritage sites within national parks. NSF Alaska funding supports community engagement grants, resilience initiatives addressing Arctic challenges, and capacity building programs that empower Indigenous communities in scientific research. These efforts align with the world-leading National Inuit Strategy on Research (NISR), which emphasises the integration of Indigenous knowledge, equitable partnerships, and sustainable research practices to uphold community rights and environmental stewardship ¹ .

This Collaborative Perspective focuses on how to plan and implement the communication of research and its findings with community partners, as one stage in jointly owned co-produced research projects. While communicating the results of science to the wider world, clearly and for a range of audiences, is now a fairly standard obligation for scientists, this communication activity is rarely undertaken jointly with the communities who scientists are working with or next to during their research. The past decade of Arctic research has seen little improvement in this regard, as local researchers are very rarely included in peer reviewed publications (Brunet and Fletcher, 2025). But as we go on to argue, this stage of research can have significant impacts for communities living in rapidly changing environments, such as Indigenous Arctic regions. Research communication and outputs may reinforce harmful ideas about people, places or processes, or lead to actions that disbenefit communities, regardless of researchers’ intentions. Socially inclusive approaches to science communication, on the other hand, address critical questions around communication principles, types of output and assumptions about audience knowledge (Sobane et al., 2023).

Our team was researching climate change adaptation among Inuvialuit youth in Inuit Nunangat. Inuvialuit is the western Arctic region, within Inuit Nunangat which is commonly known as northern Canada (see Figure 1). We were keen to develop a whole-project strategy so that every member had involvement in creating, shaping and vetoing outputs. We developed a protocol by which all communication during and after the research would be jointly controlled by academic researchers and Inuvialuit partners. Our intention was that this would lead to rich and diverse outputs and perspectives, share benefits such as named outputs, and mitigate potential harms as far as possible. Rather than leaving best practice to individual communities and scientists to navigate, our suggestion here is that developing a collaborative protocol at the start of a project provides a systematic route that is more likely to centre the values and priorities of the communities involved.

Figure 1.

Map of Inuit Nunangat showing location of Tuktoyaktuk. Source: Authors’ adaptation of base map from NASA 2025.

Our communications protocol is co-produced by Inuvialuit youth involved in our research. It is also informed by guidance from Indigenous expertise elsewhere, produced to mitigate both the historically exploitative relationship with science and the academic prerogative of benefiting from knowledge creation (Eerkes-Medrano and Huntington, 2021; John and Castleden, 2024; Sobane et al., 2023). The authors of this paper are drawn from a larger inter- and intra-disciplinary project team that includes physical and social science researchers from Canada and the UK, Inuvialuit researchers, artists and other community members. Our research (‘Carving out Climate Testimony: Inuit Youth, Wellness & Environmental Stewardship’) explored how changes to terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems impact Inuvialuit youth’s mental health and well-being, their resilience, and charted their innovative adaptations to climate change that are key to continued livelihood and cultural continuity. The research has taken a participatory approach from the outset, providing an Inuvialuit-led structure and methodological pathway for community members to determine how climate change impacts are experienced and what adaptations they make. Each stage of the research has been led or directed by Inuvialuit co-researchers, as far as is desired and possible, from designing the research and specifying areas of activity and focus to disseminating findings. At the centre of the project were the Youth Advisory team, consisting of four Inuvialuit young people who are community leaders in Tuktoyaktuk, co-researchers, and key members of the project team who were paid for their time throughout the project’s life. The Youth Advisory’s work goes beyond having input at all stages of the research, to taking an active role in decision-making in our work together, and leading on specific community activities, follow-up action and outputs.

Our intention in sharing our model is that it may stand as an example and guidance for other research projects; although there is a clear need for some aspects to be project-, site-, and community-specific.

