Excerpt: An NGO in Montenegro created a digital platform that allows citizens to report environmental problems such as illegal dumpsites.  Senad Pepić, an artist, environmental activist, and co-founder of the organization EkoGard from Montenegro, tells a story of how it came into being. 

 

More than three years ago, we stood beside a rural road near the town of Rožaje, in northern Montenegro, surrounded by bags of waste and the putrid smell that illegal dumpsites leave behind long after they are cleaned. Volunteers from different towns spent the entire day cleaning the area, and by evening, the place looked different for the first time in many years.  We believed the hardest part was behind us.

After the cleanup, we launched a public appeal, asking local officials to install a waste container at that location. The nearest legal disposal point for village residents was around six kilometers away. We registered the proposed location in the cadastre. Local authorities promised a solution: first it would come in autumn, then in spring, then by the end of the year.

Years passed. Nothing changed. Today, the area is once again an illegal dumpsite.

This is not a story about one broken promise. It is a story about what happens when generations grow up without basic infrastructure and slowly begin to accept neglect as something normal.

When absence becomes everyday life

In dozens of villages across the municipality, residents live kilometers from the nearest official waste disposal point, without organized collection or basic communal services. Over time, this begins to feel like a normal part of rural life.

What worries us most is not the waste itself, but what long-term institutional neglect does to people. When communities spend decades without basic infrastructure, expectations slowly disappear, and people stop believing that change is possible.

Illegal dumpsites stop being exceptions and become part of the landscape. Children walk past them on the way to school, rivers carry plastic downstream after every rain, and residents burn waste because they have nowhere else to put it.

There used to be dozens of points along the rivers where children swam and learned how to swim. Today, only two or three remain, as pollution and litter have made parts of the river unsuitable. New generations are growing up without ever learning how to swim in the same rivers where their families once spent entire summers. Perhaps this is where we best see how deeply neglect can change a community, when things that once seemed unimaginable slowly become normal.

That normalization can be more dangerous than the waste itself. It produces resignation and the feeling that some communities simply matter less.

From cleanup actions to a bigger question

Through our grassroots initiative Očistimo Rožaje (“Let’s Clean Rožaje”), volunteers have spent years organizing cleanup actions, documenting illegal dumpsites, and drawing public attention to environmental problems in northern Montenegro.

Some campaigns produced results. Through public pressure, we contributed to ending the daily burning at the town landfill and eventually to its official closure.

But we realized something important: cleaning individual locations does not solve the underlying problem. You can remove waste from a dumpsite today and find new waste in the same place a month later because nearby villages still have no legal disposal option.

Public appeals were often not enough. Illegal dumpsites were discussed on a case-by-case basis, with no attempt to show the broader pattern connecting them.

So we kept returning to the same question: how can we make visible the systemic causes that keep producing the same problems year after year?

Mapping what is missing

That question led to the creation of EkoMapa, a digital platform that allows citizens to report environmental problems such as illegal dumpsites. Every report is geolocated and publicly visible. But the purpose is not simply to map where problems appear.

EkoMapa also maps the conditions in which people live: what infrastructure exists, what is missing, and what environmental problems appear around each settlement. The problem was never ignorance. People in these communities know very well what surrounds them. What was missing was a public picture that connects individual cases into a pattern much harder to ignore.

When illegal dumpsites appear alongside data about settlements without basic infrastructure, the dominant narrative begins to collapse. Our example is not isolated. Similar patterns can be found in rural communities across Montenegro and the wider region, where environmental problems often remain invisible because they are still treated as separate incidents rather than signs of deeper systemic neglect.

Environmental degradation in marginalized communities is often explained as a problem of “citizen behavior,” as if people simply do not care. But behavior is shaped by conditions and access. If residents must travel kilometers to the nearest legal disposal point, illegal dumpsites are no longer only a matter of individual choice. They become evidence of long-term neglect.

Data alone does not accuse anyone. It simply shows what exists and what has been missing for years.

What maps cannot solve on their own

We try not to romanticize technology. A platform cannot replace public institutions, a map cannot install waste containers, and data alone does not create accountability. We know this because even before EkoMapa, we had photographs, documentation, public appeals, and cadastral records. Yet despite this data, many problems remained unresolved.

What digital mapping can do is change how these problems are discussed. Instead of isolated incidents, communities can begin speaking about broader patterns of neglect. Problems that once seemed disconnected become visible as part of the same reality. That matters because as long as environmental problems remain fragmented and undocumented, it remains easy to reduce them to “irresponsible citizens” rather than the long-term absence of basic public services.

Residents of Rožaje, who were promised a waste container, are still waiting for officials to follow through on their pledge. It has been over three years. 

In one sense, it is only one of many locations that EkoMapa is trying to bring into the light. In another, that location alone explains why this project exists, because it was never only about technology. It was about showing that environmental problems are not isolated incidents, but consequences of long-term systemic neglect.