Participatory Networks and the Environment

The BGreen Project in the US and Bangladesh

Fadia Hasan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315306216
• Subtopic: Infrastructure
• Index: Business

Seeking innovative answers to global sustainability challenges has become an urgent need with the onslaught of environmental and ecological degradation that surrounds us today. More than ever, there is a need to carve new ways for citizens and different industries and institutions to unite – to cooperate, communicate and collaborate to address growing global sustainability concerns.

This book examines one such global collaboration called The BGreen Project (BGreen): a transnational participatory action research project that spans the United States and Bangladesh with the aim of addressing environmental issues via academic–community engagement. By analysing and unpacking the architecture of BGreen, Hasan teases out the key factors that are required for the continued momentum of environmentally focused, academic–community partnership projects in order to present a workable model that could be applied elsewhere. This model is based around a unique conceptual framework developed by the author – "transnational participatory networks" – which is drawn from participatory action research and actor network theory, with the specific aim of addressing the common challenge of building evolving, stable and sustainable networks.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication, citizen participation, environmental politics, environmental sociology and sustainable development.

1 Introduction

Seeking innovative answers to global sustainability challenges has become an urgent need with the onslaught of environmental and ecological degradation that surrounds us today. More than ever, there is a need to carve new ways for citizens and different industries and institutions to unite—to cooperate, communicate and collaborate to address growing global sustainability concerns. Through the lens of a transnational participatory action research project that I founded, called The BGreen Project (BGreen), multi-industry, political and economic network connections were developed. The formation of these connections into a transnational academic–community platform spanning the US and Bangladesh is analyzed here. The connections between multi-institutions, culture, and politics from a US and Bangladeshi perspective is explored, as well as how such intersections impact development and sustenance of academic–community partnerships, models, and frameworks globally. It is not so much a comparative analysis of the two geopolitical locations, but more an analysis of the transnational continuum that illuminates the complex interweaving of diverse global, regional, and local policies as they play out in these disparate locations in the creation, implementation, and operationalization of transnational academic–community partnerships such as BGreen.

The main goal of the formation of BGreen was to create new ways of organized participation of global youth, community, and academia towards inclusive and sustained social change. The very different roles of youth in both countries, the US and Bangladesh, will be explored in this book and how it has shaped the experience of BGreen and its global proliferation (Kabir, 2010; Giroux, 2002, 2005, 2013; Tuck, 2009; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Khaleduzzaman, 2014). In brief, BGreen is a participatory action research platform that had its roots in Western Massachusetts, USA and Dhaka, Bangladesh. As a scholar interested in connecting community with academia, I wanted to create a trans-local and transnational academic–community platform in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Western Massachusetts, USA that merged youth with academic and non-academic organizations to bring about sustained social change in the fields of education, environment, and sustainability. Upon its creation, the platform mobilized global high school, college, and university youth in an assortment of participatory/ deliberative activities in the fields of education, environment, and sustainability in both geopolitical locations in and out of the classroom.

Via BGreen, global youth have negotiated their affiliation to diverse political economic structures (for example, their educational institutions) in creative ways and developed innovative methods of public engagement and participation as a means for potentially deep, sustained, and long-term social change. The nature of participation and academic community engagement took different shapes in the two locations due to the differing contexts creating a nuanced and complex transnational network; these issues will be analyzed in the following chapters. Combining the theoretical paradigms of Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Participatory Action Research (PAR), I argue for the development of what I call the BGreen participatory network (to be defined later) that is informed by the democratic inclusion of multi actors/actants to address the challenges at hand. The BGreen participatory network builds on the frame of an “architecture of participation” (Harvey, 2014) that involves the contribution of human and nonhuman actors/actants to gain network stability. The onset of climate change calls for new, humane, and inclusive frameworks. These frameworks, combining economy, ecology and education, can effectively address environmental issues by creating trans-local and transnational spaces. BGreen aims to be such a space, purposefully constructed for optimal emergence of solutions.