Rationale and context

Our starting point is that research communications and outputs may unintentionally reinforce harmful ideas and actions that disbenefit communities. On the project that is our case study for this paper, the research outcomes are being communicated through a wide range of media, including murals, film, and StoryMaps created by the artists on our team (https://www.cinuk.org/projects/cct/); podcasts; op-eds (https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2025/07/03/inuit-climate-policy-futures-from-seeing-to-sensing/); reports and briefings seeking to influence Arctic policy (https://changingclimate.ca/map/carving-out-climate-testimony-inuit-youth-wellness-and-environmental-stewardship-in-tuktoyaktuk-nwt/); Indigenous-Inuit climate delegations (https://www.uvic.ca/news/topics/2024+delegation-shares-climate-change-displacement+news); and academic presentations and journal articles.

Tuktoyaktuk, where our project is located, is a small hamlet in Northwest Territories (Figure 1), a well-researched community that has featured in numerous media reports and scientific articles. As a result, it is a place powerfully associated in the global imaginary with climate disaster, due to real and imminent processes of coastal erosion, sea level rise and permafrost thaw. Portrayals by journalists, drawing on scientific research (e.g. Shaw et al., 1998; James et al., 2022), tend to reflect an apocalyptic vulnerability approach, highlighting projections that Tuktoyaktuk Island will be breached within the next few decades, with potentially deleterious effects for the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk. In much that has been written about it, Tuktoyaktuk is largely represented as ‘the arctic community falling into the ocean’ (CBC, 2022), where exists an ‘almost-forgotten way of Indigenous life’ (MacEacheran, 2018). The conflation of Indigeneity with nature – both at risk of being ‘washed away’ (CBC, 2022) – continues a longstanding colonial narrative that, even in aiming to ‘protect’ Indigenous peoples, denies complex ways of life and reduces communities to the natural world (Braun, 1997).

Residents of Tuktoyaktuk have little input into these imaginaries, which are at odds with our youth researchers’ joyful experiences of home, deep love of land and culture, and resistance as climate change activists (Bagelman et al., 2025). In their view, moving is not an acceptable response, and they call instead for climate change to be addressed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_0AVTfsf28). The looming ‘solution’ of moving the community comes from the same governmental structures that have destroyed Inuvialuit communities and families historically and is complicit in causing climate change: the colonial logics are clear. A review of dominant narratives in 76 papers on Arctic climate change science also highlights stark divergences with Indigenous knowledge and understanding (Eerkes-Medrano and Huntington, 2021).

Our case study case throws up a number of wider rationales for the community control of communications from research projects such as press briefings, policy reports, and academic outputs. These include issues of consent, risk reduction, data sovereignty, and opportunities to promote existing community knowledge and action on environmental issues. As we stated earlier, in the context of Arctic science the imperative to decolonise research processes is especially salient; and particularly so on our project, given that our team spans Canada, the UK, and Inuvialuit communities, and the recent history of colonial violence in Tuktoyaktuk and the wider region (Watt-Cloutier, 2015).

A decolonising research framework works from Indigenous critiques of knowledge/power relations as benefiting European and North American descendantst of colonialists in different parts of the world (Quijano, 2007; Smith, 1999). It emphasises the ongoing role of coloniality in contemporary academic research, which reinforces the power of English-speaking, minority world institutions ² . The majority world and Indigenous lands are frequently positioned as a site of research data but not of theory, and Indigenous peoples as subjects not authors of research (Castleden et al., 2012; Kovach, 2009; Smith, 1999; Wilson, 2008). Seen as ‘a path not a destination’ (Held, 2023: 95), decolonising research practices vary, undertaking the complex task of centring or incorporating the traditions of science and ways of knowing of Indigenous peoples around the world (Lauter, 2023; Yua et al., 2022). Indigenous scholars remind us of the common misconception in Western science that:

…ethical misconduct is a predicament of researchers having a lack of cultural knowledge but good intentions… [Instead] a critical analysis points to a power dynamic sustained by societal and institutional cultures that allow the privileged to take, take and take. Seen from a decolonizing lens, ethical infringement through research is an extension of the Indigenous-settler colonial project.

