project

Start date: 2002

Date of completion: 2004

Water and Environment: Uses and Waste

The National Inquiries (“The Portuguese and the Environment”) carried out by OBSERVA in 1997 and 2000 emphasized the importance of water as a resource in several particular dimensions. Also the study “The Media Dimensions of Water – Evolution and Trends” (Schmidt, 2002) contributed to the identification of a set of type representations about the way water is treated in the media. If the surveys contribute to capture the representations that the Portuguese population attributes to water as an environmental element, the second study referred to constitutes an essential source of information about the role of the media in the construction of these same representations.

Understanding that the role of an Environment Observatory is to produce relevant information on environmental, general and particular issues, and assuming that previous research has made a fundamental contribution to understanding the relationship between representations and values ​​of Portuguese society with respect to water, whether from the point of view of diagnosis – what do the Portuguese think? – from the point of view of sources of information – what message is transmitted in the media? – the present study concentrates its attention on a third element whose importance is central in contemporary societies as regards the processes of socialization, integration of new values ​​in social practices and transformation of old habits: educational processes. And so, following the two previous questions, for which there is justification, it finds in the environmental policy objectives mentioned above a second reason for seeking answers.

On the other hand, the fact that the National Plan for the Efficient Use of Water (2001) is not yet in the implementation phase, and which includes a programmatic area exclusively dedicated to sensitization, information and education with a view to transforming behaviors, constituted relevant factor in the choice of this question. So, when looking for the answer to this question – how do the Portuguese learn? – a vast field of research possibilities opens up, both for the understanding of the learning phenomenon and for the introduction of transformations at the level of the message and the relation that the subjects in learning establish with it.

If this question is of a very significant scope, allowing to develop diverse and complementary lines of investigation, the project tried to focus on two concrete questions:

i. How to promote situations of collective learning in the context of the experiences of the local community?

ii. How to promote situations of group interaction that stimulate the participation of members of this local community in the processes of integrated management of the water?

The search for answers to these two questions led us to develop a methodology applied to three case studies in the course of which we tried to test practical ways of stimulating the aforementioned purposes – collective learning processes and participation – and to do so in a collective and integrated into a local community. In addition to this purpose, we were interested in verifying the degree of adherence of a school community and some elements of a local community to such a proposal.

Thus, in addition to the clues to intervention itself, which are useful from the point of view of policy-making at the local community scale, these two questions allow us to problematize two particular scientific dimensions:

i. The first provides us with a qualitative record of the practices and collective representations that a group of people produces on a particular theme in a context of interaction.

ii. The second is in the field of methodological possibilities that allow us to develop a situation of production of collective responses to a central question of work.

In this sense, this is a project with a strong methodological component through which we tried to create experimental conditions that, having the school as a field of sociological experimentation, corresponded to an ethically oriented and methodologically prospective research posture.

One of the fundamental values ​​of the “new water culture” is the need to involve local people in water management processes. Generally known as the principles of information and participation, these values ​​affirm two distinct needs for the implementation of a “new water culture”: access to information and a basic environmental culture by citizens, on the one hand, and the possibility of participation in the processes of water resources management, on the other. This project seeks to contribute to this end, assuming that it is possible to develop a new basis for a local water culture through learning and intervention processes, seeking to test this possibility in three particular local communities: Bombarral, Montemor-o-Novo and Odivelas.

 

Associated Publications:

Água e Ambiente – Usos e Desperdícios