Course

A community is a clearly identified group of individuals that together, identify themselves as a community. People can be part of a community when they live near each other, have similar ethnicity or beliefs or have similar interests. A community is formed when people have a sense of belonging to each other and have a shared understanding. However, the concept of a community is also somewhat fluid and any person can be part of multiple communities at the same time. For example, you might belong to a community based on your geographic location or as part of a village, but at the same time you could be part of another community based on your ethnicity.

In the past, most environmental monitoring was undertaken with little or no involvement from the community in which the study took place. In recent years citizen science projects have become more popular, however, they often use a top-down approach led by scientists with the community only being involved in the collection of data and not being included in the design, analysis and reporting of the monitoring programme. Community monitoring is monitoring developed and carried out by communities themselves. It encourages widespread participation of community members in the planning, acting, observing and evaluating of the monitoring programme.

Community monitoring is more successful in engaging the community to act to solve a problem. This is because awareness of the issue and what is causing it is greater among the wider community as they were actively involved in the monitoring. The act of undertaking the monitoring also brings the community together which helps in the actions needed to solve the problem that was being monitored.

Click on the book icon below to visit the course section on how to develop a community monitoring programme.

Activity 1

Identify an environmental challenge that may be of interest to you and your community. Draw a timeline to indicate what steps need to be undertaken in which order to create a community monitoring programme.

Evaluation is an ongoing process to review and improve your environmental monitoring programme. You will have gained an understanding of participatory impact evaluation in Unit 1 and how to evaluate the data collection aspect of the project in Unit 4. It is also equally important to evaluate the experiences of the community and the participants.

To evaluate a community monitoring programme you should carry out the following steps:

1. Agree at the very start of the monitoring programme how the community will evaluate the experiences of the community project team, community monitoring team and the wider community. What will be the indicators?
2. Ideally evaluation should be undertaken throughout the monitoring programme and not just at the end.
3. Encourage all members of your community to assess the monitoring programme at appropriate stages.
4. Invite and incorporate feedback from the community i.e. use the learning cycle approach to improve your survey, e.g. plan, act, observe and evaluate. If the monitoring study is not working for the community then learn from your mistakes and adapt the project.

Activity 2

For the environmental challenge you identified in 5.2 decide what indicators you would use to evaluate the experiences of the community and the participants.

Now, after completing this unit, you will have an appreciation for the benefits of using a community approach for environmental monitoring. You will also have an understanding of how to plan, act, observe and evaluate such a community-based environmental monitoring campaign. Having widespread participation of diverse community members in the design, execution, reporting and evaluation of the monitoring programme is important to ensure it is done ethically and with wide community support from diverse community members.

Illustrations for Unit 5 were produced by Ed Dingli (www.eddingli.com). 

Animations for Unit 5 were produced by Rosie Miles (www.rosiesmiles.com).