Prepared by Clemencia Rodríguez
Temple University
March 2019

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In 2018, Temple University and the University of Western Sydney initiated a research/practice project centered on environmental stewardship in Montes de María, Colombia with the goal of collaborating with several local grassroots groups to design and implement a series of communication and media initiatives promoting community engagement and environmental stewardship in the region.

Regional context

Montes de Maria, located on Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast, is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and faces great conservation challenges due to accelerated ecosystem transformations (dry tropical forest, coral reefs, wetlands, and mangrove swamps) and territorial changes. The region of Montes de María was particularly impacted by Colombia’s armed conflict during the last two decades of the 20th century. The war had a paradoxical impact on the region; on one hand, the conflict scarred local ecosystems and kept biologists, conservationists, and environmental NGOs away; on the other hand, the constant presence of adversarial armed groups isolated the region and deterred tourism and extractive economies. Two peace agreements and the subsequent demobilization of armed groups have since brought relative peace to Montes de María.
The paramilitary demobilization known as Justicia y Paz in 2005 and the more recent peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, signed in 2016, have both been significant for the region. Today, in this new post-peace agreement era, different threats to environmental security are emerging in the region, including predatory tourism, agribusiness, and extractive economies.

The project

Local grassroots environmental initiatives have emerged in Montes de María to address new pressures on local ecosystems. The goal of this project is to build a long-term partnership –focused on communication, community, and environmental stewardship– between seven local environmental groups and three universities. The key aims are to: uncover some of the underlying drivers of environmental insecurity for rural communities in biodiversity “hotspots”; offer training and capacity building in the areas of communication for social change and media production; and create a new network of local environmental stewards and champions. Ultimately, the goal is to build a network of local communicators with enough skill and expertise to design and implement communication and media initiatives centered on environmental stewardship and specifically tailored to reach local audiences.

The key principles driving this project include:

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• Promoting a participatory approach to media making and communication campaign design;

• Promoting an innovative and experimental approach to communication as a practice that involves research, creative design, and an in-depth understanding of target audiences;

• Strengthening local capacity-building in the area of communication with a broad “tool box”

• that includes campaign design and implementation, participatory media production, audience research, citizens’ journalism, and message positioning;

• Understanding message design as a process that should involve emotion, local identities and cultures, traditional knowledges, and diverse visions of the future;

• Centering all communication and media making on local languages and local modes of communication;

• Understanding environmental stewardship as a practice emerging from individual and collective engagement, environmental consciousness, and local decision-making;

• Understanding environmental stewardship as strongly linked to issues of local governance, access to resources, and power dynamics.

 

Research/Practice

This project is centered on a fundamental assumption that knowledge construction is a process that involves research and practice. Working hand-in-hand with grassroots collectives, the academic team will engage in scholarly analysis of the project’s practical components. The team will interrogate issues such as the use of diverse approaches to communication for social change; how to best use communication and media to increase civic engagement towards environmental stewardship; how to incorporate traditional knowledges and local languages in local environmental communication campaigns; and how to triangulate edutainment, participatory media, and citizens’ journalism in environmental communication initiatives.
Based on a continuous monitoring, evaluation, and analysis of the project’s activities, the academic team will produce a series of academic articles, book chapters, and conference papers about communication for social change and environmental stewardship. The project’s scholarly component has the potential to advance the field of communication for social change. The convergence of traditional approaches such as edutainment and public communication campaigns with more critical approaches, such as participatory media, action research, and citizens’ journalism will make key contributions to how we think communication for social change. One of the academic deliverables already planned is a paper submission for the International Communication Association conference to be held in the Australia in 2020. At the same time, the academic team is currently pursuing international grants including the COALAR grant and Western Sydney University’s Linkage Grant.
 

The partners

 

This project includes several academic, grassroots, and institutional partners:
 

Grassroots collectives:
Casa Suria, Rincón del Mar, San Onofre
Reserva Sanguaré, San Onofre
Jóvenes Provocadores de Paz, Alta Montaña
Vigías del Medio Ambiente, Alta Montaña
Biblioteca Infantil Mariamulata Lectora, Rincón del Mar, San Onofre
Emisora Comunitaria Playa Mar Estéreo, San Onofre

Institutions:
Omar Sierra, Consultor Marino Costero, and Daniel Posada, Profesional en

Comunicación Social, Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación

y la Agricultura (FAO)

Academics:
Juan Salazar, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Clemencia Rodríguez, Temple University, United States
Patrick Murphy, Temple University, United States
Martha C Romero, Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Colombia
Camilo Pérez Quintero, Universidad del Norte, Colombia
Jair Vega, Universidad del Norte, Colombia