Citizen Voice and the Arts: Opportunities and Challenges for Citizen–Policy Engagement on Environmental Issues in Sahelian West Africa

Citizen and policy groups address environmental challenges in the Sahel, but rarely together. In Sahelian West Africa, including in Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali, artists and citizens have used protest art to make their voices heard, in contexts where this can carry risks of conflict with authorities. Artists sometimes act as engaged citizens, who can draw on their artistic talents to communicate a message. This paper explores how far art may be used as a tool for dialogue between different groups on environmental concerns in the Western Sahel.

The project revealed that communication around environmental issues is therefore more successful when carried out by artists who already have a relationship with powerful groups, and may have worked with them to promote top-down government messaging. However, this did mean those powerful actors could, potentially, try to quieten artists' activist voices. Social media is increasingly important in reaching a wider section of the population, and this means those without digital skills increasingly struggle to make their voices heard. We confirmed that the skill of the artist is critical to creating work with the aesthetic qualities that can communicate a message or invoke an affective response.
Directly instigated dialogue, including through co-creation of artistic works, can also be enhanced by the factors that enhance art-led communication. Instigators of dialogue must be realistic about the resource needs, and to plan for a longerterm engagement than might initially be anticipated. There is a need to understand whether emphasising commonalities between groups, such as a common religion, will facilitate dialogue.
However, arts-led dialogue may not be appropriate in all contexts, due to established hierarchies and the risks it can pose to artists and citizens: it may be more effective or appropriate in such contexts to keep to the one-way 'communication' mode where citizens or artists present their opinions to policy actors or the public -for example, as some form of representation by citizens on a critical issue, or as an artistic performance by an artist -as a potential precursor to more conventional forms of deliberation. These findings imply that there is a degree of compromise between amplifying an undiluted 'citizen voice' and trying to find some degree of resonance within the dominant policy context. Further research work is needed to understand the situations where direct artsled dialogue may work most effectively as part of wider social change, in contrast to general communication; where either may be appropriate; and how far these different forms overlap. A way to learn more about this is to continue to build networks of artists, citizens, and policy actors who have worked with the arts across contexts, and to promote further exchange of knowledge and learning based on their experiences.
Notre question de recherche principale est la suivante :
En Afrique de l'Ouest, ces relations art-activisme-politique sont largement caractérisées par des artistes et des groupes de citoyens utilisant les arts pour une communication par la base, visant à générer un dialogue et une réflexion.

Introduction
Citizen and policy groups address environmental challenges in the West African Sahel, but rarely together. Although power dynamics, social structures, and political contexts in Sahelian countries have sometimes made it difficult for citizens to publicly expose their concerns on the environment, and on other pertinent issues, the arts have often played a role in successful activism on the environment, and in other areas of public concern. However, this has rarely been done in a way that promotes dialogue between citizens, policy actors, and decision makers.
The two-year-long Citizen Voice project took place in Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania. The objective of the project, and of this paper, was to understand how far art may be a relevant mode of citizen-policy engagement in the Western Sahel, for helping co-construct understanding of environmental challenges and to address them in practice. The project also aimed to initiate a network of people who are concerned with using arts to develop pro-environmental initiatives across the Sahel and may be interested in collaborating further on joint initiatives.
Our main question is:

How can citizens and policymakers co-create understanding about environmental issues through arts and storytelling?
We explored this through four sub-questions: 1. Which policy and citizen groups are the relevant actors in the study contexts?
2. Which environmental challenges, and linked issues, facing societies in the Western Sahel are amenable to analysis by citizens and policy actors through artistic mediums?
3. How do citizen-policy relations and concepts of citizenship differ across our study contexts?
4. (a) Which forms of artistic and cultural expression, forums, and spaces can release transformative power for social change in each context? 4. (b) What prevents or facilitates artistic expression or storytelling acting as a credible means of engagement between policy and citizen groups?
This project brought together different bodies of literature and histories of activist scholarship, including work on the role of arts in communication and dialogue for environmental change. This paper will present the study contexts, and key ideas from the literature, before outlining project activities and findings, structured in response to the preceding questions. We will summarise by

The project context
Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali were chosen as study contexts due to their commonalities. These include a similar Sahelian climate and ecology, some common ethnic groups (e.g. the Peulh/Fulani), and over 90 per cent adherence to Islam (Clark 2022;Toupet 2022;Hargreaves 2022). The following sections give brief entries to the study contexts in terms of civic participation, and then arts, at the time of writing (July 2022). Acknowledging the impossibility of doing justice to these areas in a few paragraphs, this section summarises trends in civic participation and contemporary arts which are less well represented in the academic literature, but have relevance to the expression of citizen voice, and connects them to key historical movements and influences.

Contemporary status of citizen participation in the study contexts
This project situates citizen participation against a backdrop of a long history of debate and discussion about its meaning, and practice, in a range of different contexts. As Arnstein's seminal work on citizen participation noted, 'The idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in principle because it is good for you' (Arnstein 1969: 216), but what it really involves is often unclear and contested. Recent work by Anderson et al. (2022) highlights lessons learned about how citizen-led social and political action contributes to empowerment and accountability, especially in settings which are democratically weak, politically fragile and affected by legacies of violence and conflict, demonstrating the complexities involved in any specific context, as observed also in the study projects for this project.
Senegal has had multiparty democracy since 1981. Some commentators perceive erosion of democracy since 2012, with controversy and speculation over term limits (Freedom House 2021

