Environment and development in coastal regions and in small islands

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EDUCATION, COMMUNICATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN COASTAL REGIONS
Laurent Charles Boyomo Assala, Université de Yaoundé II, Cameroon

SUMMARY

African economies are in crisis particularly where the development of coastal regions and small islands is concerned. So too is the relationship between the physical state of the land and that of coastal regions, the sea and ecosystems. Education and communication are clearly the most neglected factors in the equation.

It is hard to list all the programmes of United Nations (UN) agencies in this field around the world. The state of data-gathering projects in individual countries makes it difficult to draw up summaries by sector. The UN Secretary General’s report to the Sixth Session of the Commission for Sustainable Development illustrated the wide range of UN action in the field of water resources, such as:

• the gathering and analysis of data and making surveys and reports;
• holding meetings and workshops with appropriate backup;
• technical help (providing consultancy services and working projects).

The problems and delays in communication and education in Africa, particularly in the countries concerned, block out the inevitable developments going on worldwide. Communication and education influence a country’s development of its resources because they are at the root of all development. Sustainable development in countries with a coastline and in small islands depends largely on the ability of local people to communicate in modern or traditional fashions and form local links between individuals to initiate new forms of co-operation and action.

So the people of the countries involved first have to be made aware of the need to protect the environment and taught how to do it in the hope they will include it in their development priorities.

They need to assess the status of the major coastal problems as part of the education and communication programmes of African countries. The rather hasty surveys done on this so far are modest and generate little optimism about the present ability of education and communication to solve the demographic and environmental problems of coastal regions and small islands. In addition, future projects can only be carried out over the long term by including the problems and their solutions in education programmes, and by developing formal and informal education.

African countries need to formulate an information-education-communication (IEC) strategy and consider ways to raise public awareness, ‘strengthen’ participation and decision-making and encourage a change in people’s behaviour; since many problems are due to the way people damage the environment. This method involves training IEC instructors for target groups so as to bring communities closer together to consider the problem.

Many international projects could be adapted to local communities which are in the main unaware of such things. These include drawing up regional communication plans, local use of new information and communication technology (setting up web sites) and developing traditional media as well as supporting local media and formal and informal education.

INTRODUCTION

In the business of protecting the environment and promoting sustainable development, especially in coastal regions and small islands, education and communication are the most neglected aspects. Many projects link the physical state of the land and coastal and marine areas and the ecosystem with the aim of helping the growing population of such regions (two-thirds of the world’s population) achieve sustainable development through thoughtful and efficient use of the world’s continental shelf marine resources. But communication and education have not been emphasized enough by international organizations.

UNESCO has stressed the need for integrated management of coastal regions and small islands by noting the disruption caused by the sharp increase over the past century in the population of coastal regions and the destruction of the resources which drew people there in the first place. Such an observation raises questions about human responsibility and how the damage might be repaired by changing people’s behaviour, habits, attitudes and knowledge.

In this paper, I want to show first the part played by communication in making people aware of coastal problems and then ways to increase knowledge and encourage new values, along with know-how and the desire to be involved. This is essential for sustainable development through IEC and its planned approach; which has the advantage of combining communication and educational approaches, as well as teaching.

I shall also argue that a composite model including teaching as part of an education plan is likely to produce better results than one where there is a very sharp divide between communication and teaching, as far as efforts to get local people more involved in sustainable development are concerned. Drawing up formal or permanently informal teaching programmes is only feasible or suitable if they are part of an overall programme of sustainable development in coastal regions and small islands.

Communication for local awareness

Historically and theoretically, communication appeared around 1995 as one of the main axes of the environment. The others are sustainable development, sustainable consumption (the responsibility of consumers and how to make them so), planning and the state of ecosystems and local people. Communication was presented as a tetrahedron, with each of its four sides a main axis (Vigneron and Francisco, 1998). ‘Increasing restrictions to a maximum produces a barycentric area which takes the different restrictions into account,’ with the base (communication) ensuring the tetrahedron’s stability.

So the notions of environmental communication and then IEC gradually developed as indispensable ways to involve local people and get them to participate in working towards what is usually an improvement in their standard of living.

The invention of environmental communication

Environmental communication emerged from the notion of ‘green communication’ thought up by Thierry Libaert in 1992; although Paul Debacker discussed it in his book ‘Le Management Vert’ (G reen Management) in the same year. The book included so-called green management in a firm’s overall planning. Libaert did the same, defining environmental communication as:

• protecting the environment;
• teaching people about the environment;
• publicity campaigns to mobilize people on environmental issues.

