Connecting Waterways to Global Citizenship via Education for Sustainable Development (CW2GC)

The aim of CW2GC is to understand how and to what extent capacity building for global citizenship occurs when young people living in conditions of austerity and violent townships engage in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through waterway rehabilitation projects in their communities and schools; and what this means for global efforts to tackle deprivation and conflict in poverty stricken communities and regions. The study arises from an on-going AHRC impact project that indicates the potential of such work for developing global citizenship amongst young people. It will comprise a cross-cultural, multiple case, ethnographic study investigating 6 projects in the United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa (SA) across 30 months. In a political and economic climate of instability, scarce resources, and global movements of people, this timely research will inform urgent international conversations about citizenship, particularly those relating global citizenship education (GCE) to ESD.
Sustainable use of water resources is fundamental to human survival and a focus of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Hydro-sociology is an emerging discourse within the science of water systems that pays attention to the urgent need to understand them as coupled to human systems. Studies show that pressures on and behaviour of water systems in the Anthropocene are linked to human activity. Research identifies a global water crisis resulting in 80% of the world's population predicted to suffer water stress by 2050. Worldwide, communities are responding to these threats and the associated problems caused by rapid economic development (e.g. industrial effluent, plastic pollution) through community-based approaches to waterway rehabilitation. We propose to make these our focus, aiming to study how and to what extent ESD through community engagement with waterway rehabilitation contributes to young people's civic learning and multi-level political agency.
Primary objectives:
1. To explore how ESD in waterway rehabilitation projects contributes to young people's developing attributes for global citizenship, using the cross-cultural comparison between the UK and SA to elucidate how this occurs.
2. To develop detailed, rich descriptions of the projects (including as infographic case portraits) to illustrate some strategies community-based waterway rehabilitation projects employ to achieve their ends of improving waterway health in diverse cultural contexts.
Our research will comprise 3 phases. Phase 1 develops a detailed demographic description of project localities, drawing on existing census data sets and creating new data through door to door surveys using an innovative paired researcher technique. Phase 2 includes observations of project activities and walk-and-talk interviews with project members. Phase 3 analyses the data thematically, drawing on literature and field experience to achieve our objectives.
We will co-author academic articles and produce innovative online infographic case portraits to share the research outcomes. The research cycle will culminate in an international conference with practitioner walk-shops and knowledge exchange sessions.
The research team will comprise the applicant as principal investigator (PI), a research assistant (RA) with hydropolitical expertise and a mentor from within the PI's chosen institution (Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge), and community-based paired researchers. CW2GC will provide the PI with crucial capacity building opportunities including developing knowledge and innovative community research methods, and learning knowledge mobilisation strategies. The experience of leading a project, including managing data and ethical procedures will be a foundation for the PI to build a career studying vital issues with global significance. The ambitious and targeted plans for scholarly outputs and the mentor co-authoring of papers will be career-defining for both PI and RA

Here we focus on academic, policy and third sector targets of this work. (See 'Pathways to Impact' for mechanisms to achieve impact)
1. Academic communities - fields of environmental and sustainability education, sociohydrology, hydropolitics, the sociology of community-based education initiatives, and citizenship education. Knowledge outputs might influence the natural sciences, e.g. academic communities working on biodiversity (see 'academic beneficiaries')
2. Policy - The study is designed to have policy implications at multiple levels. The aim is to contribute to ongoing international efforts by intergovernmental organisations such as UNESCO to further understanding about civic learning for a global citizenry through delineating the political, social and cultural issues underpinning participation in environmental actions like efforts to improve access to and quality of local waterways; and understanding the learning that engaging with these issues engenders in schools and communities (e.g. understanding local governance structures); and how this influences participants' active citizenship at multiple levels. Additionally, we aim to influence how countries address their commitments to the UNSDGs; specifically, but not limited to: Goal 3 (Health and Wellbeing), Goal 4 (Quality Education), specifically Target 4.7 that refers to ESD, Goal 6 (Water and Sanitation) and Goal 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). Whilst the SDGs have high-level support from governments around the world, their achievement relies on the commitment of individuals and communities, and community-based initiatives of this kind are crucial to their success. However, some goals conflict and this research might reveal some of these conflicts, so the study may contribute to meliorating these problems.
At the national level in SA and the UK, this research has medium and long term implications for educational policy (e.g. the citizenship and natural sciences curriculum) and environmental policy (e.g. resource use and preservation). Locally, case study reports arising from this work might influence local government infrastructure management and maintenance, thus improving knowledge exchange between voluntary groups and local governance. It might influence school programmes of study, improving school-community interfacing and developing curricula with community groups and volunteers inspired by local environmental issues; with indirect benefits for environments and their non-human inhabitants (economically and physically), and for political participation in local governments.
3. Practitioners in waterway rehabilitation projects of the participating organisations will learn from each other through cross-cultural networking, knowledge interchanges, infographic GIS case study portraits, and through exposure to the process of academic research and the entailed access to academic knowledge. Young people who act as community-based co-researchers will have improved chances to access employment.
4. Waterway community inhabitants will benefit in the short and long term as it may consolidate and enhance the projects' successes in achieving waterway rehabilitation. Improvements in the condition and aspects of the waterway environments will have direct health and economic benefits (including improved mental health).
5. Physical environments and habitats may benefit from this research, which will contribute to the case study projects' efforts to improve indigenous biodiversity, knowledge of which will be disseminated widely to other such projects around of the world via the online infographic GIS case study portraits.
6. Water security may benefit which aims to support efforts to find solutions to an emerging crisis that puts 80% of the world's population at water risk.
7. The project team will accrue considerable capacity building from this experience, including of project leadership, authoring, data management and collaborative working.