Part 1: Thinking Bigger
Last year, we took the critical decision to discontinue an initiative.
Our parent organisation, the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), a globally-renowned environmental think tank, focuses on generating rigorous research and training the next generation of environmental leaders. Recognising the need to turn research into impact on the ground, CSEI was started at ATREE in 2019 to become a bridge between institutions of power and influence, and changemakers on the ground.
We began with a focus on three landscapes where ATREE had expertise: cities, farms and forests. In cities, ATREE works on restoration of green spaces and on protection and rejuvenation of urban lakes. In farms, the work is focused on farmers and groundwater, as well as food systems involving wild foods. In forests, removing invasive plant species and providing livelihoods to indigenous communities is the area of interest.
After over a year of CSEI’s operations (severely limited by Covid-19), we decided to step back and answer the question: what do we do and where do we add value?
We got help from brand consultant, Rini Dutta of Brand Centric Advisors, who interviewed our team, partners and key stakeholders to get to the answer.
Read | Setting Up For Success at CSEI
We realised that we needed to make some big decisions regarding the fate of our original initiatives. In 2021–22, we took three major decisions that changed the course of CSEI’s work. This series of two blog posts details how we evolved — the first focusing on how our work in urban areas changed scope; and the second explaining our work in farms and forests as well as the two new ‘horizontal initiatives’ that cut across all the work we do at CSEI.
We make change happen
Research institutions see a research paper as the endpoint of their work. Whereas changemakers are looking for science-backed solutions to implement. We build communities of early adopters to design and scale science-backed solutions for complex social and environmental challenges.
There was no dearth of changemakers on the ground with deep roots in communities. But many efforts remained local or collapsed when funding ceased. In other cases, there were unintended consequences that were not accounted for. Where we could add value was by enabling them to become more effective and connecting them to larger institutions and communities to help scale their efforts. We would position ourselves as impact ecosystem builders.
The branding exercise also helped us decide what we would not do as an ecosystem builder. We would not implement new solutions ourselves. We would identify the gaps, co-create solutions with changemakers and help them scale these innovations.
How our work in cities changed
One of the big decisions we made pertains to our work in urban areas, i.e. the Urban Lakes and Green Cities initiatives.
Urban Lakes Initiative
Lakes in Bengaluru are under threat from degradation, drying, encroachment and outright land conversion into built-up areas.
The Bangalore Citizen’s Lake Dashboard was created to help concerned citizens intervene in managing their neighbourhood lakes. It evolved in three phases: our attempts at IoT solutions for Bengaluru’s lakes, then a shift to citizen science, and finally, our move to the idea of lakes as living and learning spaces.
Read | Invest in Your Lakes
As the initiative evolved, we transitioned to focus on building capacity to measure, understand and interpret data around lakes. We worked with a technology collaborative to create the ‘Mira Project’ focused on community storytelling and learning, including data. The Mira project is an initiative to create common digital resources and tools to help citizens learn simple, science-based ways to nurture Bengaluru’s lakes.
We realised that our role is not necessarily to collect and curate the data ourselves but rather to unlock knowledge for other players so that they could be empowered to take action. Our focus thus shifted to capacity building — we continue to collaborate on running courses for lake practitioners with Biome Environmental Solutions, the Water Institute at Bangalore University, and Friends of Lakes.
The most critical decision we made this year was to spin off the Mira project and discontinue our Urban Lakes initiative. It continues on via Mira: Your Urban Nature Guide app managed by a group of open source technologists.
Cities and Towns Initiative (previously Green Cities)
The Urban Lakes Initiative provided a key insight: sewage inflow was one of the biggest problems hindering lake conservation in Bengaluru. One way to solve this challenge is to turn treated wastewater into a commodity thereby stemming the flow of untreated sewage into Bengaluru’s lakes.
This is now the focus of our Cities and Towns initiative (previously Green Cities) — studying ways to ensure higher rates of reuse of treated wastewater in the domestic context.
But we did not start here. This initiative started with the objective to make cities greener and more climate resilient. Through stakeholder mapping and systems analysis which took us the better part of a year, we realised that there were great organisations doing work on restoration of lakes, urban farming, terrace gardening, and other greening initiatives. However, many of them were using freshwater sources.
India is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. Using freshwater for greening could be particularly devastating for cities like Bengaluru which are vulnerable to water stress because of rapid urbanisation. The equivalent of 2,50,000 people’s domestic water supply would have to be diverted to greening projects for Bengaluru to reach its 2030 climate goals. Given the paucity of new freshwater sources to support these greening efforts, we needed to find alternative sources of water.
Not only could treated wastewater be used for all of Bengaluru’s greening, it could also be used for construction (a water-intensive industry), and if treated properly, recharge aquifers and store water in lakes. We saw an opportunity for potential impact and turned our focus to water recycling as the entry point to creating greener and more climate resilient cities.
While large cities have the resources to address these challenges, many tier-2 cities do not. Small towns were approaching us for help in creating circular water systems — more effective rainwater harvesting and wastewater reuse. Small towns were particularly keen on finding more sustainable growth pathways and making better water decisions instead of continually drilling borewells.
We added small towns to the cities initiative as we saw the opportunity to bypass the current trajectory of energy and freshwater-intensive urban growth to a more sustainable growth path.
That’s how our urban initiatives evolved over the last year. Read the next blog post in the series to learn how else our work changed course.
To know more about our initiatives, join our mailing list!
