Effective environmental action starts with listening. Under the Plastic Free Rivers and Seas for South Asia (PLEASE) project, SACEP took a deliberate two-step approach in Bhutan; first engaging communities at the ground level, then elevating their voices to a national forum, to ensure that policy is shaped by the people who live closest to the problem.

On 3 February, a community-level consultation at the Ariya Hotel in Thimphu brought together the Thimphu District Chief Environment Officer, local waste management companies, international development agencies, educational institutions, and youth activist groups. Their exchanges surfaced a critical on-the-ground reality: riverine litter in Bhutan is as much a challenge of behavior and social norms as it is of infrastructure. Youth leaders identified gaps in waste segregation and disposal habits that local officials alone could not resolve – insights that would have been invisible to a purely top-down process.

Those community findings were then brought into SACEP’s National Consultation on Riverine Litter, which convened over 40 stakeholders from across Bhutan’s public and private sectors. As the world’s only carbon-negative country, landlocked between India and China, with its rivers acting as highways for plastic waste into the Brahmaputra and Ganges basins, Bhutan’s challenges are uniquely its own. The national consultation translated what communities had identified into three coordinated priorities: strengthening institutional alignment between public and private sectors; addressing behavioral lapses that infrastructure alone cannot fix; and using the updated National Waste Inventory to guide evidence-based mitigation under the PLEASE Project.

SACEP and PLEASE is grateful to the Department of Environment and Climate Change of the Royal Government of Bhutan for their partnership in turning these dialogues into actionable pathways. This process affirms a simple principle: when the people living alongside Bhutan’s rivers help shape the decisions made about them, the outcomes are stronger for it.