Bangladesh Spring: Participatory conference and new media to educate and seed youth engagement in environmental preservation

Background/Question/Methods

Rising sea levels and more extreme temperature will severely test the resiliency of Bangladesh by disrupting ecosystems, food production, livelihoods, and infrastructure. The magnitude of the challenge, the timescale in which it will unfold and the uncertainty of triggering episodes will far exceed the government’s capacity to mount timely and adequate response.  The focus for capacity building therefore has to include building of sustainable communities.  However, sustainable communities cannot develop without sustainable governance, and sustainable governance cannot develop with a widening gap between policymakers, citizens and experts.  Against this backdrop we designed a 2-day action and engagement conference on environment in Dhaka, Bangladesh in January 10-11, 2014 to investigate whether: (1) young citizens can effectively engage with one another and with experts and others to formulate and express informed ideas about complex issues at the intersection of environment, sustainability and governance, (2) such engagement can create meaningful public citizen-science discourse, (3) such discourse can lead to transformative behavior, personal actions, and projects, and (4) such transformation can be sustained by leveraging new media technologies. We recruited students between the ages of 16 and 22. 100 were selected and divided into groups of 6-7 and assigned a facilitator.

Results/Conclusions

We had two types of programming: (a) hands on educational activities with different types of grassroots environmental organizations and (b) a participatory technology assessment (pTA) exercise on the use of nuclear energy.  The pTA exercise was done in 4 stages. Students deliberated with each other and with experts to develop and present their consensus opinion about a proposed nuclear power plant.  To address the research questions we collected demographic data on the applicants and participants, pre-survey of participants’ activities, knowledge and expectations and exit survey on project ideas and participant learning. About 86 students from a wide range of institutions actively participated.  There were more males (73%) than females (27%) and more university students (73%) than High School students (27%). 63% of the participants voted in favor of changing the current policy and 27% favored a moratorium on nuclear power. An overwhelming 98% of the participants felt that they discussed the topics constructively, actively listened to each other and were treated respectfully. 95% agreed that the conference motivated them to get personally involved in societal issues on energy and environment. Projects proposed included climate change and conservation education, leadership development, recycling and product labeling.