1.2. Community Mobilisation: Tools

What does meaningful community engagement in climate action look like?

Module Overview:

Effective community mobilisation requires an awareness of who the actors are in the socioenvironmental system in which you are planning to work, and having a basic contextual understanding of the system is important for credibility. The tools presented in this module will be helpful for preparing to engage participants.

Different projects will require different degrees of preparation and mobilisation, and different facilitators will prefer various strategies. Not every tool will be necessary for every intervention or action, but being aware of multiple options can help you feel more ready to instigate and help guide a Community Environmental Action Plan. See Module 1.3 for further details on how to apply the tactics presented below, and see Module 1.4 for more general facilitation techniques.

Module Objectives:

- appreciate the importance of identifying a wide range of actors to engage through participatory methods
- understand the need for an initial scoping assessment, and why more comprehensive analysis is conducted only after relationship-building has happened, with community participation
- explain Driver Mapping as a useful tool for adopting a conflict-sensitive and climate-sensitive approach
- consider various strategies for relationship building in diverse communities

Actor Identification

WHAT IS ACTOR IDENTIFICATION?

Any number of individuals, groups, and institutions - to say nothing of non-human actors - will affect a socioenvironmental system. The people involved in a community will include everyday locals, organised collectives, and foreigners, all with a variety of interests, resources, and capabilities.

Actor identification is about getting to know 'who's who' in a community, and building a basic understanding of their role in the socioenvironmental system.

WHY INVEST IN ACTOR IDENTIFICATION?

It's all well and good to be interested in 'community mobilisation'...but who is that community? Who are you mobilising? Actor identification is about knowing who should be involved in Community Environmental Action Planning processes.

Thorough approaches to actor identification will involve going beyond who is already known or obvious to an instigating convenor, finding new people to engage. It can also help you consider the preexisting relationships between various actors, informing how you facilitate.

WHAT ARE SOME LIMITATIONS OF ACTOR IDENTIFICATION?

If actor identification is undertaken as a single-stage activity and/or conducted by one primary evaluator, then it is little more than a simplistic snapshot: taken from one perspective, of one moment, in one setting.

Participatory approaches to actor identification (e.g., asking actors to identify other actors) can help with this, but the inclusiveness of the exercise still depends on the starting 'nodes' of who was initially identified and how widely they consider and highlight others. Overly superficial approaches to actor identification are likely to reproduce inequalities and exclusionary practices, and/or inadvertently recreate preexisting networks.

The result of this initial stage of actor identification should thus not be used as an authoritative dataset. Acknowledging the inherent limitations of basic actor identification is necessary to ensuring it does not overly inform future planning.

Initial Scoping Assessment

WHAT IS AN INITIAL SCOPING ASSESSMENT?

An initial scoping assessment is a starting analysis for a socioenvironmental system, identifying its most apparent strengths, weaknesses, and stressors. Forms of initial scoping assessment might include a rapid environmental assessment (see page 17 of the Synthesis Report for the Community Environmental Action Planning: A Handbook for Practitioners); a climate security map (see pages 32-34 of the Toolbox for Addressing Climate-related Security Risks: Conflict Sensitivity for Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Livelihoods); or a literature review of existing studies or projects on conflict and environmental change in the area.

WHY CONDUCT AN INITIAL SCOPING ASSESSMENT?

Having a general understanding of the underlying context is important for Community Environmental Action Planning facilitators. Understanding what key stresspoints are for various actors, how socioenvironmental systems are changing, and which issues are impacting the greatest cross-section of the community will help inform the tone and direction of participatory analysis.

WHAT ARE SOME LIMITATIONS OF AN INITIAL SCOPING ASSESSMENT?

It is critical to remember that an initial scoping assessment is intended only as a guide for community mobilisation and facilitation techniques, to help you with the very early stages of Community Environmental Action Planning. The initial scoping assessment is, by its very nature, limited and fairly superficial. Using participatory methods for conflict analysis, solution identification, and program design will almost certainly result in different assessment results - that are more accurate and more robust. It is important to ensure that a preliminary scoping assessment does not bias or warp the facilitation of participatory assessment activities, or how those results are interpreted and applied.

Driver Mapping

WHAT IS A DRIVER MAP?

Driver maps visualise the DPSIR theoretical framework, which evaluates the drivers, pressures, state, impact, and responses of a socioenvironmental system. DPSIR tools help analyse the impact of human activity on the environment - and vice versa - by considering how various socioeconomic, environmental, and political forces 'drive' climate change, fragility, and conflict.

Driver maps identify pressures and shocks, highlight structural dynamics that influence how those factors are experienced by the system, and trace their resulting outcomes.

WHY CREATE A DRIVER MAP?

Driver mapping is a useful tool for building both conflict-sensitivity and climate-sensitivity into your Community Environmental Action Planning approach from the beginning.

At this stage, a driver map can be fairly superficial and generalised: details of exactly how the relationships work, where feedback loops arise, and how different elements of the community and system experience interactions differently will be further analysed in future CEAP stages. Its purpose during community mobilisation is to ensure conversations and relationship-building are informed right at the outset by shared considerations of conflict and climate change.

WHAT ARE SOME LIMITATIONS OF A DRIVER MAP?

Driver maps are quite linear in their set-up, not easily accounting for feedback loops or multi-directional relationship. They also do not delineate which drivers most impact which dynamics and impacts. As a starting point for bringing together climate and conflict concerns, this is not a particular issue, but it is important to bear a driver map's generic nature in mind. Driver maps should not be used as substitutes for more the thorough forms of problem analysis presented in Unit 2.

Example Driver Map
(see pages 35-36 of this Toolbox)

Relationship Building

WHAT IS RELATIONSHIP BUILDING?

Relationship building is about creating connections with diverse groups in the community, developing trust in the facilitation process of Community Environmental Action Planning.

WHY INVEST IN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING?

Socioenvironmental systems are complicated things with a great many changing interactions and power dynamics. In order to make a genuine impact on them, especially one that is conflict- and climate-sensitive, it will be necessary to bring together diverse actors who may have very different goals, resources, capacities, and worldviews. Oftentimes, various members of the community will have preexisting (and potentially unrelated) tensions between them, which must be addressed and managed in order for Community Environmental Action Planning to be successful. Trusting relationships between participants and facilitators will be vital to managing conflict and uncertainties.

Relationship building should begin as early as possible, so that a wide variety of perspectives are engaged in analysis and action throughout the entirety of the CEAP process.

WHAT ARE SOME LIMITATIONS OF RELATIONSHIP BUILDING?

Relationship building can go a long way toward breaking down barriers, but it's necessary to understand the bounds of the trust that has been built. Actors might cooperate for the sake of accomplishing a particular project, but not believe that underlying enmity has been addressed. A spike in conflict may bring underlying tensions within a network to the surface. A certain degree of collaboration will be necessary for CEAP to be successful, and the very process of that collaboration will hopefully produce more trust - but that isn't a guaranteed outcome, and no amount of initial relationship building can promise full partnership throughout a lengthy process. Relationship building must not be seen as something that is completed once a network has been brought together, but rather as something that requires constant care and maintenance.

Additionally, people often feel more connected to individuals than institutions. Trust might be built between specific representatives of different groups, but that trust might be reliant on the representatives' specific personalities and shared histories, and not transferrable to the wider communities they represent. In order for Community Environmental Action Planning to be successful, it is important to develop broad relationships that are not dependent on a sole facilitator or particular individual.

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