Co-construction beyond participation: Who decides what counts as evidence? Insights from the Wellcome-funded programme, The Health Impacts of Climate Change on Precarious Outdoor Workers in Urban Vietnam

The seminar will examine the co-constructed research approach that we have developed over the past three years with informal outdoor workers in urban Vietnam. Its central concern is not simply whether affected communities participate in research, but whether they exercise meaningful authority over the production of knowledge.

It is important to emphasise that this seminar focuses specifically on the co-construction of evidence about the climate-related health risks faced by workers. This is a critically underdeveloped area in the existing literature. Although research increasingly documents the health consequences of climate change, there remains insufficient evidence grounded in workers’ own knowledge of how climatic hazards are encountered, interpreted and managed within the everyday realities of precarious employment. The experiences of informal outdoor workers are particularly likely to remain absent from formal evidence systems because their work, exposures and health needs are not always adequately captured by conventional occupational health categories, standardised measures or institutional datasets.

In conventional participatory research, communities may be consulted, interviewed or invited to comment on findings, while researchers retain control over the questions, categories, methods and standards of evidence. Our programme sought to redistribute that authority. Workers contributed to defining the research questions, identifying relevant forms of climate exposure and health harm, assessing the adequacy of existing measures, interpreting findings and shaping potential interventions.