The arts in the study contexts
Senegalese artists have made prominent contributions to contemporary mainstream fine art, and many incorporate activism into formal as well as popular art. Senegal's independence President, poet-philosopher Leopold Senghor, established the École de Dakar as part of his nation-building exercise.
Artists were encouraged to work with the concept of Negritude, a philosophy of proclaiming and celebrating African blackness, and explore themes of African identity and culture (Cohen 2018). Negritude was later challenged, prominently by the Laboratoire Agit'Art collective, based in Dakar, which emphasised bottomup, socially engaged actions and performances; for example, through its workshop Tenq and rurally-based project Huit Facettes, which valourised grassroots participation in art forms such as glass making and pottery (Deliss 2014). 1 This heritage, along with the griot tradition of West Africa, has continued to influence those musicians who bring political themes into music. These include world famous artists Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal (Topouzis 1990), who draw on specific ethnic musical traditions, yet hybridise them with modern forms such as rock, and activist hiphop group Y'en a Marre which campaigned against President Wade's attempt to run for a third term (Binet 2011;Sajnani 2017). 2 Mauritania's cultural and arts scene is less globally focused than that of Senegal, some suggest because Mauritania was indirectly ruled by the French in colonial times, through Islamic leaders (iExplore 2022). Arabic and Hassaniya language poetry has been, and is still, revered as a specifically Saharan art form (Deubel 2012

Background concepts: arts in communication, dialogue, and deliberation
The interest and activity area of this project sits at an intersection between literatures on civic, participatory, and environmental dialogue, deliberation, communication, and activism. Below, we explore different forms of communication, dialogue, and deliberation about the environment and then examine the ways the arts have been mobilised in such initiatives, focusing as far as possible on examples and ideas connected to our project.

Role of arts in environmental communication, dialogue, and deliberation
Multiple interest groups are simultaneously implicated in managing, governing, and making decisions about the environment, particularly in the common situation where groups' interests diverge. Sometimes one ( group instigates some type of dialogue process or even decision-making process, which may involve other groups to a greater or lesser extent. In formal contexts, such questions of environmental importance, where environmental, social, and economic interests meet each other, are often addressed by referring to 'instrumental' methods such as cost-benefit analysis (Edwards, Collins and Goto 2016). Yet, such approaches are less likely to recognise plural or shared values or priorities. More deliberative methods, including visioning and participatory techniques, aim to provide more space for group discussion and shared opinion-making (Tyszczuk and Smith 2018; Doyle 2020; Burns, Howard and Ospina 2021), aiming to recognise divergent values and priorities. Multicriteria analysis aims to combine the two (Ross and Stirling 2004). Edwards et al. (2016) describe the potential for moving from these conventional deliberation or decision-making modes towards arts-based dialogue. This term is loosely defined. It can refer to dialogue between groups facilitated by an artist or prompted by an artwork, or a process where the dialogue itself is considered a work of art. It is therefore conceptualised as an imaginative space where nonrational, potentially bizarre or apparently outlandish ideas may safely be proposed.
The unique contributions of the arts include their potential to instigate communication of a deep and nuanced nature, that other forms, such as statistical evidence, may be less able to achieve. Arts often connect with emotions and life experience that can create a deep resonance with individuals and communities, and may induce affective, emotional responses (Corbett and Clark 2017). This can lead from communication towards a dialogue that acknowledges and considers diverse motivations and worldviews, beyond the logical or rational (Lee and Taylor 2011). In particular, the arts may provide opportunities to create spaces of joint enquiry and meaning making (Galafassi et al. 2018;Light et al. 2018) where people may be able to explore multiple meanings and rationales rather than necessarily being obliged to immediately seek solutions constrained by a specific worldview. Arts-led dialogue is intended to elicit values that matter to people and to groups (Kenter and Reed 2014). Idealised policy responses to environmental problems, e.g. climate change, are popularly characterised as responding to scientific evidence using rational logics (Hulme 2011) rather than alternative, value-laden or caring imperatives. But increasingly, the suggestion has emerged that the arts may have a role to play in those policy domains hitherto dominated by the rationales of quantification, valuation, and evidence-based deliberation. There have therefore been calls for the arts to become more integrated into deliberation and science-policy interfaces and processes such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Galafassi et al. 2018). There may be subtle differences between more general arts-led dialogue and more purposive deliberation, valuation, and decision-making: dialogue may accept the impossibility of finding a single outcome, solution, or resolution to a problem. Arts-based dialogue may also be used alongside more conventional decision-making and deliberation methods such as futuring and scenariobuilding (Tyszczuk and Smith 2018;Doyle 2020). It may come close to the aims of techniques such as multicriteria mapping in 'opening up' possible futures, yet pay more attention to the emotions, feelings, and non-rational imperatives of participants (Ross and Stirling 2004).
This tradition of using artistic and affective methods in environmental deliberation should be contextualised in relation to other ways of conceptualising interactions between the arts and society. The labels applied to such activity have varied, depending on how far the actors involved are embedded in the domains of art, activism, or research. Bourriaud (2002) used the term 'relational aesthetics' for fine art that deals with relations between people rather than visuality, and often involves the development of relations between viewers, or artist and viewers. This can include participatory art (Flinders and Cunningham 2014), or socially engaged art (Helguera 2011), which generally tend to involve the viewer in some type of interaction with an artist or each other, sometimes with an intended positive outcome. However, relational art does not have to be participatory (Bishop 2005) and can include visual art that provokes thought and reflection in the viewer.
Participatory art has been used as a research method, with varying degrees of participation and control by participants, artists and researcher, in well-known methods such as participatory video ( Art with a specific activist message, sometimes called 'artivism' or 'cultural activism' (Firat and Kuryel 2011;Buser et al. 2013) has long been created by artists and/or community actors in attempts to encourage social or policy change.
The potential of the arts as a change agent is increasingly recognised, to the extent that government agencies now sometimes employ this approach in statutory institutions (Cleveland 2011). Recognising the increasing diversity of arenas in which the arts are used for activism, communication, dialogue, and deliberation, and of the actors involved, Borstel and Korza (2017) use the umbrella term 'arts for change'.
We have necessarily mentioned a wide range of artistic applications rather superficially, to contextualise, theoretically, the very broad variety of experiences and understandings that participants brought to our project activities. The wider body of theoretical literature cited draws on European and American experiences. The next section will turn to applications within West Africa, less widely reported in academic literature.

