CoCooR focuses on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and related forest-based climate change mitigation policies and financing mechanisms with direct effects on sustainable development and poverty reduction. REDD+ may aggravate the protracted conflicts characterizing forestry in the Global South or cause new ones in the absence of a conflict-sensitive approach. Yet, the changes in cross-scale governance brought about by REDD+ may also provide unprecedented opportunities for transforming existing conflicts and promoting cooperation. CoCooR seeks to strengthen the evidence on the impacts of REDD+ on conflict and cooperation in developing countries through research in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam, three countries at advanced stages of REDD+ offering excellent opportunities for generating insights relevant to other countries. Application of an environmental justice lens is expected to generate novel understanding of cross-scale conflict and cooperation over forests. This knowledge innovation allows CoCooR to develop a conflict prediction checklist for REDD+ practitioners, produce recommendations on conflict-sensitive national safeguards processes for decision makers and provide relevant training to local communities, grassroots organizations, NGOs, government and project developers. By involving national institutions and ambitious postdoctoral staff as equal partners, CoCooR makes unique contributions to capacity development with regards to the ability to investigate, provide advice and implement tools for conflict-sensitive REDD+ policy and practice. CoCooR brings together world leaders on REDD+ research and practice with national research institutions of excellence on the basis of existing collaborations. The partners draw on recent environmental justice research to examine how the production of injustices and politics of justice associated with the development of REDD+ affect conflict and cooperation over forests. They survey REDD+ conflicts in Mexico, Nepal, Vietnam and worldwide, investigate local-level dynamics in six REDD+ demonstration sites, analyze national safeguards processes, and examine the empirical results from comparative and theoretical perspectives. The research employs transdisciplinary methodology drawing on ethnography, discourse analysis and participatory research in a broadly inductive approach. CoCooR uses the new knowledge on conflict and cooperation over forests and innovative theoretical understanding of cross-scale dynamics of conflict and cooperation to engage with various kinds of REDD+ policy makers and other stakeholders in the three countries, South/Southeast Asia and worldwide. CoCooR also develops close linkages to other CoCooN projects and deepens the partners integration in global networks of excellence in research and practice on conflicts, climate change, environmental justice and forests.

“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)” (www.datasproject.org) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making used in our digital platform, requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning West Africans. This methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four reasons. First, scholarly expertise on West Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was transnational, rarely limited to one country or population, and the transfer of Africans across borders reflects this global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools as a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about demography, data justice and research transparency.