Freire’s call for the emergence of “critical consciousness” or conscientização (1970a, 1970b, 1973) is a desired goal for BGreen that can potentially transform the way in which youth, community and academic institutions relate to one another. The complex and sometimes contrasting understanding and application of conscientização as a working concept of the youth from the two locations is also explored in this book. When explaining the concept of conscientização, Freire (1970a) writes, “Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. Intervention in reality—historical awareness it self—thus represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientização of the situation. Conscientização is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence” (p. 109). Building the collaborative architectural process of a platform like BGreen holds the potential to the emergence of “new epistemologies that celebrate, rather than suppress, alternative ways of knowing” (Shabazz & Cooks, 2014, p. 27). Conscientização (critical consciousness) is key to the networked political economic process of BGreen. This is because the different stages of this idea (magical, naïve and critical) are necessary to build a participatory process that engages multiple institutions and youth. These participatory processes, where all members are actively making sense of and engaging with their social and political realities, is capable of generating action and social change (Freire, 1970a, 1970b).

The youth is the thread that connects multi-industries and institutions, potentially creating conscientização that addresses the pressing issues of education, environment, human rights, citizen participation and deliberation. All of this is key to a balanced and well-functioning society, as the well-being of a few cannot come at the expense of tragedy, loss and displacement of many. Such inclusive solution building of communities directly counters the “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) perspective of interacting and working with communities from the borderlands (Anzaldua, 1999) as being broken, damaged, deranged, or dysfunctional. More specifically, my research interrogates the tensions and potentials of hybrid, in-between spaces that exist between political economic structures and networked, youth-led academic–community connections. Political economic analysis of the different actors/actants can be referred to as “the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources” (Mosco, 1996, p. 24). This analysis, a focal point of my research, examines youth-led action alternatives on the ground that complicate the way in which both ends of the power spectrum operate. To study this transnational networked academic–community project, I use and extend what Busch and Juska (1997) call the political economy of networks. This concept focuses on “the relationships among people, things, institutions and ideas [that] are created, maintained and changed through time” (p. 701) by taking into account the role of human and nonhuman actors/actants in the analytic process.

Academic–community partnerships have many names, including the following: community–university partnerships, community service learning, civic engagement, scholarship of engagement, community-based research, citizen science, public engagement, to name just a few. While it has varied names, “the landscape of community-university partnerships include service-learning, community-based participatory research and partnerships focused on solving a particular problem or achieving a particular goal (i.e., neighborhood economic development, workforce development), among other approaches” (Holland et al., 2003). Reflecting on their long engagement with community-engaged work, Cooks and Scharrer (2006) write, “by situating learning in the relational and contextual processes through which people make meaning, we also are able to situate community service-learning as engaged practice – a practice that offers learning in situ through challenges to notions of power, identities, cultures, community and change” (p. 2).

The relationships between pedagogy and institutions and the mechanisms that are in place to facilitate and maintain such processes need to be mapped. Doing so will aid understanding of the complexities of northern and southern educational systems as part of global policy and funding shifts around education. Numerous studies have been done in analyzing the networked political economy of such academic–community partnerships mainly in the global north, all of which will form a general backbone of this research. However, my project takes this investigation further by looking at the development of one such PAR-ANT based project in both the global north and the global south, providing a fresh comparative narrative. Perhaps lessons from such global academic–community projects hold the potential to redefine the way in which youth can engage with academia and community organizations to address these pertinent social issues and build a newer, better, fairer “architecture of participation”. As a generative and transformative space built on the foundations of conscientização, BGreen complicates the outmoded binary of “core” and “periphery” developed as a result of the critical political economic lineage (Wallerstein, 1974). BGreen has the potential to unsettle and reconfigure such divisive, asymmetrical power constructs by creating hybrid spaces that combine citizens, institutions and technology for social change, although as the chapters will delineate, the project played out differently in the two geopolitical locations.

Using participatory action research (PAR) as a tool for “fundamental, critical strategy for youth development, youth based policymaking and organizing and education” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008, p. 7), the youth are consciously and unconsciously navigating academic–community partnerships like BGreen for the realization, sustenance and application of Freire’s concept of conscientização, which is designed to complicate epistemic communities as a theoretical and institutional project. Reid and Frisby’s (2008) work on critical participatory action research well articulated the theoretical knowledge that backed the practical design of this PAR project, one that calls for “accounting for intersectionality, honoring voice and differences through participatory research processes, exploring new forms of representation, reflexivity, and honoring many forms of action.” PAR as a field has its direct origins in Freire’s idea of conscientização, and PAR has been theorized in a multitude of different ways (among others Sparks, 2007; Servaes & Malikhao, 2008; Jacobsen & Kolluri, 1999; Gibson-Graham, 2005; Escobar, 2008; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Tuck, 2009; Stoval, 2006; Patel, 2012), most of which have been used in different ways in the field of communication. While there are nuanced differences in all approaches, they all work with the central theme of conscientização as defining a starting point, even though the term and its applications have been interpreted in a variety of different ways and have found unique meanings in different parts of the world while forming heterogeneous participatory forms.