Using the arts for communication, dialogue, and deliberation in West Africa
The arts have been extensively used in communication in the study contexts, and in many cases this leads to dialogue and to some extent, deliberation. In the following, we acknowledge the inter-relations between these three key functions, and the different roles artists and citizens play in them. We then situate our work in relation to this field. We refer as far as possible to examples focused on the environment and West Africa. However, as this is a nascent area, we occasionally draw on work from a broader domain in order to be able to illustrate the full range of possibilities.
The arts have sometimes been used as a communication tool to raise awareness about environmental practices or even nudge the public toward more desirable behaviour (Burke, Ockwell and Whitmarsh 2018), without prompting dialogue or deliberation. This mode of generally one-way, top-down communication contrasts with cultural activism, but is found in the study context; for example, when mobilised by political actors in nation-building exercises, behaviour change campaigns, and propaganda. Sawo (2020), for example, describes how Gambia's President Jammeh enrolled popular musicians to sing praise songs for him.
Individuals, artists, and citizen groups use the arts for bottom-up communication, in cultural activism which usually aims to prompt varying degrees of dialogue, consideration or discussion. Kester (1985) points to the distinction between dialogue and 'communication', presenting the latter as a component of advertising, but also mentions the opinion of Lyotard (1984) that the two are intertwined to some degree. Music has played an important role in this task in West Africa. In addition to those mentioned above, Mariam Kone, Maman Guereti, and Abdullahi Diop of Group Laye Bi, all involved in the Citizen Voice project, are examples of musicians who have produced music with clear messages that prompt contemplation and discussion. The artist may have little control over the nature of the dialogue or deliberation engendered by their work. Kester (1985) gives an example where Nigerian artist Mama Toro created a mural in a Lancashire barn as part of the ArtBarns project. African women living in Manchester visited the artwork and met the owners of the barn, resulting in a food-sharing partnership between these groups. Though these arts-led processes deliberately move beyond communication to action, they do not seek to bring together opposing views or groups who do not know each other in dialogue or deliberation; they seek co-construction between relatively homogenous groups of citizens towards civic actions for democracy.
Art is, however, sometimes intentionally positioned next to spaces for inter-group deliberation. A small Nigerian advocacy group, Connected Advocacy, commissioned paintings on the environmental challenges, and presented these at an exhibition event where they also provided interactive sessions with youth (Connected Advocacy 2021a, 2021b). It is notable that their description of the event states that policy actors were present. This is relatively rare, as Stern (2005) shows in an account of the 2003 Gene(sis) exhibition, which created multiple deliberative and dialogue spaces for discussion of the human genome, only one of which involved policy actors. One role of cultural activism can be to draw attention to issues in a way that leads to citizens being invited to policy spaces, particularly in the instance that no participatory spaces already exist (Delicath 2004).
An approach where the co-constructive element is more prominent involves asking citizens to participate in the creation of the artwork, or for them to instigate this. Adjairatou Ouedrago's project My Town in Painting installs blank canvases on multiple roundabouts in Ouagadougou to allow citizens to paint. Although Ouedrago's objective is to bring art to the public, some of the citizen artists raise themes that concern them and may animate the viewer, such as poverty. This does not undermine Ouedraogo's intention but shows again that co-creative artlike participatory arts-based research -can allow the agency and creativity of citizen artists to direct the conversation (Teller Report 2021). 6 Dancer and choreographer Aguibou Bougobali Sanou's project Why Not? involves creating dance pieces and performances with prison inmates. Sanou believes that cocreating the dance will effect transformation within the inmates, rehabilitating them as they dialogue with him and each other. Simultaneously, the performance of the dance prompts reflection among the audience (Al Jazeera 2019; Bonkian Londry 2019; Fulbrighter 2021; Dogbey 2022).
Activities framed as participatory art research may link more explicitly to deliberation spaces than these arts-framed events do. Mkwananzi, Cin and Marovah (2021) report the experience of a group of Zimbabwean youths who were prompted by researchers to make graffiti art about their aspirations. In these latter examples there are multiple levels of co-creation -dialogue between viewers, but also among a group of artistic creators, or between creators and viewers, who are sometimes policy actors (Flinders and Cunningham 2014), and sometimes actual deliberation on a concrete problem to be solved (Pässilä, Oikarinen and Kallio 2013). Therefore, the form of the final artwork matters to varying degrees, depending on how far the aim is to use it to communicate to the outside world or to provoke reflection among viewers. If the process of artistic creation by citizens is of more importance, the qualities of the final product may be less important.
Upkong's work references cultural heritage, place attachment, and human connection to the natural environment, themes which have been proposed as helpful to enrol the general population in environmental struggles (Golonu 2013).
Referring to the work of Ken Saro-Wiwa, also in the Niger Delta, Nnamdi, Gomba and Ugiomoh (2013) suggest aesthetic education creates the landscape in which dialogue about a given issue can be instigated, by enabling people to see beauty in nature.
The preceding examples of art-led dialogue involve varying degrees of cocreation, but examples of different groups working together in the conscious creation of an art piece are rare, especially across hierarchical levels. It is possible that co-constructive activities are easier when activities take place in systems which are already less hierarchical (Pässilä et al. 2013).
Dialogical art more usually involves such cross-hierarchical engagement. It involves posing the act of creating a dialogue as the artwork (Kester 1985). For example, artist Suzanne Lacy facilitated a live, public 'conversation' between young black and Latinx citizens and members of the police force in Oakland, which the public could observe. Dialogical art often interacts with social praxis, as in Theaster Gates' conversation pieces, complex conceptual artworks where one component involves individuals dialoguing whilst participating in a meal (Pickens 2019), or the work of the Atelier Theatre Burkinabe. This group moved around rural Burkinabe communities, presenting plays Morrison (1993) described as comprising of three facilitated sections: firstly, a play presenting a social problem; secondly, an opportunity for the audience to rewrite, redirect, and re-enact the play as they wished; and thirdly, a dialogue between actor, citizen, and policy participants. Dialogical art may overlap more closely with more deliberative modes of problem solving such as futuring. This depends on the degree to which the outcomes of a dialogue or deliberation refer to tangible solutions or address specific problems. Many dialogical and deliberative processes take place over a longer period and there is an assumption in the literature that longer term engagement produces more meaningful dialogue.
The preceding examples have shown that, whether an activity is conceived of as cultural activism, as participatory art research, or as relational/socially engaged art, elements of communication, dialogue, and deliberation can take place between the creators or the viewers, who may be artists, citizens, or policy actors arranged in any constellation. Table 1.1 summarises types of activity in relation to these axes of differentiation. The red shape in the table is situated in the space where the research team initially conceived the scope of the Citizen Voice project to lie. We intended to explore co-creation between a diverse group of citizen and policy actors as they collaborated to create an artwork.  The next section will describe the methods we used to answer these questions.

