Less Talk, More Discussion

What’s the Problem? There is so much information to cover to properly prepare a community to better manage its marine resources. That usually means several days of workshops and lots of PowerPoints. And in a Pacific Island village that just isn’t how issues are discussed and decisions are made. People gather and discuss issues at length, in various settings without projectors, and, over time, through consensus building actions can be taken.

So What’s the Solution? We experimented with an 11-minute animation with all key messages for fisheries management, so workshop-weary communities can spend more discussing solutions. The video can also be broken into segments to illustrate specific key messages around marine resource management, such as how marine protected areas work.

The goal was to allow people to get enough of an understanding to have fruitful discussions, moving later to more detailed aspects of management solutions. As it is now, too often, the solutions (and the presentations about the solutions) are often too big and complicated to spur the kind of initial broad community discussion needed to support management solutions. This animation attempts to seed those discussions first, and create an environment where people want the solutions.

The animation can be played at workshops and has the resolution to run in HD on television. To increase dissemination, versions for mobile phone platforms were also created, as rural areas can share files by bluetooth easier than trying to download them on unreliable and often costly internet.

Focus groups have responded well the animation. The video was translated into Fijian and provided to site-based partners in Fiji to show as an introduction for their workshops. Looking ahead for cChange, the animation is being shortened and adapted to support a national campaign around minimum sizes. We still think it’s a little long, and want to narrow the messages around helping fish reproduce, which has been far more effective.