CAPACITY BUILDING
LIN 2016: TRAINING ON NON-VIOLENT ACTIONS AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND PRESERVATION IN THAILAND
The ultimate goal of this training is to indicate target audiences how to design environmental protection and preservation projects at community levels by using civil obedience and non-violent actions as working strategies. To participate in the training, target audiences will obtain basic concepts and best practices of non-violent actions and civil disobedience movement from all over the world, particularly, in Southeast Asia. The project will also provide target audiences situational analysis on current environmental circumstance in Thailand where is the main implementation area. With understanding on civil disobedience and non-violent actions concept, present situation of environmental issues in the country as well as the best practices from other arenas, target audiences are supposed to be able to design community projects focusing on environmental protection and preservation by adopting the concept of civil disobedience and non-violent actions into project implementation and activities. Besides the abstract knowledge, target audiences will also receive civil disobedience and non-violent actions toolkit. The toolkit will be adapted from relevant online and offline publications.
Target audiences for this project are undergraduate students who have been voluntarily working on environmental issues for years and they have possibility to scale up the knowledge and skill gained from the training more than others. RTSD team* will select maximum 10 target audiences who show their knowledge, skill, understanding, motivation and aspiration to work on community development after graduation.
The intensive training is planned to conduct in either 1st week or 2nd week of November 2016. The training will distribute small seed-grant to target audiences in order to create the project and/ or practices by knowledge obtained from the training. In March 2017, the project can be completed with the final report on project achievement and lessen learnt submitted by the target audiences and monitoring and evaluation procedure by the RTSD team and external experts on environment issues. For more detailed on timeframe, please see the tentative timeframe attached with this proposal (it can be modified together with online training course provided by ICNC, the final training programme should be done within October 2016 after the workshop in Morocco).
The sustainability of the project can be divided into three parts as follows;
Target audiences:
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Have more knowledge and better understanding on environmental conflicts and violence in Thailand
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Have knowledge on non-violent resistance and learn from good practices from other countries
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Be able to prepare project proposal and work plan as appropriate with the community context, including appropriate monitoring and evaluation template
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Have experience to work in the field as young activists focusing on environmental protection by the concept of non-violent resistance, speaking skill and cultural sensitivity will be given to participants
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Be able to take lead or actively participate in environmental protection projects and campaign in the future
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Become trainers to target audiences in the next batch
Organizations (RTSD):
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Become the key organization providing training and workshop for social development issues based on the principles of civil resistance and nonviolent actions
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Be able to expand the network on civil resistance and nonviolent action to NGOs, CSOs and CBOs in Thailand and encourage them to apply it to their work plan and activities
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Be able to increase the fundraising for organizing similar activities in the future with different target audiences and issues
Stakeholders (communities, government agencies, private sectors, educational institutes and individuals):
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Have more understanding and knowledge on nonviolent action and civil resistance
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Be able to apply the concept of nonviolent action and civil resistance and practice it accordingly
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Be able to expand the concept of nonviolent action and civil resistance into future projects and actions to prevent any potential conflicts through training, workshop, activities to other partners
Thailand has got several experts on non-violent actions and civil disobedience; however, they mainly involve in political issues. Lack of expert adopting non-violent actions and civil disobedience into environmental issues may be main challenge of the training implementation, together with budget shortage. The primary consumption towards local community regarding nonviolent action is they originally would like to take nonviolent action; however, they do not know how to do and cannot well understand how such action can make their voice to be heard. Finally, to protect their communities, the community members choose the so-called violent action such as implementing the protest with anger and escalate the argument and conflict with the government agencies (impolite and aggressive wording), moreover, the government officials did the physical abuse against counterparts.
Hence, the government officials need to obtain the knowledge and understand the concept on nonviolent action and civil resistance in order to work properly with the people. This project will provide the training to target audiences who can become mediators between different stakeholders particularly ones having total different point of view such as NGOs and government agencies to understand the concept of nonviolent action and civil resistance, include it into the action or work plan on environmental projects and lead to nonviolent discussion and participatory solution finding and agreement.