Synopsis of a Masters Thesis, Department of Environment and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo, 1998.
Public involvement is a critical part of the ecosystem approach, but in many environmental initiatives it has remained more rhetoric than reality. Ecomuseums and other community-run museums offer a model for changing this. Their experiences show how educational programming can be an effective method for cultivating community involvement in the direction and management of a site. This thesis applies this experience to create new ways for local people to be a part of environmental decision-making in context of the development of a park, Huron Natural Area, in Kitchener, Ontario.
Ecosystem-based management involves the overcoming of jurisdictional fragmentation by encouraging multistakeholder involvement, new planning units, agencies and methods. At its heart is the idea of adaptive management, which rejects reductionist approaches to defining problems that offer a spurious sense of certainty and unambiguity. This thesis demonstrates how educational experiences can promote not only awareness and stewardship at the individual level, but can generate high-quality community input into complex environmental situations. It describes programming strategies that support the ecosystem approach to operating a site as a learning system. Incorporation of the community feedback, generated by these programs, advances management of the site. This adaptive management approach is essential for dealing with situations characterised by high risk and uncertainty, where traditional science cannot provide sufficient inputs for decision making.
Programming techniques used by various place-based, community-driven museums from around the world, including ecomuseums, are identified as models for this adaptive approach. The thesis examines how educational programs can create two-way communication, designed to inform local residents and natural area users, while at the same time giving them an opportunity to articulate their local place-based values, and review the quality of inputs to the management process. Their response can then be fed into decision making processes for the park, so that the choices made for the management of this landscape are aligned with residents' and users' goals for this area. The result of this research is a programming strategy that begins to turn the notion of an ecosystem approach to park management from theory into reality.
Huron Natural Area is located south of Kitchener, Ontario. It has some high quality ecological features, including the headwaters of Strasburg Creek (a tributary of the Grand) which form a provincially significant cold-water trout stream. But it is surrounded by business parks and industrial sites, aggregate extraction, and increasingly, construction of new residential areas. This mixture of industrial, residential and other urban influences means that managing the Natural Area requires looking at what goes on around it as well as what happens within it. The ecosystem approach to management has been adopted by project leaders as a way to achieve this. The cooperation and involvement of many groups-- businesses, developers, city planners, politicians, homeowners and more-- is required.
One particularly important stakeholder group is the people living around the park. Their actions have direct impact on the area. They are also the ones who have to live with the results--and their political influence is significant. How can they be encouraged to take shared ownership of the project? One approach is to offer interactive public education programs that will provide people with a quality experience on the landscape. A comprehensive series of programs can be developed that a) motivate people by immersing them in the area, cultivating their curiosity and interest in the site, and b) allow for two-way exchanges of information between project leaders and local residents in order to create a kind of "extended peer community" for reviewing park planning and management initiatives. A model for this kind of programming comes from so-called "new" museums, which are often developed by a particular community to represent itself. At these sites, the concerns and interests of the community direct the process of inquiry which leads to museum exhibitions. The techniques they use could be applied to Huron Natural Area, to involve local people in helping to determine the questions that need to be asked as the site evolves.
This chapter sets out a broad context for why community involvement in environmental initiatives like HNA matter. Often, people make choices that have negative repercussions for the environment, despite the fact that they are concerned about the state of the environment. One explanation is "social traps"-- situations where short term incentives such as convenience or low cost encourage us to make choices that are destructive or ill-advised in the long run. These social traps are often a fundamental part of our institutional arrangements. (For example, municipalities are now reconsidering recycling paper, because the structure of our economy makes it cheaper to cut down forests to make new paper than to recycle it.)
The author John Ralston Saul has identified a social trap at the most fundamental level of our society. He believes we live in a culture addicted to intellectual comfort, to the point where we have relinquished our consciousness, and the right to be involved in decision making about the common good. Uncertainty is uncomfortable; therefore, we have come to believe in scientific progress as the trail to truth, and the solution of our problems. The truth is out there, and the experts will find it. Increasingly specialised knowledge and narrowly defined problems--"micro-management"--give us the impression there is enough control and certainty to fix our problems, and at the same time excludes the vast majority of us from the debates.
But as recent environmental crises have shown, for certain kinds of problems, experts may have contradictory empirical evidence, with no one expert having sufficient evidence to claim "truth" for his or her results. Some problems are just too uncertain and complex. The alternative to permanent gridlock in these cases is to shift the basis for decision making from scientific proof (which is unachievable), to prudence, ethics and good judgment. This is something not only scientific experts, but all citizens, can play a role in. In this context, the challenge for environmental education is to go beyond to provision of information. It must also be more than a behaviour modification tool. It must promote consciousness--the embracing of uncertainty and complexity so that we may proceed cautiously to solve our problems.
Two approaches to dealing with highly complex and uncertain environmental problems are explored: the ecosystem approach and post-normal science. The ecosystem approach unequivocally puts our species inside environmental systems, not as an outside influence but as a working component. It challenges the presumption that one can stand back from problems enough to be objective, allowing one to break them down into their constituent pieces, so as to know how they operate. The impossibility of a preferred observer demands the relocation of legitimacy--the perspectives of those inside the system are relevant.
Post-normal science is a basis for policy formation that complements and encompasses traditional or 'normal' science. It can involve traditional science, as well as values, ethics and various forms of local knowledge in order to create environmental policy through a rigourous process despite uncertainty: "This emerging science fosters a new methodology that helps to guide its development. In this, uncertainty is not banished but is managed, and values are not presupposed but are made explicit. The model for scientific argument is not a formalised deduction but an interactive dialogue. The paradigmatic science is no longer one in which location (in place and time) and process are irrelevant to explanations. The historical dimension, including reflection on humanity's past and future, is becoming an integral part of a scientific characterisation of Nature." Extending the peer community that reviews management policies and processes to include all those with relevant local knowledge becomes essential, again reinforcing the need for community involvement.
