As Food Tank President, I get to meet really cool people. Folks like Dr. Ankita Raturi. She’s an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Purdue University. Several years ago, she was working to help growers adopt and improve cover-crop practices.

Rather than simply imposing a solution, she collaborated directly with farmers and cover-crop councils and held interactive sessions with these groups to design interventions. It was a long process, but ultimately, a more effective and inclusive process.

“Each of the different activities we do are really oriented around making sure that everybody is able to speak up and talk about what they’re working on—and is able to actually then influence what we ultimately design,” Dr. Raturi tells Food Tank.

This style of research is called participatory action research, or PAR. It’s an open-ended model that centers the expertise of those experiencing a particular social issue. Researchers collaborate with these stakeholders and build authentic relationships as part of their methodology.

Participatory research is important, it’s more effective at addressing inequality in food—and it’s not utilized nearly enough. I’ve said it before: Farmers are knowledge producers too, and those who fail to recognize that are only making things worse.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. According to an analysis in the journal Nature, participatory research “prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives.” Another paper, in Oxford Academic, finds that these PAR approaches “yield excellent outcomes to democratize knowledge production.”

That’s a lot of jargon to essentially say this: If we want to truly fix our broken food system, collaborative knowledge is the way forward.

If we care about building resilient equity and justice, community-centered research is the way forward.

On-the-ground research all over the world bears this out. A recent analysis looked at 20 years’ worth of farmer engagement programs in northern and central Malawi aimed at diversifying crops and improving soils.

By working closely with communities, researchers were able to identify solutions that (1) achieved these goals; (2) were sustainable for communities themselves, and (3) ruled out strategies that created too great a burden on farmers. These sorts of research methods can even help the world achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, says Sieglinde Snapp, a co-author of the study.

Read the full article about collaborative food system solutions by Danielle Nierenberg at Food Tank.