In this research I seek to listen to voices lesser heard in urban river restoration in London, England and Wrexham, Wales. In the UK, thousands of volunteers are relied upon to carry out and strengthen the work of conservation organisations yet despite efforts to diversify those engaged with volunteering, the demographics of volunteers are often not well representative of the surrounding populations. Seeing volunteers’ activities with conservation organisations as informal and non-formal education, I explore how diversity within waterways conservation organisations working in urban environments may affect the range of activities and learning opportunities afforded to volunteers. I also explore how formal education practices - underpinned by human exceptionalism and scientific rationalistic thinking - are implicated within this.

This research aims firstly to understand the status quo of participation in two urban river conservation organisations in terms of employment and volunteers; secondly, to understand the barriers and enablers of greater inclusivity from both ‘in’ (those engaged with waterways conservation organisations) and ‘out’ perspectives (those not currently engaged); and finally, to develop insights on what conservation organisations might do about this. To achieve this, I am doing an ethnographically informed case study which includes participant observations, interviews, focus groups, and document analysis, focusing on one river conservation organisation in England and one in Wales. Counterpoint organisations have been sampled for each of the organisations to listen to those not engaged with conservation, for example, young people aged 18-25 and people from various ethnic backgrounds.

The word river is understood as “arena(s) of contested co-production among humans and non-humans of ‘river’” (Boelens et al., 2023) and I draw upon the concept of river as a verb - to be a river - to highlight the temporality or changingness of what is considered a noun in the English language. First and foremost, the rivers are rivers unto themselves. Next, I see rivers as co-teachers. In Ecologizing Education, six cairns are suggested to guide those on the path of nature-centred teaching and learning - the first of these is “Nature as co-teacher, human teacher stepping back” (Blenkinsop and Kuchta, 2024). In the context of this research, this means carving out sufficient time to be with the river Thames and the river Gwenfro in different seasons, in different ways (walking, rowing, paddling) as well as noticing their/my absence when the rhythm of my research dictates this.

Yoga philosophy (Ranganathan, 2024)  is used as a an ethical and theoretical framework underpinning the research, recognising that animals, the Earth, and the rivers are persons.

Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio declaration stated the importance of participation of all concerned citizens in environmental issues and holds States accountable for facilitating and encouraging public awareness and participation in decision-making processes; access to information, public participation, and justice are three fundamentals in environmental governance. These three pillars are used within the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe which connected environmental and human rights together in the ‘only global legally binding global instrument on environmental democracy’, the Aarhus convention (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1998). Echoing the Tbilisi Declaration, the Global Diversity Framework calls for “transformative, transdisciplinary education, formal and informal, at all levels, including….lifelong learning processes, recognizing diverse world views, values and knowledge systems of indigenous peoples and local communities” (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022).

This research contributes to informal environmental education, addressing what has been described as a ‘bald spot’ (Reid and Scott, 2012) of research outside of formal education settings such as primary, secondary and tertiary education.

This research is a case study. Firstly, the research explores contemporary phenomena in which I cannot control behavioral events (Yin, 2018). I seek to deeply understand a complex set of issues within their real-life contexts. The research questions posed cannot be answered by numerical data alone, rather, a combination of data are used, including fieldwork notes, participant observation, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. While I draw lines to form spatial boundaries of portions of the river Gwenfro (Wales) and river Thames (London), the rivers themselves have no sense of these boundaries. Equally, I posit a temporal boundary only because my research constrains my work to be completed within three consecutive Gregorian calendar years 2023-2026. This imposes a linear understanding of a snapshot of time which, while necessary in the academic PhD, may not be in the best interests in the longer-term health of a river. I refer to the case study as being ethnographically informed. I seek to explore the socio-environmental meanings and activities of people and rivers in the area of river conservation and volunteering, and make visible the real-world contexts in which they work. This requires my direct involvement in those contexts which, in this case is achieved through participant observation, walking, and rowing. Walking interviews also provide a partial involvement in the participants’ contexts since the participants choose the routes, while the words exchanged provide further details of how participants perceive and interpret their circumstances. Time spent in the field is central to the research. Ethnography builds knowledge of the social world through an intimate familiarity with day-to-day practices (Brewer, 2008). My time spent in the field with people can be described as a selective intermittent time mode (Jeffrey and Troman, 2004), where the fieldwork element of the research spans 13 months (September 2024 - October 2025) with a varying frequency of site visits. The main determinant of this frequency is when the organisations host events with or for the public⁠, which represent in-person ‘engagement’. Further time is spent in the field on the days interviews are organized. On the other hand, my time spent in the field with the rivers uses a compressed time mode, namely, as far as possible permanently living life with the rivers for 3-5 days. Here the intention is to cultivate noticing as an art of inclusion (Tsing, 2021) while exploring new ways of relating to rivers.

With data collection ongoing, the conference is an opportunity to share some of the early emerging findings. What is already clear is the vast differences between the two fieldwork sites and the importance of local context. For example, access to river frontage on the river Thames is increasingly constrained through new ‘waterfront’ property developments which interrupt the continuity of the publicly accessible “Thames Path”. Public land behind closed gates gives the appearance of private property; the gates remain unlocked or are unlockable to the few in the know. The tide being in blocks or limits access to river spaces whereas the tide being out opens up vast areas of foreshore in size comparable to public parks – their use limited to those who know the access points and able to time visits in accordance with tide times. By contrast, the river Gwenfro in Wrexham is a small tributary of the larger river Dee, and while the river flows through the town and local parks, it is little valued and often associated with anti-social behaviour. Flooding also contributes to some residents’ feeling fearful of rivers. A prerequisite to more diverse engagement in volunteering is listening to the plurality of local voices and exploring how their values can connect with the river, to guide and be guided by the work of the conservation organisations. In line with Ives et al. (2017), river connections may be created or rekindled materially, experiential, cognitive, emotional, or philosophically.

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