Methods and activities
The 1. The first activity was to map relevant actors. In each country, local researchers listed artists and arts groups, civil society and advocacy organisations, and policy actors concerned with environmental and/or citizenship issues. The purpose was to gain an idea of the range of organisations concerned with these issues, and their reach and interrelations, and to provide a sampling frame for the interviews that would take place in a following stage. A snowballing approach was taken because the mapping began from the most well-known organisations and individuals. This meant that each country map prioritised the capital cities but also included some actors based elsewhere. Researchers started with key contacts and used telephone calls, meetings, the internet, and word of mouth to contact stakeholders, and thereby build up a list of key actors at the time of the exercise. Basic information was collected about each organisation. The lists for the three countries were combined and are presented in Annexe 1. We carried out a post hoc inductive categorisation of the actors, using the information gathered about them to group them. The groups were elicited after all researchers, including from the UK, reviewed the list and discussed the types of organisations present. This categorisation of groups aimed to capture the main types of groups, each of which had slightly different functions in terms of environmental activism.  3. The interviewees and a select few others from the actor map (as listed in Table 2.2) were invited to a national-level workshop in each country. We aimed for a mixture of citizen/civil society, policy, and artist invitees to each workshop.  One aim of these workshops was to ask participants to reflect on the study questions in the light of the interview data. The research team members in each country presented this data, and there was a remote presentation in each case from the IDS study lead, referring to the project's overall goals, and the content analysis of interview data. Participants had a general discussion on how the arts may facilitate citizen-policy dialogue on the environment, and what may impede this. Another aim was to practically observe how different types of dialogue and deliberation may be possible following displays of the artworks as a prompt. We invited policy and activist actors to present their work, and artists to perform or display their oeuvres, and asked participants to react to these interventions in their debate. We also planned for the workshops to host an experimental co-creative activity. This proved too uncomfortable for the artists in Mauritania and Senegal to facilitate, so in the Mauritanian workshops the artist created an image themselves. However, in Mali, artists, researchers, citizens, and policy actors drew pictures and participated in writing the lyrics of a song. Each participant was invited to contribute a phrase to the song. The artist combined these French words and put the composition to guitar music, which participants sang together. Visual artworks presented in and produced in the workshops can be seen in Annexe 2 of this paper.

Local researchers performed interviews with the ten actors listed in
The song produced in the Mali workshop was professionally produced by the singer who had facilitated this section of the workshop. She added verses and an additional refrain in Bambara language, bass, keyboard, and drums. A simple, low-cost music video was produced to accompany the song. 7 4. The final task involved production, dissemination, and network-building. We originally intended to hold an international workshop, but decided not to do this in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and instead to create an online group to bring participants together internationally. The lead researcher at IDS therefore created a Facebook group and email list for the workshop participants. In the Facebook group, we shared all outputs from the workshops, and invited participants to react to these and share their own news. Low internet connectivity and digital literacy meant that it was also necessary for local project researchers to personally feed these results back to some participants, either through phone calls, personal visits, or interlocuters who could use social media. Thus, we gained some idea of the reactions of group members to the work. We also shared the project experience more widely, by participating in a podcast and publicising our outputs on YouTube. The core team members from IDS, including the lead researcher, and counterparts from Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal, reflected on the results and outcomes of the initial project, and based on this decided to continue collaborating, and to expand on the project by seeking further funding (successfully) to include research partners also in East Africa. Several of the workshop participants in each country are now members of the new project team.

Results
This section will address the four project sub-questions using data from the mapping, interviews and workshop, and from participants' messages and posts on our Facebook group, before a summary section addresses the overall project question. The three first questions are relatively brief questions that must be addressed in order to understand the background to sub-question 4.
1. Which policy and citizen groups are the relevant actors in the study contexts?
The actor mapping shows that the main categories of people and organisation relevant to the subject area are: -Individual artists; -Artists' collectives, which are not necessarily grouped around social and environmental issues; -Civil society organisations, often conceptualised as youth organisations, which treat environmental issues alongside a range of other concerns; -Civil society organisations with a specific environmental objective; -Groups of politicians convening around environmental concerns; and -Government structures and departments that are mandated to deal with the environment.
There are connections between some groups, particularly enhanced recently by online activity e.g. the dissemination of art and social mobilisation through the internet. The capacity of almost all is limited by lack of funds and time and resources.
2. Which challenges facing societies in the West African Sahel are amenable to analysis by citizens and policy actors through artistic mediums?
The project intended to focus on environmental challenges from its inception but found in interview and workshop data that people saw these issues as intertwined with socioeconomic issues; for example, pointing to how environmental change threatens means of livelihood such as farming and fishing, and how poor waste management affected human health. Such themes were meaningful to people when they were locally pertinent, for example in cases of sea-level rise around specific islands, and in that they represent matters of justice for all citizens, e.g. in the case of land as a resource. Many nonenvironmental issues were considered of equal importance, and discussion acknowledged the interconnection of these with each other, and with environmental concerns. Security concerns and peacekeeping were commonly mentioned, along with the social cohesion, human rights, citizenship, racism, education, and health issues which, as the introduction showed, West African artists have historically referred to. Based on the examples presented in the workshops and that they had experience of (e.g. flooding), respondents claimed that the arts could be used to promote discussion on all these issues, even though the arts had less commonly been used with reference to contemporary environmental challenges. Bearing this in mind, we will continue to use the term 'environmental issues' in this paper, but acknowledge that, in this context, it encompasses environmental and linked social and political issues.
3. How do concepts of citizenship and citizen-policy relations differ across our study contexts?

