Conservation Theatre: Mirroring Experiences and Performing Stories in Community Management of Natural Resources

ABSTRACT

Learning how to boost collective imagination and creativity is a key component in transformative processes supporting community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). The use of the arts in such contexts is becoming a prominent methodological approach in strategies aimed at opening new spaces for public dialogue and reflection. The arts play a decisive role in sense-making and especially in establishing meaningful and emotional connections between individuals and their broader socioecological systems. This article explores the contribution of “conservation theatre” to sustainability learning and to the integration and mobilization of multiple knowledge actors for CBNRM. We focus on an experience in a Mexican community using participatory theatre with young people. Our experience illustrates that conservation theatre helped raise awareness of local conservation issues and contributed to opening nonconventional, aesthetically rich spaces for new ways of social interaction, diversity recognition, and empathic dialogues. It also showed limitations suggesting the importance of further work.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts-based research
• community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)
• forest management
• participation
• performative methods
• sustainability learning

Acknowledgments

We thank all the crew who participated in the process and made it possible: Sofía Molina, Yurixhi Ochoa, Diana Manrique, Fabian R. Medina (ECA team); Miriam, Betsy, and Yuni (Cherán crew) and Graciela Martínez and Arnim Scheidel (audiovisual team). Special thanks to the Consejo de Bienes Comunales, Consejo Mayor, the COBAEM members, and Tata Trini and his family. We also thank Dr. Louis Lemkow for his thorough review and support as co-supervisor, and the anonymous reviewers, who greatly contributed to improving the text. More generally, thanks to the dignified people of Cherán.

Notes

¹In this article we refer to “space” not only as a particular physical location but also as the more general space in which social interactions take place. Related to the political concept of “arena,” such spaces may include interactions and encounters that relate to the mobilization of resources and identity of Cherán’s community.

²By knowledge actors we understand those holders of different kinds of relevant knowledge who can be mobilized towardsan explicit end and become “actors” contributing to community reflexivity and learning.

³Central to ABR is the concept of aesthetics. Acknowledging the complexity of such a concept, in this article we use an operational definition including both “aesthetic elements” (Knowles and Cole 2008), the basic principles characterizing an art form (e.g., form and composition, internal consistency, clarity, evocation, resonance), and “aesthetic experience” (Dewey 2008), the resulting experience of the creation of or interaction with an artwork, potentially conducive to new meanings and perceptions.

⁴The process was supported by two researchers from the Mexican environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) alongside a team of five volunteers from in and outside the community.

⁵Nevertheless, the findings of this article focus only on the theatrical process, since each workshop had independent research objectives and evaluation approaches.

⁶Targeted at participants of the whole performative process (theatrical workshop and performances), to guaranty a complete vision of the process.

⁷See for instance: Evaluation Toolbox (http://evaluationtoolbox.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=38:dartboard&catid=19:formative-evaluation-tools&Itemid=145).

⁸Quotes from workshop participants are referred to by their name, while for audience members we use a number preceded by the letter A.

⁹For instance, state legal definitions of community membership often only recognize the head of the family’s participatory rights. This situation is slowly changing in Cherán thanks to its assembly governance system.