People Powered and NDI are bringing community participation into environmental policymaking
/By Nikhil Kumar, resource manager
In October, I traveled to Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) to co-facilitate a workshop with the National Democratic Institute (NDI) for our partnership to strengthen participation in national-level environmental policymaking. Together with the NDI teams from B&H, Georgia, Jordan and Tunisia, we worked with local stakeholders — elected officials and civil servants from federal, cantonal and municipal authorities, as well as representatives of environmental civil society organizations and academia — to begin designing a participatory policymaking process that addresses environmental issues.
Using a human-centered design approach, the stakeholders worked together to pinpoint a key environmental problem: waste collection and management. One challenge specific to B&H is the country’s complex governance system, which includes four levels of government, sometimes with different competencies depending on the location. In Sarajevo, for example, waste management falls under the jurisdiction of the cantonal government, but in other cities, it’s the responsibility of the municipality.
With the problem in mind, workshop participants began to sketch out a participatory program to address the problem. I introduced different participatory approaches to environmental decision-making — including climate-focused participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, legislative theater and participatory policymaking – and how to intentionally include marginalized voices and generate equitable outcomes. In addition, experts from Georgia and Tunisia spoke about their experience with participatory environmental policymaking conducted by national legislatures: a thematic inquiry on lead contamination in Georgia and a network of parliamentarians for sustainable development in Tunisia. We discussed lessons for the Bosnian context and how to strengthen existing public participation mechanisms.
Introducing workshop participants to participatory democracy approaches.
We also playtested a new module of the Participation Playbook, an interactive online tool that synthesizes global knowledge on participatory program design to help users plan and implement a program for their context. The module we’re producing with NDI walks users through the key questions to assess their needs around participatory environmental policymaking, particularly at the national level, and then develop a detailed action plan. This work builds on People Powered’s commitment to climate and environmental democracy. After revising the module based on participants’ feedback, we will pilot it in B&H next year to support the development of a policymaking process, before making the module available to the wider public.
Over the two-day workshop, we learned about the political and environmental challenges facing B&H, and how the government and civil society work to address these challenges. The participants’ commitment to using participatory policymaking to address a pressing environmental issue demonstrates participatory democracy’s potential to bring people together, even — or especially — in challenging political circumstances. Stay tuned for more updates about how People Powered is supporting this work through the Participation Playbook and Climate Democracy Accelerator.
Workshop participants from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Georgia, Jordan and the United States debriefing over dinner.