Interactive education programs can help such efforts, by assisting people to cultivate their local knowledge and place-based values, and by providing the forum for their expression, so that they can be used in the management process. One way to create this two-way communication is through the development of what one museologist calls 'dialogic programming'.
Community-driven "new museums" have succeeded in creating quality experiences for participants that are desirable in themselves, and that are also part of a new way of running their institutions. In the new museum model, the source of legitimacy is the museum user, who is most often a member of the specific community who have developed the museum to represent their experience. Dialogic programs are part of an iterative process that involves presenting ideas and artifacts, collecting responses from viewers as a basis for further research, and then modifying or creating new exhibits on the basis of the results. "Instead of viewing scholarship as separate from public programming, we have found that...public programs are integral to the effort to document and understand the community better. A resonant exhibition demonstrates trustworthiness and predisposes more people to contribute to our collections-- people who traditionally have been closemouthed begin talking to our researchers."
Examples of programming that can create these kinds of opportunities include the addition to an exhibition of an interactive database or archive, either on paper or computer, to which people can add their own data; timelines where people can insert significant events in the local community; mapping projects; and genealogy workshops, where people can learn how to document family genealogies and oral histories, which become part of the museum archives. Creating opportunities for feedback on-line also exist. Other museums, such as ecomuseums, involve citizens in action research about their local history, through surveys and interviews for example, leading to their involvement in exhibit creation, artifact "keeping", animation and the collection of inputs from viewers. Local environmental planning initiatives use many aligned techniques to involve citizens in collaborative design projects. In all of these initiatives, the goal is not one-way education but two-way communication.
The dialogic new museological model provides the following lessons for HNA:
Examples of such programs for HNA are described in chapter 6.
Key informant interviews were conducted to gather more information about the perceived role of local residents in the HNA project by the project leaders before proceeding with the design of program possibilities. Statements regarding the role of the community in the stakeholder process at HNA showed two different views of what that role was: one was to be part of a shared creative process, one was to buy into an expert-generated vision for the park and to behave accordingly. These two views were held simultaneously by some subjects. There is dissonance between the latter view, linked to the old top-down view of governance, and the notion of the HNA as an exemplification of the ecosystem approach. This might make the realization of an ecosystem approach more difficult. However, it is also a realistic acknowledgement of the diverse roles the public now plays at HNA, and are likely to play in the future.
The educational programming proposed in this thesis seeks to resolve this dissonance by addressing the variety of roles, shallow and deep, that the public is likely to play as stakeholders, through the creation of conduits that will attract their input and direct it towards use in an ecosystem-based process. Resolving dissonance in this way will allow the majority of stakeholders' expressed aspirations for the public to be met. The implication of these key informant interviews is that educational programming that clarifies and supports the role of the community as part of the stakeholder process at HNA could be useful in facilitating the realisation of the ecosystem approach.
The following is just one example of what dialogic programming applied to Huron Natural Area might look like. It is intended to prepare participants for reviewing a Master Plan for the park. It is a sketch, for one part of an educational initiative that such an effort would require.
GOAL: To prepare participants for choosing between alternative scenarios for the park's Master Plan, by:
a) familiarising them with what is there, providing a positive first contact with the HNA;
b) explaining the idea behind the HNA project to them;
c) providing an opportunity for them to establish their own values/preferences for what might be on the landscape, and to compare this vision with that of others;
OBJECTIVES: After attending this program, participants will have or will be able to achieve the following tasks:
a) after walking/exploring the site, particpants will know where it is located, and will demonstrate some ability to get around in it.
b) they will have created photos and accompanying narratives that demonstrate their ideas of what HNA could potentially be.
c) they will be able to compare and contrast these visions with those of organisers and other participants.
Part I: Public Program
Preparation: Prior to beginning activity, the animator should:
a) allow for participants to examine historical photographs of the site, maps and historical narratives of people living in the area describing the landscape as it was then.
b) give a sense of the raison d'être of the HNA today as expressed by other stakeholders, and some of the ecological constraints that guide its development.
Activity:
Photograph images that capture what excites you about HNA, which express your hopes for the site and the surrounding area.
Photograph fears, the things that most disturb you regarding the future of the landscape and surrounding area.
If useful, create commentary that accompanies the photographs, which further clarifies your vision.
Part II: Photography Exhibit
Contrasting visions should be emphasized in the exhibit. Group photos so dissonnances are revealed; for example, an old photo of what was on a section of the landscape a generation ago (a stream used for watering cattle, for example) could be placed beside a photo of what could be on that landscape now (a trout-angling stream). Competing visions for a particular area could be contrasted (that fast-moving trout stream could alternatively be a beaver habitat, with dams, that slow the flow of water. Either of these is realistically possible, but not both.)
Collect responses to the exhibit station:
From here, the next step is to have organisers work these ideas into the alternative scenarios for the Master Plan, and then to have participants and others attend the selection process.
Environmental education is inevitably more than just education about the environment, it is education for change. But education is only half the story; institutional reorganisation is the other half. Neither half is as effective at creating change as both together. This research suggests that the institutional reorganisation argued for by the ecosystem approach to promoting the integrity of a system such as HNA can be significantly supported by place-based, interactive educational programming.
It also demonstrates how the assertion (by Funtowicz et al) that the model for post-normal scientific argument is not a formalised deduction but an interactive dialogue can be actualised. Dialogic programs are the place where this dialogue can happen. It replaces one-time public consultation with ongoing interaction. It illustrates how someone who is truly not an expert might contribute something valuable to this process.
On the basis of my research I make the following recommendations:
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