Importance of ownership at ground level

This article is authored by Sameer Shisodia, ecosystem fellow and former CEO, Rainmatter Foundation.

Deep in Bhitarkanika, Odisha, a group of girls gathered around a map of their village, talking us through the changes they had noticed over the year. They knew where things had shifted, what was causing concern and which problems needed attention. These were the village’s Climate Champions, part of an ECRICC programme designed to encourage young people to take an active role in their communities. But the girls had gone well beyond the programme’s charter. They had begun observing their surroundings closely, documenting what they saw and turning those observations into questions about what their village needed.

Collective Ownership (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

We were meeting outdoors, with much of the village gathered around us. At one point, a slightly drunk but gentle man kept interjecting from behind us. Some of us could not follow the language, but his agitation was apparent. Devjit, who was chaperoning us around the place, eventually paused the discussion so we could hear him out.

He pointed towards a shallow waterbody that we had assumed was a pokhar, a village pond. He wanted it cleaned out rather than, as I paraphrase him, having us “chatter away”.

The conversation that followed revealed something we had not understood. The waterbody was a tiny remnant of a 17-kilometre-long freshwater creek that once ran across several villages. Over time, the creek had been encroached upon and filled in. It had once been important not only for managing freshwater, but also for keeping saltwater ingress in check.

The changemakers and others in the village agreed that this needed attention, and the idea quickly took on a life of its own. A couple of partners travelling with us promised to come back with a plan and figure out government support and approvals.

But within a month, before anyone got back, the changemakers in the villages had met, discussed the issue and started clearing the creek themselves. They cleared more than two kilometres. Eventually, the Collector noticed the work and stepped in with MGNREGA approvals to support the remaining work.

The last we heard, 15 kilometres of the creek had been cleared. The person who might have been easiest to dismiss that day knew what was missing and what needed to be done. And he knew it without needing a specialist organisation, a government department or a funder to tell him.

That encounter brought home something fundamental: People who live in a place are its first and most important owners.

The same logic holds true for a household. A family governs itself. You gather around the dinner table, have conversations across different aspects of your lives, decide what matters and make choices about how to respond. Of course, you consult experts — on health, education, finances and much more. But you remain the owner of the problems. You decide your priorities, the pathways you want to pursue and the trade-offs you are willing to make based on your collective understanding and knowledge. A village is no different.

The people who live there experience the full complexity of the place. They see how water, livelihoods, health, agriculture, infrastructure, ecology and social relationships intersect in their everyday lives. These things may be separated into departments, schemes and projects from the outside, but they do not exist in silos for the people living there.

These insights, gathered through conversations on the ground with our partners and with communities that had a strong sense of ownership, formed the core of our approach to addressing the planetary crisis, including the climate crisis.

Some of what communities do may look like adaptation. Some may look like resilience. Some may look like mitigation. But, in practice, these distinctions often dissolve. What matters is the long-term relationship people have with the place they live in and the choices they make to sustain it.

Governance and social change have too often ignored this reality.

Across the development and philanthropy sector, we have collectively — perhaps inadvertently — weakened communities’ ownership over their own places through interventions designed from the top down and pushed through with the weight of mon ey or authority.

Villages have been treated as collections of beneficiaries to be served, rather than collectives of individuals with the standing to decide their own futures.

Schemes and projects are designed in headquarters — whether in government, philanthropy or large civil society organisations — often with limited contact with the people they are meant to serve. They are then rolled out with resources behind them, regardless of whether the people living there want what is being offered.

The lack of buy-in can lead to unsustainable or even negative outcomes. More importantly, it leaves out priorities that may matter deeply to communities and creates trade-offs that they may not be willing to make for the long-term.

For the people living in a place, the metrics of a project are never the only metrics that matter. Their lived reality is much wider than any single domain. It does not separate neatly into the silos that a specialist view of the world often creates.

At Bhitarkanika, dozens of other initiatives have followed since, chosen and driven by the changemakers and villages themselves.

Many of our partners, government actors and local entrepreneurs have provided the backbone and support needed to enable these efforts. But the choice of what to solve, how to solve it and what success should look like has belonged to the villages.

Our own involvement has been minimal, and our direct costs have been negligible. The reason is simple: The owners of the place wanted the change, sought help where they needed it and worked towards it themselves.

Of course, we had supported some of the backbone infrastructure they used. But much of what happened was beyond the scope or means of any single funder, organisation or even government department.

That, ultimately, is what a functioning ecosystem can look like.

Our role was not to arrive with a solution. It was to support and participate in the ecosystem to the extent — and in the ways — that we could.

Given how rapidly multiple crises are adding up across landscapes and nations, we need to change how we approach problem-solving. The more we organise well in place, the more we strengthen places ecologically and economically, linked to their own resources and skills. And the stronger those places become, the better equipped communities are to make the trade-offs that the future will demand.

Rebuilding collective ownership is, therefore, not incidental to the climate response. It is a precondition for it.

A serious rebuilding effort is needed to help communities regain their collective capacity — hopefully stronger, fairer and better informed than before. This is what local self-governance has long envisaged, and it is critical if we are to respond effectively to climate change and the other crises that are increasingly intertwined with it. Funders should be resourcing that infrastructure directly, not just the projects built on top of it.

Government should show up to support decisions that communities have already made, rather than making those decisions first. And civil society should measure itself by how little it needs to intervene, rather than how much.

A key part of this is building knowledge and data infrastructure that is accessible to people in the village and strengthening changemakers of all kinds who operate there and work in sync with the collective.

At the same time, the numerous solutions, methods and knowledge that civil society, researchers and experts have developed over decades need to be made available to communities on their own terms and timelines — to each set of changemakers, when they need them, according to their priorities rather than ours. Projects are valuable. They can demonstrate what is possible, test approaches and generate learning.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Sameer Shisodia, ecosystem fellow and former CEO, Rainmatter Foundation.