(Kovach, 2009: 142).

Indigenous scholars also identify that the recent vogue for ‘decolonising’ research and education has often been applied loosely and disingenuously (Tuck and Yang, 2012), serving to re-centre rather than de-centre existing knowledge/power hierarchies. Participatory and community-based research approaches, on the one hand, may address this danger, while on the other, the close relationships they involve also leave them open to exploitation and the retrenching of academic researchers’ power (De Leeuw et al., 2012). Decolonising science must therefore be part of broader moves to decolonise society and politics, bringing Indigenous sciences and ontologies into academia rather than add-on community engagement or tweaks to methodology on projects that remain otherwise unchanged (Held, 2023). This is why, we argue, rethinking how we communicate science is an essential part of the decolonisation agenda.

Developing the protocol

In this section, we outline our collaborative development and application of the communications protocol used on the project. Shortly after the project started, our team made the decision to create the protocol, both as a guide for dissemination of findings and to field media enquiries, with underpinning values and priorities set by the Inuvialuit Youth Advisory team. By this point the project had already received considerable media interest (including from Netflix), and the team were concerned to protect against the risk of reinforcing damaging stereotypes about Indigenous Arctic communities and erasing their existing knowledge and action.

The protocol was created in two stages. The first stage involved creating and populating a template, through a collective discussion on priorities for the communication of project activities and findings. The template took the form of key questions around the desired purpose, principles, messages, audiences, and potential risks of communication, as well as mitigations of those risks, how to measure impact, and the process to be followed for responding to enquiries, co-authoring publications, and so on (Figure 2). Our template took intellectual inspiration from the First Nations Communications Toolkit (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada and Tewanee Consulting Group, 2015).

Figure 2.

Template for Communications Protocol used to develop our approach.

This template was used to guide a structured discussion with the project Youth Advisory team. While the academic researchers from Canada and the UK would usually be the ones to field media enquiries and suggest where we might publish our work, the Youth Advisory wanted to have a central influence on the messaging in all communications, in creative outputs, and in planning publications and other dissemination. The discussion took place during a retreat day in Tuktoyaktuk, held in the local school. Following the template (Figure 2), the Youth Advisors deliberated on the questions and set priorities for communication. This was summarised as we worked, in the form of a vision board (Figure 3). The discussion was recorded and transcribed to inform the creation of the strategy.

Figure 3.

Vision Board created with the Youth Advisory at a retreat day in Tuktoyaktuk.

The Youth Advisors raised a range of issues; some that researchers often consider in planning communications, and some specific priorities that reflect the youths’ positioning in relation to climate change within and outside our own community. For example, in deciding the purpose of communication we included love, healing of the land and people, and spreading awareness about the causes we fight for. As regards the purpose of communicating, we want to relate to other people and respect culture as well as broadcasting our voice and our stories to the outside world. Our approach to communication is informed by the mental health crisis that is affecting Inuvialuit youth and exacerbated by climate change (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2015); one of the key messages from the research we have conducted is that being in the land is its own form of healing. Western observers might call this priority of the Youth Advisory a trauma-informed approach to the risks of communication; we are keen to avoid unintentionally triggering others who are at risk in other places by telling traumatic stories of climate change harm. We target a wide scope of audiences for our communications: communities who are close as well as far away, politicians and policy-makers, and taking on the challenge of persuading those who don’t yet believe in the impacts of climate change. We are well aware of the dangers of misrepresentation, and the discussion was also an opportunity for the academic researchers to share suggestions about how to mitigate the harm of misrepresentation; for example, insisting on the right to edit or check media pieces before publication, consent processes for sharing photos, and ways of approaching writing journal articles collaboratively. This stage resulted in a longer document containing all the agreed practices for our communications from the project.

