The campaign across Europe

Click here to access photos from the four conferences, the world conference of humanitarian studies, the cultural exchange between schools in Europe and in Karamoja, the visit to the EC in Brussels and the art intervention on Geneva CCC students (see country pages for more details).

Supported by the European Commission, the Karamoja campaign was coordinated by the French non-government organization ACTED, in partnership with the Leuphana Universiteit Luneburg, Germany, and the Czech NGO People in Need.
It took place in six countries: Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland.

The objective was to create public awareness in Europe and advocate for a more sensible relation between Europe and developing countries for a sustainable development. The case of Karamoja introduced the European public to the complexity of development issues and to the interrelatedness of the different challenges facing populations in crisis regions in the context of globalization.

Why raise awareness in Europe?
Raising public awareness in Europe is key to gaining public support for development policies implemented by the European Commission and national governments. Recently, many donors have stepped up their cooperation with African governements to develop pastoralist areas, including the Karamoja region. Europeans are also entitled to know and better understand the development problems in the South and decide what policies are adapted to assist vulnerable population in their plight. The media holds a strategic role in educating and mobilizing Europeans at local, national and international levels.

Methodology

The KARAMOJA awareness raising campaign is not only a practice of information and communication about the contemporary situation in Karamoja.  It is also and especially a research practice carried out by the participating university students, based on the principles of 'Systems Thinking', inspired by the framework of the 'Syndrom Approach  to global change' and integrated as an 'Action Research' agenda with multiple key outcomes.

If one only treats the local and partial symptoms one at a time, looking at one domain at a time, one will not manage to go very far in terms of proper and effective long-term solutions for more sustainable developments of societies.

(Lüdecke, Petschel-Held and Schnellhuber in Gaia, 2004)

A Systems Thinking approach to issues of sustainable development

In a complex world, issues of (un)sustainable development can only be understood when the interactive dynamics of changing ecological, economic, social and cultural contexts are understood together. This is why the KARAMOJA campaign is integrative as well as inter- and transdisciplinary, and bases itself on Systems Thinking.
Systems Thinking asserts that the only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the interacting parts in relation to the whole 'system' they belong to, and to further explore complex interactions between different systems. Benefiting from the rise of cybernetics and system theories in the second half of the 20th century as well as from the science of ecology, systems thinking allows to understand complex cycles of causes and effects beyond simplistic linear logic. Keywords of systems thinking are e.g. 'feedback', 'delays', self-reinforcing and self-balancing loops, short vs. long term effects and 'high/low leverage points' as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called "structured structuring structures".

Students research inspired by the Syndrome  Approach ('Syndromansatz')

The students at the KARAMOJA Campaign are carrying out research (reviewing existing literature and asking NGOs such as ACTED for further information) about the different dimensions of the current situation of unsustainability in Karamoja. They are putting these dimensions together into a systemic overview, following the model of the 'Syndrome Approach'  that was developed from 1993 onwards by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU: Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen).
In a few words, the syndrome approach , identifies functional patterns (or “clinical pictures”) of interaction between humans and nature and describes key processes driving spirals of unsustainable development. To achive this aim, it brings together the knowledge about the environment, population, economy, social organization, technologies and cultures.
The students at the KARAMOJA Campaign will draw a specific "syndrome" of unsustainability in Karamoja, given the knwoledge they have been able to gather so far. This synthetic understanding will serve as the research  basis for the elaboration of the students' advocacy paper to the European Commission.

 

A practice of 'Action Research'

The KARAMOJA Campaign is a project of 'Action Research'  in several ways:

It brings together four universities, two NGOs and an art school (+ several more partners, such as highschools and associations) into a collaboration that aims at action-oriented research dealing with awareness raising on issues of sustainability in the Karamoja region.

It combines the on-the-ground experience of a NGO with specific university research (cf. the above) and with other complementary approaches of inquiry and reflection such as documentary film-making.

It combines research and campaigning by university students.

It combines the organization of awareness raising events and of international conferences.

It will result in the writing of an advocacy paper by the students, sharing the insights learned and pointing at further steps towards sustainability in Karamoja and elsewhere.

More here