Citizen participation is critical to deepening democracy, and community organizations are an increasingly vital avenue through which that participation is realized. One focus around which people in communities all over the world are increasingly banding together to take action on is water. Imbued with all kinds of social, cultural and spiritual significance, water is something people in a wide variety of contexts seem prepared to defend when local supplies or socially just access are threatened.
Although sometimes connected to broader social movement networks, water activism in many contexts emerges through small scale, place-based and often ad- hoc action groups that form in reaction to emergent threats to local waters. Under the right circumstances, water activism can create lasting change. However, community groups can lose efficacy and perish if they are not able to generate and sustain engagement. It is therefore important to understand how and why individuals join others in collective action, and how community engagement can be sustained and broadened over time.
Methodology
We applied the pyramid of engagement (Fig. 1) to analyze the ebbs and flows of community engagement in grassroots water activism. The pyramid depicts activist engagement as a multilevel, developmental process, and can serve as a useful tool for community engagement scholars and practitioners alike.
FIGURE 1: Rosenblatt’s (2010) pyramid of engagement is a metaphor that depicts the larger number of people who are expected to belong to the lower levels of engagement and the progressively smaller number who occupy the upper tiers of contribution, ownership and leadership in a social movement context. It illustrates how people will engage with an issue or organization in different ways and at different levels, depending on a range of individual, social and organizational factors.
We compared two Canadian community-based, volunteer water activist organizations: The Wellington Water Watchers in Wellington County, Ontario and the WaterWealth Project in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. Both had engaged in collective action around the perceived threats of water bottling companies extracting their groundwater and the arguably ineffective governance in place that permitted it. Their actions were successful in raising the profiles of their respective issues and both ended up contributing to significant policy wins. We interviewed a diversity of key informants (KIs) in each community to identify trends and dynamics related to community engagement in water issues.
Outcomes
A number of themes emerge from the analysis, which describe what KIs collectively identify as key trends and factors in community engagement in water issues in the period surrounding and following the policy wins.
Inhibiting factors
Despite the groundswell of momentum behind the Wellington Water Watcher’s initial campaign against water-taking for bottling, and in spite of the WaterWealth Project’s well-resourced and strategically- planned start, the KI data in both contexts suggest that building and sustaining community engagement on water issues in general has been very difficult. KIs attribute a lack of spontaneous community engagement to a variety of factors:
› Lack of understanding of the issues
Building awareness of water issues is more complicated than just making information available. It involves challenging the norms and values of a consumerist society, and counteracting conflicting messaging from advertisers, the media and well-resourced organizations seeking to undermine or silence the activist groups.
› Distrust or dislike of activists
Water activism is not perceived as positive or constructive by everyone. In the farming-intensive Fraser Valley, in particular, KIs told us that many farmers feel that their property rights and livelihoods are threatened by the demands of water activists.
› Busyness and burnout
People see themselves as too busy in their everyday lives to get involved in voluntary activities or civic engagement. Conversely, among those who dedicated time and energy to the cause at the highest levels of engagement, burnout is a real risk.
› In-group dynamics and perceptions of expertise
Some may avoid participating with the local water organization because they do not feel they belong or have anything of value to contribute. Community engagement efforts tend to attract the same small groups, which over time can take on a sense of exclusivity for new people trying to get involved.
Facilitating factors
Across the two communities, our research found considerable consensus on what KIs observe to be key factors that encourage and facilitate community engagement.
› Concrete and local issues
A localized, concrete crisis or immediate perceived threat is a significant trigger for spurring community members to action. On the other hand, people eventually need new crises to remain engaged at the same level.
› Presence of the proverbial ‘bad guy’
In both communities, water bottling operations helped to draw attention to related policy issues such as groundwater regulation because it paved the way for identifying a common enemy.
› Sense of community
There is power in like-minded compatriots to inspire engagement. Social connections are what facilitate deepening levels of engagement and more big-picture conceptualization of water issues.
› Sense of efficacy
People’s perceptions of the winnability of the campaign and of their own ability to make a meaningful contribution and affect change are an important motivator for engagement
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that emergent local issues or crises can stimulate community engagement, but that reactionary engagement of this kind tends to be short-lived and involves low levels of commitment. By depicting community engagement as a fluid and dynamic process, however, the pyramid of engagement presents a way in which to understand short-lived and low-intensity engagement as a building block for longer-term momentum building. Consistent with other research on engagement in activism our findings suggest that the formation of collective identity, a sense of community, and the perception of self-efficacy are more important for understanding movement up and down the pyramid of engagement than a feeling of urgency, a sense of crisis, or even the perception that others have succeeded.
Community engagement is a process that requires nurturing and attention to the differential needs of individuals at different levels of engagement. By conceptualizing activist engagement as a multilevel developmental process rather than a zero-sum construct, we contend that the idea of a pyramid of engagement can serve as a useful tool for understanding how to promote broad-based citizen participation in activism and democracy beneath and beyond the state
Case, R.A., Zeglen, L. (2018). Exploring the Ebbs and Flows of Community Engagement: The Pyramid of Engagement and Water Activism in Two Canadian Communities. Journal of Community Practice, 26(2), 184-203.
Contact: Robert Case, Social Development Studies
For more information about WaterResearch, contact Amy Geddes.
