With Prakash Raj Bista, Ajit Tumbahangphe, Jan Fliervoet, Walter Verspui, Umesh Paudel and Naresh Subedi we documented the experiences with the poetry route and with RiverSideVillage the in the chapter Community art and communication: crafting sustainable landscape stewardship in Terai Arc, Nepal in Collaborative Change: Towards Inclusive Rural Communication Services, a book published by FAO and IAMCR.

The chapter is published in part II focusing on participatory, inclusive and negotiated qualities of the approaches and strategies. Our chapter 8 adopts the RCS framework and zooms in on the design and facilitation of two innovative community-art-based RCS strategies: serious gaming and poetic-inquiry.

These RCS strategies are applied in the NWO funded project exploring rural communication and mediated participation in the Terai Buffer Zone in Nepal integrating the social-ecological context and rural communication processes into stewardship strategies for family farming in an area near tiger habitats in Nepal’s natural reserves, integrating a nature-conservation perspective with a rural-livelihoods perspective. Through the two innovative, community-art-based RCS strategies, the farming families express how they interact with water systems, natural grasslands and wildlife populations in the buffer zone. Participation and horizontal communication are central to the strategies, and facilitators are seen as process designers, creating space and crafting routes for change. Based on the two community-art methodologies, the voices of farming families are heard through active social imagination.

The book is freely available at: https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/dc9b65ff-4bfd-4595-9c0b-e53e17f5d803

General overview of the project “Save the tiger! Save the grasslands! Save the water!”, by Thom Bogaard, Astrid Blom, Maurits Ertsen, Indushree Banerjee and Kshitiz Gautam

April 2023