Such communication must take into account:

• the state of public opinion;
• the strategic aim of the message communicated;
• definition of the target audience;
• the goals of communication;
• the message and the means to convey it;
• how measures develop.

On this basis, Vigneron and Francisco came up with what they called the ‘ten commandments’ of environmental communication.

1. Environmental communication must take the complexity of the environment into account, especially the number of people involved, their status and the nature of the resources which define and drive human ecosystems.
2. The individual is the vital element in environmental communication. Social models are overridden by cultural identities which link each person to his environment.
3. Environmental communication seeks to involve the individual and relies on neighbourhood or even door-to-door communication. It uses dialogue, participation, interactivity and partnership.
4. The final effectiveness of environmental communication is judged by a permanent change in individual behaviour. The modern social trend towards individualism cuts people off from their bearings and their membership of social groups which means their behaviour is crucial in protecting the environment.
5. Time is essential for environmental communication, to allow people to reconsider and change their attitude towards the environment. Because this takes place over years, memory plays an important part in it, as a link between the past, the present and the future. Events are only important if they can be incorporated in a long-term strategy.
6. Inside a firm, internal communication used in staff management defines environmental communication.
7. Eco-tools (product labeling, ecological inventories, projects and charters concerning the environment) which rely on volunteer workers are the technological part of environmental communication. They also fit in with the growth of individualism by giving each partner a reference and a guarantee of the quality of a product or service.
8. Environmental communication changes how societies work, with interactive networks replacing hierarchical pyramids.
9. The role of education is constantly emphasized in environmental communication. The behaviour of tomorrow’s citizens is shaped by their education.
10. Reference to ethics enables people involved in the environment to relate its local management to the stability of the global environment. Eco-citizenship arises from the need for each person to choose a morality based on universal values and a code of conduct to behave as a responsible consumer. Eco-citizenship, environment, sustainable development and citizen-run organizations are the basis of a new morality, which includes and completes environmental communication.

In this spirit, the UN Population Fund, at the end of the 1980s, encouraged the idea of IEC in its programmes.

Role of information, education and communication

Although a central part of a population programme, the limitations of IEC often make it a weak point. IEC is an action programme with three parts:

Information. The aim is to provide easy access for all sectors of the population to knowledge likely to improve their lives and fight mistaken beliefs or rumours which may adversely influence people’s attitudes and behaviour. Information is often provided vertically corresponding to the Shannonian linear communication model which facilitates sending data and knowledge from a transmitter to a receiver through a channel.

Education. Teaching is conveying knowledge, but education aims at intellectual growth, along with physical, moral and aesthetic training. It includes everything that influences people throughout their life – things that come from their family, school or job, as well as mass communications and religious, economic, social and political institutions which they are part of.

Communication. Communication is a process of active and interactive exchange between one or more transmitters and several receivers with the aim of getting people to adopt desirable and recommended attitudes and behaviour. Various methods, linguistic, computer, person-to-person, can be used.

IEC involves a wide range of action: the definition of a people’s socio-cultural identity (their knowledge, attitudes, practices, beliefs, assets and limitations); the conception and execution of social communication programmes; the production and use of teaching materials and the spread of messages to persuade the population to change habits, attitudes, beliefs and practices that are considered unsuitable or harmful to sustainable development.

The IEC approach highlights: the aims of each sector, the institutional framework in which the activity takes place, the programmes carried out, and the assets and limitations of such programmes.

Aims of each sector

Two kinds of problems have to be tackled in coastal regions and small islands: a. those connected to geography, and b. those caused by human activity.

1. The geophysical situation of many small, poor island states puts them at the mercy of weather conditions, that involve the state of rivers and the sea, it also means they have trouble tapping water sources and conserving it efficiently.
2. Human action includes dredging estuaries and building dams and irrigation systems which may then deprive such areas of the silt and sediment required to fight natural erosion and may also destroy fishing areas or prevent fish migration. Deforestation upstream, by causing estuaries to silt up, may block ports, which require frequent and costly dredging, as in Douala, in Cameroon. Untreated wastewater piped into the sea creates unhealthy bathing conditions and encourages the growth of seaweed, which absorbs oxygen in the water, killing fish and other marine life.

