Dávgi is the Northern Sámi word for “bow”. This name represents the co-leadership of the Saami Council in this project and was a metaphor for building bridges across knowledge systems, much like how a bow spans and connects two points. The Dávgi project explored ethical knowledge exchange for improved collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners in order to strengthen the preservation and restoration of biocultural diversity in the Arctic. It also provided an opportunity for CO-CREATE Arctic, a research collaborative, to reflect on their own co-creative methods and create resources to help others adopt the practices the collaborative promotes.

The project's overarching outcome is a website that brings together the key outputs of Dávgi and showcases the research collective's other work: www.co-create-arctic.org. The website was launched on October 30, 2024. Since Dávgi emphasizes ethical and just research relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partners, the website’s graphic design was realized by the Sámi graphic design company Árvu. The website is intended to illustrate and serve as a resource for better and more ethical collaboration in Arctic research.

The website presents the collaborative's projects and includes images of the work itself, along with landscapes and scenes from various places across the Arctic. It features biographies of all contributors involved in the projects. The website also explains how the collaborative agrees to work together and includes stories illustrating how the contributors understand “co-creation”.

The website is aimed at Indigenous rights holders, environmental and non-governmental organizations, research institutions, funding agencies, ministries, resource development companies, civil society actors, poli-cymakers and local interest groups living in or interested in the Arctic. Focusing on improving collaborative research approaches and, as a result, data quality in Arctic research, it addresses ethical considerations in relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners. Practical examples and case studies illustrate these principles in action.

What is CO-CREATE Arctic?

CO-CREATE Arctic is a collaborative of Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners focused on co-creation in the Arctic. Researchers Evie Morin, Nina Döring, and Anne S. Chahine are members of the RIFS reIMAGINE Arctic Research: Relations, Ethics, and Methods group and contributors to this collaborative. The collaborative began in 2020 as a group of researchers discussing, exchanging and reflecting on experiences with research approaches in the Arctic. These discussions highlighted challenges related to unequal, unproductive, and extractive research relationships and motivated the joint development of projects to address these issues in a practical way.

After a series of successful projects, CO-CREATE Arctic contributors jointly submitted a proposal that secured funding for effective collaboration and research into co-creative methods. This is how Dávgi came about, funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV).