Omar Mo­hammed

CEO, The Crop­per Foun­da­tion

Peo­ple feel ig­nored. Peo­ple feel pow­er­less. Peo­ple feel help­less. This has been the com­mon re­frain that we at the Crop­per Foun­da­tion heard, two years ago, as we start­ed work on a three-year Ac­tion “CSOs for Good En­vi­ron­men­tal Gov­er­nance.” In this EU-fund­ed Ac­tion, along with our part­ners, we learnt just how alien­at­ed, ex­clud­ed and dis­en­fran­chised our com­mu­ni­ties have felt as they try and ad­vo­cate for a health­i­er and more sus­tain­able en­vi­ron­ment.

This ini­tia­tive, which seeks to en­hance the ca­pac­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s civ­il so­ci­ety for the gov­er­nance of en­vi­ron­men­tal trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty in the coun­try’s ex­trac­tive in­dus­tries, builds on the con­cepts of en­vi­ron­men­tal and cli­mate jus­tice. These com­mu­ni­ties, like the small is­land states of the Caribbean, have done the least to dam­age their en­vi­ron­ment but will suf­fer the most con­se­quences. From re­gion­al sea-lev­el rise due to car­bon emis­sions by the ‘West,’ to flood­ing in the East-West cor­ri­dor caused by il­le­gal quar­ry­ing - it is usu­al­ly the most mar­gin­alised and vul­ner­a­ble among us that pay the price for en­vi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion.

Rarely do these com­mu­ni­ties get the chance to rem­e­dy these sit­u­a­tions. At the glob­al scale, most of the dis­cus­sions around en­vi­ron­men­tal and cli­mate jus­tice are played out at the elite lev­els of diplo­ma­cy and pol­i­tics, that still de­pends on a top-down view of the world. Rarely, if ever, are the true voic­es of com­mu­ni­ties around the world rep­re­sent­ed or make sig­nif­i­cant im­pacts in these con­ver­sa­tions.

At the na­tion­al lev­el, the same of­ten oc­curs with com­pa­nies com­ing in­to com­mu­ni­ties, host­ing pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions on ob­tuse and high­ly tech­ni­cal sub­jects—pre­sent­ed many times by con­sul­tants with mul­ti­ple ad­vanced de­grees. When com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers are not able to re­spond ef­fec­tive­ly to this high­ly tech­ni­cal ma­te­r­i­al or re­act in a way that re­sponds to per­ceived con­de­scen­sion, they are eas­i­ly dis­missed as hav­ing noth­ing use­ful to con­tribute. This is the re­al­i­ty for dozens of com­mu­ni­ties around Trinidad and To­ba­go. Even na­tion­al­ly, much of the con­ver­sa­tions around en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty still takes place in fan­cy rooms and work­shops that as Dan Gilmoor puts it, re­main in the do­main of the al­ready priv­i­leged through ed­u­ca­tion, ac­cess or con­nec­tions to in­form the con­ver­sa­tion to meet their in­ter­ests, as no­ble as they may be.

Peo­ple care about their com­mu­ni­ties and the world around them and, if giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty, will strive to make things bet­ter. Two years in­to the work of “CSOs for Good En­vi­ron­men­tal Gov­er­nance”, we see this hap­pen­ing. As one com­mu­ni­ty ac­tivist bat­tling il­le­gal quar­ry­ing said “… now I know the rules and reg­u­la­tions and I know where to go,” while an­oth­er leader of a com­mu­ni­ty women’s group stat­ed that they saw, through the Ac­tion, how unchecked de­vel­op­ment de­stroyed oth­er com­mu­ni­ties and “…we will not let that hap­pen to us.”

Groups worked to­geth­er to lob­by for a bridge to be re­built that had cut off an en­tire com­mu­ni­ty. Com­mu­ni­ty groups that thought they were too small to make a dif­fer­ence, helped stop amend­ments of na­tion­al leg­is­la­tion that would have worked against trans­paren­cy ef­forts.

• Con­tin­ues on Page 11

• From Page 10

Just a few days ago, these groups once again came to­geth­er re­cent­ly to sup­port their friends and fam­i­ly in the north-east of Trinidad by send­ing in com­ments against the pro­posed To­co port.

Now more than ever, as we seek to build back bet­ter in a post-COVID world, we must em­pow­er our com­mu­ni­ties. Most of us who were stuck at home and were on­ly able to ven­ture out in small jaunts ‘down the road’ should un­der­stand how im­por­tant well-func­tion­ing com­mu­ni­ties are to a coun­try. This is a new re­al­i­ty for every­one and there is still much un­cer­tain­ty in how we will build back an econ­o­my in a world that is reel­ing from the mas­sive shock of a pan­dem­ic, plung­ing oil prices and the loom­ing greater threat of cli­mate change. How­ev­er, just as we did for COVID-19, we should lis­ten to the sci­ence. It tells us that such re­build­ing must put the en­vi­ron­ment at the heart of re­cov­ery for us to build re­silient na­tions.

To do this, we must cre­ate and re­spect the space for com­mu­ni­ties to speak their truth about their en­vi­ron­ment. We can­not keep on over­whelm­ing their voic­es to favour de­vel­op­ment par­a­digms that are cen­tred, in many cas­es, around an un­sus­tain­able en­er­gy and high-car­bon econ­o­my. These 25+ civ­il so­ci­ety groups and many more com­mu­ni­ties across Trinidad and To­ba­go must be key com­po­nents of a re­cov­ery that is both eq­ui­table and sus­tain­able.