Building social capital through participatory research: An analysis of collaboration on Tohono O'odham tribal rangelands in Arizona

On the Tohono O'odham (TO) Nation, an American Indian nation in southern Arizona, where local institutions and community norms govern management of communal rangelands, government interventions in rangeland management have historically overlooked social aspects of management and consequently met with little success. Similarly, past research on the TO Nation has fueled resentment due to a lack of local collaboration. Participatory research offers one way to create power-sharing relationships between researchers and communities and to develop locally appropriate resource management strategies. In partnership with local groups on the TO Nation, we used participatory research to develop, implement, and evaluate a rangeland ecology and management curriculum. The participatory curriculum development and research processes led to increased social capital among participants, creation and adoption of a locally tailored curriculum, and institutionalization of participatory approaches within tribal organizations, demonstrating high levels of quality and validity according to emerging post-positivist criteria for evaluating qualitative research.