Healthy Waterways: Connecting communities locally and globally

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This project stems from a current research project: AHRC Pathways to Understanding the Changing Climate: time and place in cultural learning about the environment. It takes what we have learnt about children's relationships with their dwelling places and how intercultural interchange influences that as a starting point for facilitating an ongoing pilot project in South Africa namely the Aller River Pilot Project (ARPP). The goal of the ARPP is to engage local communities in the rehabilitation of a local waterway that is crucial to the livelihoods of these communities. The project's main strategy for delivering this rehabilitation and sustained maintenance is to recruit, train and stipend a group of young people from communities along the river (the 'Eco Champs'). These young people will lead the rehabilitation through engaging the local community and the schools in the local community. Our input (PUCC FOF) will begin at the end of the first phase of the ARPP when the main rehabilitation work of the river will already have been completed. We will continue the work with the Eco Champ team and the eco clubs that they will have set up in schools in the community. We will use our method of child-led walking interviews to develop a cartogram of the communities and to identify what sorts of relationships the children in these urban settings along waterways have with their dwelling places. We will use this as the basis for the interchange element of our project. The interchange partner in the UK will be a group of young people in the Norfolk Broads called the Youth Rangers who will be working with the Broads Authority (BA) to reconnect with their local waterways. The participant-led walking interviews alongside a stakeholder consultation conference will be used to identify small scale infrastructure support to facilitate the sustainability of the rehabilitation work. The projected outcome of this project for the community in South Africa will be an explicit and consolidated sense of personal connection to dwelling places including local waterways and an enhancement of commitment to maintaining these in a state that will contribute to the health and wellbeing of the local communities that rely on it for sanitation. Similar (if less extensive) outcomes are projected for the Youth Rangers in the Norfolk Broads. We will measure our impact through the data gathered during the walks that will be completed at the beginning and the end of the project and we will also use the data gathered by the ARPP and BA to elaborate our understanding of how our intervention has impacted on the local community. Our work has the potential to contribute to the following Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), Goal 10 (reduced Inequality), Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and Goal 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). Examples of how this will be achieved are the improvement in health and sanitation and through the stronger social cohesion, enhanced commitment to community responsibility, effective local agency and a deepened sense of an explicit connection to place. This project will instigate collaboration between people in similar circumstances with regard to the role of water in their dwelling places. The partnerships created will have significant potential for the way in which locally affected communities respond to globally determined consequences of changing climates, in both the meteorological and socio-political sense. Moreover, this project extends the interdisciplinary collaboration between Education and Social Anthropology which will further the aims of the network for the Living with Environmental Change Initiative. Whilst this is not intended to be a research project we will be able to use the impacts of the project to elaborate our understanding of the relationships that children have with place and how global interchange affects that.