The second stage of development involved distillation of the key points of the communications protocol, from which an infographic was created by an external agency (Figure 4). The result is a clear and striking representation of the co-produced protocol that can easily be referred to each time we respond to media requests, take decisions and work together on outputs. While a professional animator was tasked with the job, the creative process of producing this graphic involved frequent checking with the Youth Advisory about the distilled points and the visuals used. The design has cultural significance; the two circles are a common Inuvialuit motif signifying holistic ways of knowing. The design signals the importance of co-production at every stage, as the first version by the (UK-based) animator used a pan-Indigenous (rather than Inuvialuit) image. A process of feedback from the Youth Advisory led to one member, Darryl, sketching the ulu based on a carving, and the suggestion of nanuk, that appear in the centre of the circles in the final image.

Figure 4.

Infographic: Communications Protocol. (available online at https://www.cinuk.org/resources/cct-resources/).

Evaluation and implications

As we have sought to demonstrate here, the communication of outcomes is a crucial stage of research. In community-based or community-affecting research, developing a protocol collaboratively at the start of a project provides a systematic route that is more likely to ensure that communications centre the values and priorities of the communities involved.

Our communications protocol was an attempt to create a tool to deepen participation in our research together in the Arctic and to share control at every stage of the research process, including the important but often neglected phase of dissemination. Co-authored by Inuvialuit, Canadian, and UK academic and community researchers, this Collaborative Perspective aims to contribute to the growing literatures on science co-production and community self-determination in research and its impacts. Through asserting shared ownership of communications, identifying risks and priorities, and community control of the representation of land and people, our hope is to provide a small contribution to the wider project of decolonising science.

At the time of writing, our team is actively using the communication protocol in responding to media enquiries, in writing reports and academic articles, and in conference presentations and other meetings that the Youth Advisory have engaged in. For example, our project organised a ‘changing climate conversations’ delegation in Victoria, British Colombia, in April 2024 where the Youth Advisory members met with scientists from Environment Canada and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The young leaders used the protocol to determine how their research findings would be shared. Often on such occasions, Indigenous communities are invited into a testimonial space where their ‘evidence’ of ‘impact’ is shared within allocated time and limited to conventional modes of speaking. Instead, youth determined that this needed to be a 2-day event, opened with a traditional welcome by local Inuk residents, and that creative storytelling would be central to the sharing of knowledge. The Youth Advisory team also determined when the event would end, based on the team’s other commitments and capacity for what can be tiring work. In this way, we were able to maximise the dissemination of knowledge within the policy space, while controlling the encounter and minimising potential harms (which range from exhaustion, to having a tokenistic presence only, to exploitation).

Carmen Kuptana, Tuk resident, Inuvialuit youth leader, and member of our Youth Advisory team is one of those who developed the communications protocol. She has since presented it to scientific audiences during a well-attended CINUK and ArcticNet science meeting in Ottawa (13 Dec 2024) and at the University of Saskatchewan to interdisciplinary researchers. (14 March 2025). Looking back on the process, she reflects:

“This strategy [protocol] was really important because it is a way for us as young leaders to decide about our project. We came together as leaders and determined the main purpose like ‘Helping our community to be seen by others’, and message of the project. We also decided on the principles that guide the project, these are important Inuvialuit values like ‘Respect for our culture and land’. As well as setting these visions we also determined how the project will share the research, like how we will share our work through Storymaps or film, and that we will have the final say on when it is ready to be shared or not. This is really important because sometimes research takes knowledge from community, it does research ‘on’ the North and does not honour Inuit knowledge holders - like us.”

