How to ethically decolonize research with more than human settings

This guide defines the principles of decolonial ethics in more-than-human settings, understood as ongoing mutual transformation between human and other-than-human beings and practices. The guide looks at urban environments from the point of view of an ecosystem that encourages transformative participatory action research. It focuses on long-term engagement with these environments. The guide talks about two types of research designs, showing how decolonial research ethics can be used in more-than-human settings. The guide is limited to urban ecosystems and urban nature as an example of decolonial research in seemingly predominantly human and, therefore, more ontologically centred settings. In this sense, the guide focuses on strategically addressing structural resistance. These are cultural ecosystem services (CES) and a design-based visual semiotics approach that shows artistic research. The first approach discusses cultural ecosystem services as knowledge and experience outcomes of civic engagement with urban ecosystems and highlights the potential of enhancing responsible public attitudes and pro-environmental behaviours through deeper understanding and promotion of CES. The authors provide tools and examples of participatory qualitative and quantitative mapping of subjective perceptions of CES. There is also an account of how prioritising public knowledge and experience of CES can decolonise urban planning and intensify its responsiveness towards the human-environment interaction in place. The authors of the second approach show what the artistic approach can do by using the Urban Semiotics Lab’s methodological design to show how design-based visual semiotics methodologies can be used. In this case, the authors take a deeper look at the social context and experiences to look at reality from a sociopolitical stance that provides an ethical look at the world, for and by the world.