The overall aim of IEC is to co-ordinate the activity of the parties involved in coastal development – such as industrial fishers, businessmen and agents, water boards, local authorities and housing and waste disposal officials – towards the goal of integrated management of coastal regions. In this, IEC is best for:

• setting up interaction between parties that have to work together, co-ordinating them within a structure which will guide and direct their activity so as to avoid the confusion seen in countries and regions without such a structure. Often IEC activity is watered down in a country programme amid the multitude of projects being pushed by various parties with opposing, contradictory or even hostile interests. The risk of this is greatest when things are seen from a broad social and regional angle;
• working out campaign strategies and arguments aimed at various groups (such as women, the private sector, government officials, young people and community associations) in each coastal or island state to encourage people to change their behaviour and attitudes to fit in with sustainable development.

Institutional framework

These days, UNESCO’s policy towards coastal regions and small islands is a clear step forward towards achieving these aims. But we need to go beyond that and come up with a global programme, which builds a structure in each country and island to co-ordinate activities and interested parties affected by the problem of sustainable coastal development. Setting up neighbourhood communication, which recognizes people’s culture, requires institutions that will be accepted by communities, thus legitimizing their activity. Such institutions must be basically national and include all the local bodies which will be involved in carrying out the programmes conceived at an international level and implemented at national level.

Programmes carried out

Activity will be concentrated in the following sectors:

• Making people aware of water problems. UNESCO reports that very few people in small island states know much about water resource problems. Demand for water is sometimes unreasonable as demand rises in worsening drought conditions. There is a need to change ingrained cultural habits. However, the relative smallness of an island and the undispersed nature of its population make education and raising public awareness easier.
• Agreements between islands to pool their experience and technical knowledge about how to manage fresh water supplies. Several such accords already exist. Some go beyond just islands to include developed countries as part of bilateral and multilateral aid. Many projects to improve water supply have been successfully completed in the Caribbean (from 1979) and the Pacific (from 1986). Broader and more permanent programmes must now be drawn up.
• The point made in 1993 by Michel Ogrizek that building a dam, a port or a motorway can damage the environment and arouse the opposition of ecological groups and local officials. Each project of this kind needs to take environmental concerns into account because the effects of such projects can be harmful.

Assets and limitations of programmes

Many projects around the world aimed at benefiting people lack a firm sociological basis. They are implemented without a feasibility study, without taking cultural differences into account or even checking whether they make sense. They are often followed by bigger programmes that are equally ill-conceived. Sometimes it is a matter of placating bureaucrats by making them feel important and convincing voters that politicians are doing something.

Sustainable development projects in coastal regions and small islands have been called into question by UNESCO’s observations on the difficulty of gathering data on the situation, whether about lack of water or how far the environment has been damaged by geophysical or human action. No communication work is possible unless we first look at how local people see themselves in their surroundings as manifested by their behaviour, beliefs, attitudes and habits. The process of communication is not the action of a subject (humans) on an object (the environment) but of a subject (humans) on the perceptions other humans have of themselves , as shown by their behaviour. Communication is not about repairing the damage humans have done to nature, but about persuading humans to stop harming it through changing the way they look at it.

Communication has its own limitations, just as education has in reserving to schools the responsibility for imparting knowledge at a time when mass communications are competing fiercely with them. So we need to work out a composite model with teaching again as part of the education section of IEC.

MIXED NATURE OF THE INFORMATION-EDUCATION COMMUNICATION-MODEL

The design of the Technical Workshop to study the role of communication and education shows clearly that these subjects do not have to be connected. They can be completely independent, complementary or completely opposed to each other. This mirrors the real-life distinction between schools and the media, but it also makes them hard to deal with because of the great rivalry these days between the media and the classroom. Without going into detail, we just need to remember how much information inundates people today – pictures, sounds and written matter – which undercuts and throws into question what is taught in school. Television, films, advertising, the press, radio and posters have expanded people’s horizons to the whole planet, even to the universe: we can now witness distant events at the very moment they happen. The distinction between communication and education raises at least two problems:

1. It conflicts with the idea of IEC we have proposed as part of communication to encourage sustainable development in coastal regions and small islands. We regard teaching as part of the education component of IEC.
2. It makes communication and teaching complementary only by mental association of the two concepts because their real-life conflict seems so established.

I think we should consider including teaching in IEC through monitoring strategic planning and looking at a few concrete examples.

1. Strategic planning

IEC’s strategic planning respects the spirit, if not the letter, of Vigneron and Francisco’s ‘ten commandments’ of environmental communication. It has eleven stages:

Teaching figures in the fifth stage as an IEC activity. According to the problem to be solved and the kind of public targeted, it can involve drawing up a programme of formal teaching or on-the-job or one-off training modules.

Such programmes must of course match and connect to the strategic aims, even where diploma education is concerned, and must contain all the stages set out above, as well as the messages passed by the mass media to a wide range of social structures.