Citizenship
Notions of citizenship itself differed within as well as between contexts, and participants raised ideas of rights but also responsibilities, including the responsibility to speak the truth about injustices. Ties to the land, through blood or inheritance, were frequently mentioned as important for citizenship. The place someone is born in and a connection to the land mattered, as, to some, did possession of the national documents of the country.
As expected, controversies over race and inequality arose in Mauritaniaopinions were expressed that all races should be treated as equal citizens, but that this was not the case in practice. Furthermore, those who speak no French, certain ethnicities, those who have not had access to formal education, and the youth were mentioned as disempowered groups across contexts. 'Youth' were often mentioned as excluded but also responding to and using art, and important to connect to. It was recognised that there will therefore be different ways to communicate with different sociocultural groups in a population. One interviewee said that notions of citizenship and cohesion can be strengthened through historical storytelling across such social groups.
It was also pointed out that artists often strive to represent other citizens, or a group of citizens, but are also citizens themselves, and have their own voice as individuals or group members.

Citizen-policy relations
Occasions were recounted where citizens and policy actors dialogued with each other, e.g. in workshops organised by NGOs to consider specific issues such as sea incursion around St. Louis, Senegal. Artist and citizen respondents recounted examples of actions they had taken to attract policymakers' attention when it seemed their concerns about specific issues had not been considered, for example mentioning problems on Twitter, organising clean-up campaigns, or producing a song about an issue of concern. Our data mainly showed isolated efforts of this type, but there were hints of more structural opportunities to support citizen-policy dialogue, or even to include artists in this dialogue. These include the annual prize offered by the Senegalese Network of Parliamentarians for Environmental Protection (REPES) to individuals who had done something meaningful for the environment, and the assurance of the Malian Agency for the Environment and Development (AEDD) that they were ready to support artists who were working towards environmental protection.
Relations and lines of communication between citizens and policy actors were often characterised as fraught. In some contexts, there is distrust between citizens or artists who are concerned about specific issues, and policymakers -a Mauritanian interviewee candidly described youth groups being blocked by government from making their views heard. Overall, citizen-policy relations are not assured to be respectful and may even be perceived as patronising or resentful.
Despite the low level of mutual engagement between citizens and policy actors, there was a resounding opinion from study participants across the different contexts that citizens should be involved in governance and policy decisions for these to be meaningful. Participants in the Senegal workshop proposed that a statutory framework for supporting the voices of artists could help towards this end. However, this opinion largely represented the perspective of policy actors, and it was hard for workshop participants to imagine a system where uninvited voices, which arose outside of a statutory consultation framework, could be heard. Although discussion in this workshop centred on raising citizens' awareness, from 'above', about environmental issues, one opinion was exposed in the discussion section that community actors may also require formal support, even if they are autonomously performing activities at the grass roots. This built on the experience of a traditional leader who had been mobilising their community as they were affected by sea-level rise.
4. Which forms of artistic and cultural expression, forums, and spaces can release transformative power for social change in each context? What prevents or facilitates artistic expression or storytelling, and communication and knowledge co-creation acting as a credible means of engagement between policy and citizen groups?
Our data showed that traditional and modern arts and cultural modes were regularly used for communication, and to effect changes, though these were better described as 'incremental' than 'transformative'. In this section we will consider what the data show about the use of arts for communication, dialogue, deliberation, and co-construction, and two major implications of our data, relating to audience reach and power relations. Examples covered issues such as rural water management and dune management, and could be presented to the population through radio and TV as well as live. In line with this, some interviewees and workshop participants had a perception of the arts as being appropriate for one-way top-down communication with those citizens with less education/'understanding', which showed the patronising nature of the relationship between some policy actors and citizens.

Cultural activism leading to 'bottom-up' communication and social awareness-raising
There were several concrete examples of 'bottom up' forms of cultural activism, in the form of artists using cultural expression to attempt to communicate their views. Most did not have a specific policy or public audience in mind, and were in the public domain, thereby more commonly gaining the attention of the public, with the conceivable effect that this may ultimately place public pressure upon policy actors. A strong example was the pop song written in Mauritania to gain policymaker attention about urban flooding. The artist concerned was proud that this had resulted in rapid policy attention to this issue. Artists from Senegal and Mali had also used song to refer to environmental issues in a more general way. Songs were disseminated by radio, TV, live formal and informal concerts and gatherings, CDs and, especially, YouTube.
There are associated examples of NGOs and civil society groups carrying out bottom-up actions, e.g. the Senegalese branch of a youth group organising activities that raise awareness about pollution and have a positive material effect. Litter picking and neighbourhood cleaning happened in Dakar and Bamako, and dune replanting in St. Louis. These activities were framed as social activism, but some were also interpreted as public art, e.g. the creation of street art and beautiful spaces and the repurposing of waste into designed dustbins. These actions do not necessarily involve policy actors, but have come to their attention, including through social media. However, art was generally a novel method for citizen groups and activists, who were more accustomed to advocating for their concerns in traditional forums using verbal debate.
Though these activities were primarily intended as communication or action pieces, their visibility resulted in a degree of dialogue, usually within the public domain between citizens. Some of them opened space for civic dialogue and deliberation by placing issues of concern onto the public agenda. Degrees of incremental change were sometimes achieved at the level of individuals or communities; for example, in the raised awareness of sustainable farming techniques or the alteration of public spaces into more attractive environments.