While the resulting protocol is specific to our project, the community, and our work together, the process has elements that we believe are transferable, and we intend our reporting here to be useful in informing those working elsewhere. While conducting physical geography on Indigenous lands has come into the sharpest focus in recent years (Kershaw et al., 2014), many other communities have been left out of knowledge production altogether, or are not included in decisions about the representation of their communities and lands which are potentially damaging. This is the case for many communities closer to home for scientists in the minority world (see Whitman et al., 2015). Our finalised protocol is not intended to be replicated in full, but instead this paper offers a template and procedure for collaborative discussion and development of project-, site-, and community-specific agreements. The values of communities and their traditions of science, the specific risks that communication may pose and the histories of involvement with Western science and scientists are all locally specific: communications protocols must inevitably be place-based as well as values-based.

None of this is to say that the process of creating and implementing the protocol has been straightforward. The ‘co’ in co-production can suggest wholeness or symmetry, yet as our experience underlines, it is always partial and uneven. Our team spanned vast geographical and temporal distances – stretching from Inuit Nunangat, to southern British Columbia, to the UK – and so we often work across eight time zones. It requires considerable time and effort to coordinate even basic communications, let alone co-create and review all outputs. Remote engagement is always a challenge compared to in-person engagement – which highlights the crucial phase of trust- and relationship-building in place to support the remote engagement later. A commitment to regular check-ins and collaborative decision-making was fundamental to our process, but it also meant we often could not meet the rapid production tempos demanded by media platforms or academic timelines. Deadlines were sometimes missed or declined, and some media opportunities were passed up because we prioritised deliberation, consent, and shared authorship. Importantly, the strategy we co-developed placed youth mobility and voice at its centre. As a result, academic team members sometimes had fewer opportunities to lead outputs, attend conferences, or act as spokespersons than they might otherwise have had. This was a conscious trade-off: a redistribution of visibility and labour that supports more equitable representation and control, even if it means sacrificing some conventional academic capital. We consider this a necessary and ethical rebalancing.

While the protocol ultimately enabled collaborative and community-led communication, the process of applying it was not always straightforward. For instance, early discussions about communications with the Youth Advisory often felt abstract and difficult to ground. Participatory methods – especially visual tools like the vision board (see Figure 3) – helped clarify priorities and make collective thinking more tangible. Another challenge was that, although youth participants were highly attuned to the risks of media exposure, they were less familiar with the norms of academic outputs such as conference papers or journal articles. These required additional conversations and shared learning to align expectations and highlight the need to provide some training to support community members in disseminating research outputs. The protocol ensured that such discussions happened and were guided by shared principles.

Using this kind of protocol therefore demands a greater investment of time and relational work – but it also fosters trust, shared ownership, and ethical reflexivity. These are not minor benefits, but central to any research claiming to follow decolonial or co-production principles.

Critically, co-production and participatory approaches to research do not automatically make for a more ethical approach that benefits community partners (Tuck and Yang, 2012; de Leeuw et al., 2012). In common with many Arctic scientists, our project was funded by Western government research councils and is not fully Indigenous-controlled research (see Kovach, 2009; Smith, 1999; Wilson, 2008). And, as John and Castleden (2024) recently observe, even when Western institutions appear to be on board with Indigenous research ethics, there are often still critical gulfs with regard to fundamental values and worldviews. Collaboration always presents many tensions and barriers to be overcome (see the special issue edited by Castleden et al., 2012 for more discussion). However, inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations – in this case between Inuvialuit experts, physical geographers and social scientists with long experience of these approaches – have added value in potential to navigate the obstacles that arise. Our paper does not resolve broader conflicts between scientific and Indigenous communication (Sobane et al., 2023), but Indigenous team members on our project are producing and co-producing outputs according to Inuvialuit priorities and traditions. In attempting a shared model of control with Inuvialuit youth, building in practices that ensure their input and stewardship, this project provides grounded insights into how a more equitable ‘path’ might be forged together (Held, 2023: 95). In Carmen Kuptana’s words:

Communicating our stories and work can be powerful. It can also do more harm than good. Making sure that there is a community-controlled strategy in place is an important step towards ensuring better science that reflects our needs and the sovereignty of our people.