Stages v., vi. and vii. raise the question of the need to adapt activities, messages and back-up to the targeted sectors of the population. Radio messages are different from posters and do not aim at the same audience. So teaching is the extension of action directed at a group of people to whom it is hoped to give responsibility in the fairly near future. Experience in Africa clearly shows the need to treat different activities, messages and target groups in different ways.

2. Range of strategies – concrete examples

Warren Parker (1997) shows how in South Africa what he calls action media have helped promote health education, the other way round from the linear communication-message-recipient pattern. The action media is an approach that requires the production of suitable material to bring together the interests of the communicator and the target group. The method includes:

• listing the aims of health education: prevention of AIDS, sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies in teenagers and young adults;
• listing homogenous groups in different geographical areas, such as schoolchildren and suburban youths;
• co-operation between parties to arrange meetings between teachers, administrators and health workers;
• recruiting 15 to 20 volunteers to take part in a series of three-hour seminars with educational groups for high-quality discussions. Activities include play, singing, short plays, handing out contraceptives and showing how to use them.

David Kerr (1997) reports how plays were used in the country areas of Malawi to make people aware of the basic requirements for good health. Along with Fandyroy Moyo (1997) in Zimbabwe, he concludes that this method had definite advantages:

• unlike other methods, it enables people to learn while enjoying themselves;
• it is easy to incorporate local languages and cultural aspects such as songs as dances;
• it encourages people to take part in discussions.

But it can also lead to the cultural parties involved becoming professional, marketing their talents and popularizing their culture in a way that makes it look ridiculous.

Lynn Dalrymple (1997) shows how the AIDS awareness programme known as Dramaide has helped fight the disease in a campaign aimed at schoolchildren in South Africa. The programme uses expressive local forms (plays, songs, poems, dances and posters) as well as workshops and community days to build a social movement around the personal choice to live a healthy life.

All these examples show the importance of adapting the activity and message to the target group. IEC offers a pleasant and deep-rooted method, in which the action media, the theatre and things like Dramaide can complement sermons, official speeches, legislation, special clinics, educational discussions and multimedia campaigns. Brought together in an institutional framework tailored to each coastal country or small island these activities can promote sustainable development.

CONCLUSION

The argument for a global information, education and communication plan, with active elements in each part of the programme, highlights the advantages of a mixed model (information-communication, education-teaching) to promote sustainable development in coastal regions and small islands.

The choices available to such regions in their fight against the whims of nature are very limited and encourage human interference with the environment as part of a quest for quick economic and political profit. The detrimental effect of such activity on soil quality, fresh water resources, the state of the sea and the availability of fish and other marine products calls for a range of responses. They include information (traditional and modern media), communication (information campaigns and personal contact) and education (teaching in schools, families and through modern and community media), along with a broad combination of other channels, such as Sunday sermons,traditional ceremonies, markets, songs, story-telling, poems, plays, radio talent contests and street banners, as well as arguments tailored to target groups.

Training by colleagues, such as women or fishermen, plus the training of those responsible for carrying out an IEC programme is part of the communication side. But before this happens, international organizations need to promote better understanding of basic data about the behaviour, attitudes, beliefs and habits of local people, as well as helping to develop means of communication in islands to make the programmes sound plausible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyomo Assala, L. C. (under the direction of) 1991. Stratégie Nationale d’IEC – Cameroun, Yaoundé, MINEFI/FNUAP

Dalrymple, L. 1997. The Use of Traditional Culture in Community Education, AMR, 11(1): 75-91

Debacker, Paul. 1992. Le Management Vert, Dunod, Paris

Fandyroy Moyo, F. 1997. Drama: An Appropriate Tool in Development Communication, AMR, 11(1): 92-105

Kerr, D. 1997. Cultural Engineering and Development, AMR, 11(1): 64-74

Libaert, T. 1992. La communication verte, Paris, Liaison.

Ogrizek, M. 1993. Environnement et Communication, Paris, Apogée.

Parker, W. 1997. Action Media: Consultation, Collaboration and Empowerment in Health Promotion, AMR, 11(1) 45-63

UNESCO 1998a. Activités des organismes des Nations Unies dans le domaine des ressources en eau douce, Rapport du Secrétaire Général. Paris.

UNESCO 1998b. Exécution du programme d’action pour le développement durable des petits Etats insulaires en développement, Paris.

UNESCO 1998c. Planète océan, Paris

Vigneron, J.; Francisco, L. 1998. La Communication Environnementale, Economica, Paris.

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