Intentional deliberation and co-creation of art
The data did not describe any instances where artworks had formally been used to prompt dialogue in a dedicated deliberative space. Yet, in our workshops, participants were amenable to participating in conventional verbal dialogue and deliberation, having been prompted by the display of artworks. In Mauritania, the activity was of a very deliberative nature. It covered the design of interventions for environmental protection and flooding in particular, and the role of the arts and culture in this task. Discussion in the workshops, preceded by the artistic interventions, was of a fairly directive nature, often focusing on practical solutions and rules for what people should do to protect the environment and each other, rather than on feelings and values. However, some imaginative, creative, and maybe impossible but idealistic solutions were proposed in the Mauritania workshop, which may not have been suggested in other more formal spaces. In this sense, a degree of co-creation of understanding was achieved by having used artwork as a prompt for deliberation.
Participants in the study contexts had not previously experienced co-creation of artwork as a form of dialogue, and it was challenging to implement in our workshops. Participants preferred to stay within their roles of policymaker, advocate, and artist, so it was too challenging for artists to facilitate the engagement of policy actors and advocates in artistic activities. However, in the Mali workshop, participants co-created song lyrics. This experience, and the fact it was not possible in Mauritania and Senegal, showed scepticism had to be overcome, including on the part of facilitators. Sectoral silos and hierarchies also had to be tackled. It is likely that the experience, credibility, and status of the artist mattered, as demonstrated in the Mali workshop by the facilitating musician performing early in the workshop, alongside displays by visual artists. It is also likely that the artist's facilitation skills were important: the facilitating artist in the Malian workshop had teaching experience. Indeed, a workshop participant in Mali stated that artists need to be credible and have made a name for themselves before being able to successfully and convincingly convey messages about the environment. Other factors that may have contributed to the success of the song-writing activity in the Mali workshop were humour, evident in the video of the workshop, and the use of a 'warmup' activity which in Mali consisted of individuals drawing simple pen drawings. The importance of all these aspects needs testing. 4.4 The importance and challenges of using social media to reach a wide audience It was considered important for cultural activism to reach a large audience in order to have impact, and social media was important in this. There was evidence that use of social media (e.g. Twitter) to communicate with the populace and raise awareness and support, was more effective than prolonged one-on-one communication with policy actors and public servants.
Some interviewees claimed that the mode of communication, and possibly the art form itself, mattered in this regard. In Mauritania, interviewees mentioned actual retelling of ancient and traditional stories and some people claimed that such historical forms of arts and culture maintained relevance. In contrast, other interviewees thought that modern ways of storytelling, for example TV plays and pop songs, are now more widespread and relevant than traditional modes such as fables and face-to-face storytelling, especially for communicating to youths. One Malian interviewee claimed that the oral tradition is now losing its meaning.
Other interviewees said that live performance, social media, and mass media platforms (e.g. radio and TV) should be considered complementary tools for communicating with specific groups, each having a different type of reach.
As social media is increasingly important, those who lack capabilities in its use claimed they struggled in the modern world to exert influence. Our experience of managing our Facebook platform showed that successful digital communication requires professional expertise, dedicated attention, a time allocation, regular content input, and a leader. We could not sustain sufficient attention to the platform organically, and members were not proactive in posting or commenting.
The formality of a given space was also a factor in its reach and effectiveness. Formal spaces such as workshops may have limited ability to reach people, but should not be entirely discounted, as open days and youth forums were mentioned as useful for contacting specific demographics. Posting on online platforms like YouTube and Twitter has more reach into the general population and can attract informal comments from a range of uninvited audiences.

Power relations, hierarchies, and silos
Although one-way 'communication', where citizen groups speak 'up' to policy actors or policy actors speak 'down' to citizen groups, does not guarantee dialogue and deliberation, it can help promote it, thereby potentially co-creating understanding. It may be easier to instigate multi-way dialogue when some form of directive communicative art has been shared in advance, as in our Senegal and Mauritania workshops. But, it is clear that power relations, hierarchies, and entrenched interests influence how viable this is. In interviews, we heard of instances where citizen organisations were blocked from pursuing their activities by the state. This sometimes resulted from competition for resources such as funds from international donors. Interviewees suggested that in such a situation, state-backed groups would be supported and others excluded or impeded. As these excluded groups developed antagonistic relations with policy actors, their lines of communication toward decision makers and possibly even the public are closed, effectively ending their activity. There was no data on artists and citizens succeeding in communication campaigns against the will of powerful domestic interests. Artists, citizens, and advocates are therefore most able to put their points across and have social impact when they are supported by governments and policy figures, or at least have some type of prior relationship with them, even if their messages are not aligned. These relationships may entail an element of mutual need or benefit: situations were described where governments and artists entered liaisons because the artists were helping convey policy messages in a top-down way. These artists were therefore given some opportunity to also promulgate their own messages, e.g. through TV shows or songs. One of our artist interviewees had such cordial relationships with policy figures, and therefore felt confident to release a song and video critical of the government. Thus, critiques of policy figures, and attempts to open a dialogue with them, are not entirely off limits for everybodybut arguably subject to prior good relations with government institutions. Lesserknown artists who lacked government affiliations are less able to question policy figures in this way. Indeed, such actions may be risky for these artists.
The aforementioned musician described mixed emotions about the compromises they had made with policy figures, suggesting they were being used for political ends when they formed alliances with the government. They hinted that if artists or advocacy groups seek support or permission from the government to do their work, critical messages can be co-opted. Other interviewees considered that citizens had a responsibility to speak the 'truth' and convey messages to policymakers that they may not want to hear. This poses a quandary to artists who collaborate or compromise to promulgate their message.
Hierarchies and sectoral distinctions continue to discourage dialogues, deliberation, and co-creation of understanding. It is likely that hierarchies of power, as well as people adhering rigidly to professional categories, contributed to the difficulty of performing co-creative activities in Senegal and Mauritania workshops. Interviewees occasionally expressed frustration with the perceived entrenched positions of others, with citizens claiming policy actors were often unwilling to consider the indigenous knowledge of people who live on the land. Data emerged in Mauritania suggesting that common characteristics could help people bridge these silos. The Muslim religion was mentioned as 'the only thing' Mauritanian participants from different ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds had in common. This was perceived as a positive force for social cohesion in this Islamic Republic.

