Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
their lives. This can then lead to conservationists getting into more traditional
development interventions such as provision of water, health care, school buildings,
or taking an advocacy role on behalf of the people who they interact with. There
are two major issues to consider when doing this:
●
It is very important
not to raise people's expectations
. When outsiders come
to an area, people wonder what impact this will have on their lives. A lone
researcher into the sustainability of resource use cannot necessarily promise
any immediate improvement to people's lives based on their work. The key is
to be open and honest about the implications and the limits of the study or the
conservation intervention for local people.
●
It is important also to
remain objective
about what the intervention's aims are,
and how best to achieve these. Both conservation and improving people's lives
are important aims, and they can act synergistically, but it is easy to get dis-
tracted on the ground. Difficult issues about moral imperatives are common,
and these need to be thought through, rather than ignored.
One of the commonest types of engagement with local people is through
educational and
awareness-raising activities
. These may include leaflets, posters,
calendars or t-shirts with a logo and conservation message on them. The medium
depends on the locality—in Russia, for example, credit-card sized pocket calendars
are very popular, whereas a t-shirt would be gratefully received (and worn) in
Indonesia. These kinds of dissemination material are
de rigeur
in conservation pro-
jects nowadays, and they do clearly raise the profile of the project. But they proba-
bly have a negligible effect on people's actual behaviour (although the degree and
direction of their influence remains to be quantified). Talks at schools, providing
educational materials to children, holding video shows and if possible hosting trips
into the field to see the conservation target are more fully engaged ways to raise the
project's profile. Because they also involve interaction with people, and show con-
cern for the area's children, they will give the project much more credibility than
just distributing information passively.
Giving feedback
to communities who have participated in research is really
important to ensure that they feel involved and can see what the research has
achieved and what the next steps should be. For example, a simple leaflet showing
the overall results of an attitudinal survey in pictorial form can be distributed to the
communities that took part in the survey. Alternatively a village meeting can
be held to discuss the results, particularly if the community is predominately
illiterate.
Ideas for awareness-raising and community participation in conservation are
limited only by our imaginations. For example, a drama group made up of local
unemployed youths was formed to deliver conservation education around
Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe (WildCRU n.d.).
Participatory video
is
another exciting new tool that could be transferred from development to conserva-
tion. This was used in Turkmenistan, where local herders themselves made films
about their experiences since the break-up of the Soviet Union, with facilitation
