Elephant conservation and indigenous experiences in Cambodia: Shaping environmental awareness through participatory filmmaking with young people

This project will deepen and extend the impact of our original research "Participatory Filmmaking and the Anlong Veng Peace Tours", which was a 'proof of concept' pilot developed and delivered through the Cambodia strand of the AHRC Network Plus grant "Changing the Story: Building Inclusive Societies with, and for, Young People in 5 Post-Conflict Countries". The follow on funding for impact will apply the successful methods developed during the original project in collaboration with two new Cambodian partners, the Bophana Audio Visual Center (Bophana) and Elephant Livelihood Initiative (ELIE), to extend the reach of the original project to address urgent challenges for environmental conservation and indigenous communities in Cambodia. In the original research, we found that participatory filmmaking could empower young Cambodians as agents and beneficiaries of change by encouraging ownership of Cambodia's histories of war and atrocity, and building dialogue and empathy across divided communities. In particular, we saw young people using their own films as grassroots advocacy tools as they disseminated them across and within their own networks. While the original research focused on issues of post-conflict reconciliation for younger generations in Cambodia, our findings highlighted important outstanding relationships concerning legacies of conflict, transitions from war to peace, and harms inflicted on the environment, particularly in terms of deforestation and wildlife loss. Thus, the primary aims of this follow on funding project is to deploy our successful participatory filmmaking methodology to encourage young people to take ownership and actively engage with conservation issues, and to amplify awareness of environmental challenges across communities.

Cambodia's forty years of conflict have left a legacy of environmental harms, including wildlife reduction, deforestation and the loss of cultural heritage informing locally grounded approaches to forest management. Cambodia's transition to peace and subsequent development has witnessed unsustainable environmental exploitation and widespread environmental harms. Deforestation during and after conflict has caused further loss of rare and endangered wildlife and wild elephant numbers, in particular, have sharply declined as a consequence of the loss of their natural habitats. Indigenous communities, who have close cultural and spiritual relationships to elephants, suffer particularly as a marginalised group within wider Cambodian society and subject to unsustainable development pressures affecting the forests that they reside in. Conservation practice around elephant habitats, and issues facing indigenous communities who live alongside elephants, therefore offers a key site through which to encourage active engagement with wider environmental and development challenges in Cambodia.

The project has been designed in dialogue with the Bophana Center and ELIE to complement each partner's strategic objectives. The Bophana Center is committed to training a new generation of young Cambodian filmmakers, while ELIE's mission is to conserve the natural habitats of elephants while providing support for indigenous communities around them. Through the recruitment of 12 young people, who will be trained in co-productive and participatory filmmaking methods, the project will deliver 3 films that can be used as advocacy tools, highlighting exemplary conservation practice, environmental challenges, and issues facing marginalised indigenous communities through field visits to ELIE sites. These films will be constitute the centrepiece of an impact and dissemination strategy that will raise awareness of environmental challenges through screenings in indigenous communities, screenings facing conservation practitioners, submission for international film festivals, and a social media training program for the young filmmakers to disseminate their films as advocacy tools.

The project has been designed with our two project partners: the Bophana Audio Visual Resource Center and the Elephant Livelihood Environment Initiative. It is based on the needs and priorities within the communities that the partners engage to ensure long term and sustainable impact. The project aims to deliver three types of impact:

1. Shaping empathetic environmental awareness - the project is designed to generate high quality impact through the production of films that centre the voices of indigenous people and conservation practitioners to highlight environmental challenges. In doing so, we will produce films that can be mobilised as grassroots advocacy tools to raise awareness of environmental harms, such as deforestation, and the attendant loss of elephant and other wildlife habitats. Active engagement with environmental issues across communities will build empathetic relationships based on the recognition of shared concerns for development challenges. We have integrated a bespoke social media training program to maximise impact as we situate young filmmakers as agents and beneficiaries of change, who will 'multiply' the messages of their films within and across networks.

2. Demonstrating exemplary conservation practice and embedding conservation norms- our dissemination and awareness raising strategy is targeted at inculcating, embedding and promoting conservation norms at local, national and international levels. Films will highlight exemplary conservation practice and the importance of habitat conservation at screenings and dialogue events for indigenous and provincial communities, at screenings to targeted national and civil society stakeholders in Phnom Penh. The films' submission for screening at international events will further highlight the environmental and development challenges facing Cambodia to an international audience.

3. Building arts-led capacity - the project services the immediate need for increasing arts and filmmaking capacity. Firstly, in conjunction with our partner the Bophana Audio Visual Center, the project will help build a new generation of filmmakers in Cambodia, who can take authorship of urgent cross-community stories about environmental and development challenges affecting them. In doing so, the project immediately provides transferable skills and supports their longer-term employability. Secondly, through the deployment of co-productive and participatory methods, we will transfer new and innovative methodological approaches and skills to our project partners. These will be consolidated in a "making of" documentary and a briefing report reflecting on the strengths of co-productive and participatory approaches for awareness raising around social and environmental issues.