Resource and time constraints
Artists emphasised that they required resources to sustain an artistic career or endeavour; for example, to produce an attractive music video or a mural which could succeed as a communication piece. The engagement process itself is also resource-intensive. The one-off nature of our project workshops precluded longterm engagement with the source material, or between participants. A certain time commitment is also required to engage with online groups or with networks over a longer period, and policy actors in particular lack time to engage for long in a structured setting like a workshop -or even in deliberative processes in general.

Discussion -the potential of the arts for facilitating citizen-policy environmental communication
We turn now to discussing how the arts may co-create understanding among artists, citizens, and policy actors in such a way as to facilitate positive change in terms of environmental and linked issues, and what may facilitate or hinder such engagement. Communication through cultural activism has had some success at generating dialogue about environmental concerns, as well as linked social issues, in the West African Sahel. Social media helps expose a wide section of the population to such art, but intentional arts-led dialogue is rare, because of rigid hierarchies and power relations which limit the extent to which art can even be used as a communication tool in this Sahelian context. So, to understand the potential of arts in co-creative dialogue, we discuss both how our findings relate to established traditions in this field and specific implications of the strongly hierarchical Sahelian context.
Our data described communicative protest artworks, which aimed to convince politicians or the public to change policy or practice, or to encourage general reflection on a theme. They fell into the realms of relational aesthetics and cultural activism, as they deal with relations between humans and aim to intervene in the shape of those relations by invoking emotions. Social actions such as urban beautification tangentially fitted into these categories. Taking these activities and oeuvres as stimuli, our workshops instigated arts-led dialogue, which we framed as participatory arts research rather than dialogical art. The co-creative songwriting performed in Mali comprises two dimensions. The first is the artwork itself, which is a relational artwork used in cultural activism. The second is the act of creating it, which, again, we framed as participatory arts research or arts-led dialogue, rather than a piece of dialogical art. Using these insights and referring back to Table 1.1 (see p.27), we note that the participants in the project activities therefore extended the scope of the project beyond that initially envisaged, into the space marked blue in  Emotion can play an important role in environmental deliberation and in artsbased activities aiming to promote environmental awareness and care. Physical presence in a landscape and closeness to nature is ascribed with the ability to help engender such emotions (Raatikainen et al. 2020;Ives et al. 2018). In our work we had little chance to explore the physical and affective effects of being in a given environment, although we examined the music videos of Maman Guereti which aim to bring the viewer into the Casamance landscape. Yet, some of the communicative art works we encountered have effected change or opened dialogue through emotion. For example, in processing the song devised in the Mali workshop, the musician added words of sorrow and a wistful tune to the words of pride that the participants had written. Emotions of anger and sorrow were evident in the Mauritanian music video shared. Simultaneously, some of the artworks shown were less aiming to evoke affect, but rather to encourage cogitation and/or simply perform a function, such as acting as a fish-shaped dustbin on the beach.
It was clear that, alongside considering the power of affect or cogitation, it is equally important in the Sahelian context to consider the political context in which artistic efforts for change take place. Firstly, the twenty-first century Sahel is a more dangerous context for artists and activists than the late-twentieth century European and American contexts that much key literature on arts-led dialogue emerges from. Artists risk losing their platform or ability to work, exile (e.g. Tiken Jah), or even death (e.g. Saro Wiwa). In this context, it is interesting that direct messages, rather than abstract musings or veiled opinions, remain prominent in the art works we reviewed, including direct accusations of corruption and specific directives on environmentally harmful activities. Secondly, hierarchies and silos remain deeply entrenched. This obfuscates citizens' and artists' efforts to present their perspectives to policy actors or to engage political actors in activities which stray from their conventional roles towards a more reflective or creative mode. Furthermore, it remains challenging to capture the attention of policy actors for sufficient time to engage seriously in intentional dialogue processes. If intentional dialogue is to be attempted, its success depends on how far the artistic activity and its facilitator can create a space where actors become strongly engaged. These are all reasons artists have focused less on organising deliberative spaces with policy actors than provoking change through emotive communication to the citizenry.
Those emotive effects rely on the aesthetics of a work (Bourriaud 2002;Bishop 2005). If the purpose of a work is to convey experience and emotion, the skill of a professional artist or talented individual is necessary to make the piece a convincing communication tool that will prompt dialogue. Pickens (2019) invokes Beuys, whose social sculpture is in turn invoked by Upkong, in reflecting on the role of the artist as shaman. Pickens claims the similarity between the African role of shaman and that of the artist is to provide to the viewer a way to approach the metaphysical through an internal dialogue, which is prompted by the aesthetic nature of an artwork such as the songs released by Maman Guereti and Group Laye Bi. Simultaneously, in processes framed as dialogical or socially engaged artworks, the artwork can be facilitated by an expert researcher, and the sensory experience may be less important than the cogitation provoked. Because of this, some attempts framed as dialogical or socially engaged art, e.g. Project Row Houses in Houston, are criticised as not actually being art but social activism (Bishop 2005). Our work moved between the art and activism spaces. It was less important to participants to label the activities, and the artist, activist, and researcher seemed equally important in this transdisciplinary space.
However, it did become clear in the Malian exercise that the skill of the musician in producing a piece that could be perceived, comprehended, and aesthetically appreciated by a given audience was integral to how far it could communicate and provoke dialogue. The work requires a particular, possibly culturally specific, aesthetic in order to have credibility as a tool of communication to the public, and is then more likely to garner debate. This in turn lent confidence to the cocreators of the song and promoted dialogue between them. Thus, the aesthetics of the piece, and therefore the skill of the artist, remain important in its ability to communicate and to instigate dialogue, and especially so in the rigidly hierarchical Sahelian context, where impact would otherwise be hard to achieve.
The film Burkinabè Rising: The Art of Resistance in Burkina Faso (Lee 2018) points to the interactions between emotion and citizenship in promoting change through the arts. The film covers the role of the arts in the 2015 Burkinabe revolution, and suggests that the arts may have been powerful in eliciting action from the citizens because they have awakened emotive ideas of Burkinabe identity and possibly citizenship in a more general way. In our data, ideas of citizenship and local, national ethnic or other forms of identity were sometimes connected to notions of responsibility to effect change. Place attachment and place-based identities can be motivators of ideas of environmental responsibility, hence why Golonu (2013) suggests invoking cultural identity through art as part of the effort to promote environmental consciousness. The work of African agroecologists such as Burkinabe Blandine Sankara speak to this, directly relating the practice of environmentally protective agriculture to revalorisation of African local identity, products and knowledges, and a decolonisation agenda (Douce 2018; Imagine Demain le monde 2021; Zongo 2016).
Despite the challenges and risks, our data shows that communication can be achieved if attention is paid to aesthetics and artist skill, and this can sometimes open space for dialogue, deliberation and co-creation, if a degree of scepticism, and various combinations of power imbalances, can be overcome. There are indications that this can be achieved by taking conscious, concrete efforts to overcome hierarchies and silos. In the case of arts-led dialogue, using known, Overall, we argue that, even in the hierarchical context of the Western Sahel, arts-based communication and arts-led dialogue are relevant tools for prompting change in terms of environmental and other linked concerns. Our findings suggest that this may be the case for direct, creative forms of communication more than for than intentional dialogue. It is worth understanding more about the relative appropriateness of communication and dialogue in different settings, and also how to work in this hierarchical context. This may involve considering the role and nature of the facilitator, and the role of potentially common characteristics between actors in contexts where nationality is not necessarily a unifying factor. This does not imply forcing agreement on a group, as there is also a need to understand how to create dialogue between groups with entirely divergent characteristics.

