Paulo Sanjines Barreiro wins the Stone Soup Award on Research in Social Innovation 2023 

Stone Soup Consulting has granted the 5th edition of its Award on Research in Social Innovation to the academic research “Ecosystem governance in the Tropics: A policy analysis and evaluation of collective action in the Atlantic forest of Southern Bahia” by Paulo Sanjines Barreiro. This edition of the award is dedicated to ”Collective action to solve complex social problems” and will dedicate its 7,500€ fund to support Barreiro’s work in this academic field.  

This research aims at investigating the collective action emergence, evolution and adaptability of a civil society organisation acting within a watershed in the Atlantic forest biome. The Esperança-Condurú ecological-corridor of Southern Bahia is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally recognized for its high biodiversity of vascular plants, with a large number of endemic species, and for housing the Serra do Conduru State Park conservation unit. The region’s poor and peripheral population, which mostly lives in Bairro Novo, is composed of black people and solo mothers, who suffer from the absence of public policies, violation of human rights, suffering from critical societal challenges of food insecurity, water pollution, environmental injustice and lack of income. 

Bairro Novo grassroot leaders and families founded in 2012 the Bairro Novo Neighbours Association (ASMOBAN) to address the aforementioned critical societal challenges through social, environmental and economic initiatives. In this context, Barreiro’s research will use policy process survey and analysis methods to investigate the 11 years of emergence, evolution and adaptation of the current self-governing mechanisms of a civil society organisation (ASMOBAN) rooted in the marginalized Bairro Novo neighborhood, and two of its initiatives, namely the Community fair and the Vegetable Garden Network. According to Barreiro, his investigation “will unveil unique ecosystem governance strategies for civil society organisation led collective action at the watershed level in the tropics”.  

In 2023, the fifth edition of the Stone Soup Award on Research in Social Innovation wanted to look for answers to the following question: how can collective schemes bring scale to interventions addressing critical societal changes? We believe that Barreiro’s research will contribute to understand how collective action can lead to the achievement of a complex societal challenge and help to scale the solution. According to Clara de Bienassis, Stone Soup’s People and Well-being Director, “this research will help rise the sociological awareness of environmental organisations. Also, its results will inform policy making at the regional level and provide capacity building tools for collective action planning and evaluation across the global tropics”. 

In 2012, the first edition of the Award recognised a research project on Entrepreneurial Learning realised by Ricardo Zózimo. In 2015, Stone Soup dedicated its second edition to recognise “Materiality in charity reporting”, a research project presented by Katherine Ruff. Nuno Archer won the Stone Soup Award 2019 with his research “Psychosocial development and student engagement in school: a study in basic and secondary education”, based in Portugal. And more recently, in 2021, the fourth edition recognised the work of Delia Mensitieri with her research “Inclusion starts with I: Reducing identity threat to promote an inclusive environment and to improve performance, career aspirations, and satisfaction”.