USING PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES TO IMPROVE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN SELECTED PARTS OF ZAMBIA

Abstract

Environmental sustainability discussions are becoming much more prevalent in local communities in Zambia and world over. For example, in Zambia citizen committees and paid coordinators are now commonplace in provinces, districts, cities and towns. Many people are even becoming interested in climate change, an issue that pretty recently would have been considered something that the central government alone would be left to solve. The paper seeks to; establish participatory approaches relevant to environmental sustainability, describe how organisations use participatory approaches to improve environmental sustainability and determine key issues for consideration when using participatory processes based on the framework of the capacity approach. This inquiry used a prospective research design and descriptive research methods, targeting participants chosen using convenient sampling technique and snowballing. Its findings were descriptively and thematically analysed. Revelations of this paper point to progressive community engaged interdisciplinary, integrated approaches, bringing together the social with technological and scientific fields of practice, providing a setting for creative investigation and response.