Small groups of thoughtful, committed, organised individuals can bring about beneficial change.
– Adapted from a Margaret Mead quote.
About
CAP was established to raise public awareness of air pollution and its effects on health and to identify sources of air pollution within its area of operations. Our goal is to find collaborative, inclusive, participatory, methods and processes, to deal with pollution and more specifically air pollution, its challenges, and its regulation and enforcement.
It has been shown that by engaging with multi-stakeholders through active inclusive participative processes, using real-life settings, implementing multi-method approaches, and adopting co-creative solutions, it is possible to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
We are committed to reaching meaningful negotiated outcomes through multi-stakeholder participation, which will ensure compelling relevance for key local role players, those who drive governmental policies, and the scientific community. However, to be truly relevant, these processes must include active and positive citizen engagement.
Essential to these outcomes is a people-centred approach, allowing citizens to play a pivotal role in these participative processes. This approach requires adaptable and repeated interaction to ensure that the needs, activities, and behaviours of local citizens are always considered.
Our mission is to promote responsibility, accountability, and the fair treatment and meaningful participation of all people with regards resource extraction and other land uses, the drafting, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies in order to achieve social and environmental justice with equitable human and environmental rights.
By raising public awareness and working closely with scientists and public authorities, we can find co-creative solutions through the implementation of innovative ways to combat pollution, its associated health problems, its control, and ultimately reduce it.
This approach requires diverse groups, made up of laypeople, experts, and interested parties, who can participate on an equal footing without communication barriers and who are open to adopting and building on ideas and reaching mutually beneficial solutions through the shared processes.
By acquiring knowledge about pollution, its challenges, and controls, citizens, stakeholders, and municipal officials will be enabled and empowered to find lasting solutions, to develop and improve new and existing local policies. This will eventually lead to an informed citizenry, conscious of the real challenges from both technical and non-technical perspectives.
Important to the success of these participative processes is to establish open communication and operational interaction which will empower citizens and engage them in the decision-making processes and lead to improved policies.
By tackling pollution on a local level, citizens can contribute in innovative ways to research and science, interact regularly with the local authorities on practical matters, and connect with researchers, scientists, policy-makers, and key municipal actors, thereby influencing policies and driving improved services by both municipalities and national government.
When engaging, on environmental issues, with citizens and other stakeholders, CAP will continually strive to achieve five ideas; Make it Simple, Make it Visible, Make it Personal, Make it Practical, and Make it Stimulating.
First Ideal – Make it Simple – We aim to articulate complexities in a clear and easy-to-assimilate manner and to avoid, where possible, language, and terminology which is taken for granted in some research or political circles.
Second and Third Ideals – Make it Visible – and – Make it Personal – Aim to make air pollution more visual, even though it may not be visible, and to show relevance by reaching citizens at a personal level, showing the real effects of air pollution in a tangible way and how these are experienced by every one of us.