Conclusion
This paper found that citizens and policy actors communicate with each other, and can sometimes co-create understanding about environmental issues, through arts and storytelling. In the study contexts, the arts have been mobilised by artists and occasionally citizens to communicate concerns about the environment, and linked social issues, to the general population and policy actors. Although risky, this has sometimes propelled the views or interests of marginalised people into the public domain, to the degree that they generate civic dialogue, or cannot be ignored by policy actors.
Popular music has been particularly prominent, but the visual arts have also played a role. Long-standing cultural forms such as plays, theatre, and traditional storytelling have remained relevant in many places, though contemporary artforms are more prominent. The emotional power of art is often usually important in generating change, and messages are often conveyed by artists in a fairly directive manner. Artists sometimes need a degree of official authority to avoid censure, which is sometimes gained by collaborating with those in power, though this risks co-option. Social media helps expose a wider section of the population to such art, increasing chances of effecting a degree of change. The increasing importance of social media means those who lack such digital communications skills are marginalised.
Direct attempts at conscious and intentional arts-led discussion, deliberation, and co-creation of meaning, or co-creation of art, are rare. Such activities are hard to perform in the study contexts due to entrenched power relations and hierarchies. In arts-led dialogue, participants need to be at least minimally amenable to traversing or questioning hierarchical levels and disciplinary and sectoral silos. More research attention is needed to confirm how hierarchies may be navigated in such situations. Emphasising mutual commonalities (e.g. religion) may be helpful in generating dialogue.
The characteristics of the facilitating artist in dialogue activities are also very important. In a co-creative event or process, the lead artist must be respected by the parties concerned, including policy actors, and possess the facilitation capabilities to put the parties at ease. It is more likely success will be achieved if they are cognisant of hierarchies but also confident about acting across them. They must also be highly skilled in their artistic domain, and there is a need for a strong focus on the aesthetics of the art works created.
Time and financial resources are also needed for artistic production and communication activities that promote dialogue. A formal, institutionalised space for these activities to take place in is useful, but not essential -what is more important is a space where normal silos can be set aside, however briefly. By paying attention to the aspects that seem to facilitate arts-led activities, it may be possible for them to help to break down the hierarchies that are occluding dialogue and communication, as people from different silos work together on issues of mutual concern.

Future work
We will continue research work to understand the contexts in which arts-based dialogue may be successful. Experimental workshops where artists and policy actors convene to co-create artworks will help us discover more about the conditions that allow hierarchies to be successfully navigated. We will learn through these experiences about the relative effects and expectations of coconstruction through responding to and creating artworks.
We will also continue to develop a network of peers who are working on these issues and in these ways. We will dedicate resources to mobilising and maintaining our serendipitously emergent international online network. This will include sharing information between the various workshop participants to consolidate the network, and to understand the best ways to do this internationally and online.