Community engagement in research agenda setting for environmental management, sustainable development and grass roots decision making has been shown to lead to improved decision outcomes. The current focus within the AHRC Connected Communities programme and the Coalition governments ‘Big Society’ agenda both provide support and a policy context for developing these types of initiatives further.
Communication and engagement tools are required to encourage and facilitate effectively community involvement in environmental decision making. Research groups from the University of York and University of Abertay (Dundee) in collaboration with other colleagues from London Metropolitan University and the 3rd sector organisations including Groundwork Trust have independently been developing a variety of methods to facilitate this community participation particularly in relation to local environmental management, ecosystem service provision and urban development. Researchers at the University of York have also been developing novel approaches, linked to spatial tools, to look at the relationship between social and environmental inequalities and potential consequent injustice.
These independently developed approaches have elements of four interlinked common threads:
This stakeholder participation has multiple goals including improving the outcomes of policy formulation by incorporating local residents’ values and knowledge but also through behavioural change towards greater sustainability amongst the people and communities involved in the process. In order to add value to these research activities a knowledge exchange activity is proposed in order to consolidate the range of currently independent methodologies for community engagement and participation in environmental decision making that have been developed by the various project partners. This knowledge exchange will identify how these approaches can be better integrated and utilised by communities to address their research concerns.
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