The purpose of this poster is to introduce a new project investigating different approaches to community-based waterway regeneration projects in South Africa and the United Kingdom and their links to global citizenship education (GCE). The project (ESRC Connecting Water to Global Citizenship via Education for Sustainable Development or CW2GC) aims to understand how working on community-based environmental efforts such as these influences how participants understand themselves as citizens, locally and globally.  It also aims to produce detailed ethnographic case portraits end-user scenario forecasting.  The cases that are selected will work with schools and/or young people around issues that are relevant to ESD as a means towards achieving local waterway rehabilitation.  CW2GC will consider the pay-off between the impact of changing cultural geographies arising from increased national and international mobility which can erode integrated community-oriented social identities and the need to preserve and sustain natural entities such as waterways in local communities through understanding their global significance.  Through intersecting water security with climate change, CW2GC seeks a contextual understanding of how political economies shape climate change agendas in nation states and in relation to education. The aim here is to begin building a knowledge base and archive repository which provides scenario forecasting profiles of the political and economic forces influencing state-related potential to address climate insecurity and resource scarcity through education. Using community-based waterway regeneration projects as a microcosm of broader social and environmental issues, we might grow knowledge of the contextual factors impacting attempts to address global environmental insecurities.  Such knowledge could be important for understanding what social and economic inequality and injustice means in different contexts and how this intersects with environmental degradation.  To investigate these issues, we will explore the potential of the notion of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2013) and the development deficit model to think about perceptions of inequality and injustice.  The project’s theoretical framework will also encompass work relating to GCE, and globalisation. Work from Andreotti et al, (2015); Blackmore, (2016), Dillabough and Yoon (2015), Hicks, (2003) and Young (2006), and Scott (2013) will be important here. Literature relating to hydro-sociology (sometimes called socio-hydrology) will also be included (e.g. Pande and Sivapalan, 2017) as well as the existing literature exploring community-based waterway regeneration and rehabilitation projects (e.g. Burt et al, 2006; Baleta, 2014; Dewulf et al, 2015; Newbourne & Dalton, 2016). 

Beyond this, a central aim of this project (through the mentorship of Dr Jo-Anne Dillabough) is to explore how sociological theory might support and deepen understanding around the challenges of the Anthropocene, including the risks posed to humanity from water scarcity and how these intersect with inequality, poverty and conflict whilst also keeping the pitfalls of a deficit development model at the forefront of deliberations.  In seeking to understand these issues we will draw on the literature about ESD in different contexts and explore why the ESD project has often struggled to find traction in education curricula worldwide and struggled to achieve the kind of behaviour change that is being called for at the individual, corporate, state and international level as a response to the rapidly developing challenges of the Anthropocene.  We are still reviewing which literature will be most useful here and we seek advice through our poster presentation on this.

This work is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK [grant number ES/S000151/1]. 

Fieldwork has not yet commenced on this project and we are still going through the processes of ethical clearance however, our aim is that the research will proceed ethnographically (Dillabough & Gardner, 2015; Dillabough & Yoon, 2017) building case profiles through three phases. Phase 1 will involve background socio-economic contextualisation from existing data sources such census data and through new data from walking interviews and door-to-door surveys of areas where the selected cases are situated. Phase 2 will involve participatory observation of project activities alongside a paired researcher from the project being profiled, and interviews and engagements with schools. Phase 3 will involve data analysis and knowledge mobilisation preparation. Analysis will involve developing descriptive statistics from the surveys; coding of fieldnotes and transcribed audio-recordings of qualitative data; cross checking coding with the mentor whose ethnographic research experience will support this process (e.g. Dillabough & Kennelly, 2006); and consulting with the board of advisors about the findings’ significance. The research methods are informed by transactional methodologies (Ohman and Ostman, 2007) which rely on the gathering and generation of data in action and are thus flexible and responsive to evolving circumstances. The data that could demonstrate how and to what extent engagement with waterway rehabilitation projects supports GCE, constitutes participant observation in the actions that present opportunities for capacity building as they arise. Being present as young people engage in actions such as waterway clean-ups with local communities enables the researcher to make meaning of the actions’ potential impacts and alleviates some of the problems of taking a deficit development model approach (Taylor, 2007). In communities, responsiveness enables a more participatory approach to engaging young people and community members. Case selection will be guided by the researchers’ developing trajectory of ethnographic knowledge of specific regions within each country, their vulnerability to water crises, the cases’ potential to be representative and to provide data that can be used for cross-case comparison. We are not aiming for generalizability; rather we aim to present critical and representative cases, richly detailed for researchers and end users to draw upon for wider transnational application (Van Manen, 1997). We aim to generate theory and an evidence base which clearly delineates our interpretive position for external validity (Yin, 2003).

This project has no conclusions to report yet as it is just getting underway, however our expected outputs include detailed case profiles of up to six projects designed for end-user scenario forecasting as well as a network of researchers and users in the area of socio-hydrology who can work together to address this urgent matters in the future. We will achieve this through working in partnership with the projects that we will profile, seeking to understand how we might best support them to work with others in similar projects from different contexts. We will also publish our findings widely in academic journals to achieve the greatest possible knowledge mobilisation around these issues.

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