Everybody knows something
Barefoot begins with people’s knowledge of their own lives.
People understand the places they live, the services they use and the pressures they face. Their choices may appear irrational when viewed through a spreadsheet or performance framework, but they usually make sense when we understand the barriers, relationships and resources shaping them.
Research should uncover that logic. It should make visible what formal systems overlook and give people greater influence over decisions affecting their lives.
From African farms to public services in the North East
Our approach began in Africa in the 1990s, where Barefoot’s founder, Christopher, worked with rural communities on agroforestry and natural resource management.
At the time, development programmes often treated professional and scientific knowledge as superior to local knowledge. Experts arrived with solutions. Communities were expected to adopt them.
The reality was more complicated. Farmers possessed detailed knowledge of soils, crops, trees, rainfall and risk. Households knew which resources they needed and what they could afford to invest. Communities had their own systems for sharing labour, managing land and surviving uncertainty.
People were not simply living in an environment. They were continually producing nature: they planted trees, cultivated land, exchanged resources, raised families and tried to create livelihoods that could endure. Any intervention that ignored this knowledge risked damaging the very systems that enabled people to survive.
That lesson remains at the centre of Barefoot’s work.
Knowledge, power and the ability to act
Paulo Freire argued that people should not be treated as empty vessels waiting to receive expert knowledge. Through critical consciousness, people can recognise the forces shaping their lives, question what has been presented as inevitable and act to change it.
For Barefoot, participation therefore means more than asking people for their views. It means examining who defines the problem, whose knowledge is believed and who has the power to decide what happens next.
E. F. Schumacher added a concern with human scale. In Small Is Beautiful, he challenged the assumption that bigger, faster and more productive must always mean better. Economic activity should serve people, strengthen communities and respect the natural world.
This is why we pay attention to the small things that large systems miss. A confusing letter, an inaccessible appointment, an unaffordable bus journey or an inflexible workplace can determine whether a policy succeeds or fails.
Amartya Sen’s capabilities and entitlement ideas asks what people are genuinely able to do and become and what prevents them from getting there. A service may exist, a job may be secured or information may be published, while barriers still prevent people from benefiting. We therefore examine real choices and outcomes, not simply what is available on paper.
A service can exist without being accessible. A person can have a job without having security. Someone can possess a legal right without being able to exercise it. We examine the distance between formal provision and people’s real freedom to benefit from it.
The relationships that hold life together
Göran Hydén’s idea of the economy of affection describes the networks of family, community, trust, obligation and mutual support through which people sustain everyday life.
Formal economics often treats the individual or household as a separate unit. Hydén showed that livelihoods are also produced through relationships. People share food, money, care, knowledge, labour and risk. These networks can provide resilience where markets and public services fail, although they can also create obligations and inequalities of their own.
This thinking connects directly with our research into the foundational economy for Karbon Homes.
That work looked beyond employment rates and gross household income. It examined what people had left after paying for housing, energy, transport and other essentials. A higher salary did not necessarily produce a better life if rent, childcare or travel to work absorbed the difference.
The research showed that homes, neighbourhoods, essential services and social relationships are not peripheral to the economy. They are its foundations. They determine whether people can stay warm, travel to work, care for others, participate in their community and plan beyond the next bill.
Looking beneath the headline
These ideas give Barefoot a practical way of examining services and programmes.
We ask:
- What are people actually able to do?
- What prevents them from benefiting?
- What relationships and resources sustain them?
- Who carries the cost when a system does not work?
- Whose knowledge has been excluded?
- What would meaningful change look like in everyday life?
A training programme may raise awareness without changing behaviour. An employment initiative may place someone in work while leaving transport, childcare or workplace barriers untouched. A public service may meet its targets while remaining impossible for some people to use.
We investigate these gaps between intention, delivery and lived reality.
Research that people can use
Christopher brought this approach to research on poverty, disadvantage and public services in the North East of England. His later experience of disability, and his understanding of the social model of disability, deepened its focus on barriers created by organisations, environments and society.
Today, Barefoot combines rigorous evidence with participation that gives people a meaningful role in the questions asked, the interpretation of findings and the changes that follow.
We adapt our methods to the people and the task. This may involve interviews, accessible discussions, observation, surveys, knowledge mapping, collaborative analysis or helping an organisation translate evidence into practice.
People create knowledge. They build places, relationships and systems of support. They try to reproduce the conditions that will allow their families and communities to endure, with the hope that the next generation will inherit something better.
Our job is to understand that knowledge, test it carefully and make it useful.
AI as a research assistant. People in control.
At barefoot, we use ChatGPT by OpenAI as a research assistant to support thoughtful, rigorous work. Large language models can help us review and synthesise published research, explore data rapidly, and assist with thematic coding of interview narratives. Used carefully, these tools give us more time to examine what findings mean and work with people to turn them into practical improvements.
Our researchers direct the process throughout. We check sources, verify calculations and review suggested themes against the original material. We pay particular attention to context, contradictory evidence and the nuances of people’s experiences. AI can suggest patterns; responsibility for interpreting them remains with us.
Our approach follows Wiley’s guidance on responsible AI use, including human oversight, transparency, accuracy and protection of confidential information. We explain where AI has made a substantive contribution to our research and remain accountable for every finding and recommendation.
Personal information stays out of our AI inputs. Before using interview material or other research data, we remove names, contact details and any contextual details that could identify someone. We only use material where this is consistent with the project’s permissions and confidentiality arrangements. We have also disabled ChatGPT’s setting that allows new conversations to be used to train OpenAI’s models. These safeguards reduce exposure while recognising that AI services still process the information supplied to them.
We will never publish unchecked AI output or fill reports with generic, machine-generated content. Every deliverable is reviewed, developed and approved by a human researcher. Our promise is straightforward: useful technology, careful research and people accountable for the results.