In my research, the goal is to combine critical PAR with Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 1987, 2004; Hassard & Law, 1999; Callon, 1987; Cressman, 2009), which is a constructivist theory that has its roots in complexity theory, or as Latour calls an “infra-language” (Latour & Crawford, 1993) used to explore and analyze the relational ties within an emerging network, where the “socionatural relations are multiple, messy and complex” (Castree & MacMillan, 2001). ANT takes a performative approach to tracing the networks through which multifarious entities are scripted, fabricated, and transformed and the concept is explored in all its complexity and not simply reduced to “an actor alone nor to a network … an actor-network is simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of” (Callon, 1987, p. 93). While PAR was used to develop BGreen on the ground, I use ANT to analyze the process of developing this participatory network. PAR in collaboration with ANT aids in the development of a participatory mechanism for working with the human actors/actants on the ground that helped build this “architecture of participation” (Harvey, 2014). However, ANT’s other critical contribution to this research process is its inclusion of studying non-human actors/actants that helped build the “architecture of participation”, such as technological and multi-media innovations, which subsequently led to the process of building a stable, global participatory network for BGreen.

“Architecture of participation” as a concept is defined as being a process that uses ICT-mediated environments and relationships to democratize any collective, political process that creates new possibilities of participation and openness within the power dynamics that frame new media processes (Harvey, 2014). To develop this robust architecture via PAR and ANT, the project deals with the relational dynamics and the resulting, evolving, and ever-changing outcomes of human and non-human actors/actants that inform the growth of participatory actor networks, with a special emphasis of course on the role of communication technological innovations. Hence, the infralanguage or theory of ANT (barring some modifications, which will be addressed in the literature review) is used extensively alongside PAR to address the research process. Merging the two complementary approaches of PAR and ANT allows for the creation of what I call participatory networks (in our case, the BGreen participatory network), one which works based on the synthesis of these two complementary approaches of working with human and non-human actors/actants and participatory processes.

With the coining of participatory networks as an interdisciplinary concept, I am referring to the way in which elements of the two theoretical frameworks of PAR and ANT can be combined to work together to create an architecture of participation amongst multi-actors/actants across institutions and industries that can be sustained. At its best, participatory networks will challenge the concept of epistemic communities and instead create a deep, engaged, complex and open participatory network that addresses issues of power (institutional, cultural, locational, vocational, individual, etc). In addressing issues of power, creating relationships to the realization of participation and engagement in an organic, meaningful way, there exists potential to impact the ways in which education, environment, sustainability and economy relate to one another. Inspired by ANT, a participatory network is comprised of human actors and non-human actors/actants that are relationally related to one another, such as technology, organizations, ideologies, cultural attitudes (to name just a few) in the development of the project.

ANT is a complex theoretical framework with roots in complexity theory. In applying it to my research, I am following what Castree and MacMillan (2001) call for, which is a weak version of ANT, in combination with the PAR approach to make the theoretical frame of the project. Why such a theoretical decision is required to form a participatory network is explained in detail in the next chapter. In the way that I have envisioned a well-functioning participatory network, Freire’s conscientização is at the core of the synthesis of PAR and ANT. Freire (1970a) reflects on the importance of the emergence of conscientização and how the pursuit of it can truly connect theory and praxis. He writes, “human activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world. And as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it. Human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action” (p. 25). The formation of such participatory networks ideally connects these different theories or “infralanguages” of participation and social change that can guide the search, exploration, participation, and creation of praxis close to the way in which Freire had envisioned it. The idea of participatory networks and the way in which I developed it in conjunction with PAR and ANT will be elaborated further in the following chapters and its potential relevance to the formation of multi-industry and institutional networks in this context.

It is my hope that the critical performative participation of the global youth in the creation of the architecture of the BGreen participatory network would result in the creation of alternative discourses and practices around the ways in which multi-actors/actants can combine forces to design a collaborative process for social change that is directly triggered by academic engagement. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theory and methods
• 3 Transnational political economic realities and their impacts on social transformation
• 4 The networked architecture of the BGreen experience
• 5 Multi-media amplification of the BGreen Project
• 6 Youth reflections, growth and sustenance of BGreen participatory network
• 7 Conclusion
• Index