HOW YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE DISCUSSION
Public Participation in the Wave Energy Siting Process
OWARE’s purpose is to solicit “local knowledge” from three distinct groups that are related in one way or another to the ocean and its resources:
- people who live and work fulltime on the Oregon coast
- people who visit the coast for tourism, recreation, own second homes, and
- people who live in the state of Oregon.
The members of these three groups have different perceptions and knowledge about the ocean and its resources, and therefore, different strategies need to be employed to appropriately communicate with them and solicit their knowledge.
There are several ways for the general public to participate in this process. You may have a particular area of expertise or knowledge about local conditions in a particular scientific area or coastal community. This type of expertise and local knowledge is an essential component of the public debate concerning siting of wave energy facilities.
OWARE is making this site available and offerring the general public several ways to provide comment and insight.
Our MAPS section allows users to view and add comments to maps which are either previously published or the user can create maps of their own for comment, based on available public information.
Our FORUM page provides a list of topics where the general public can create new discussion topics or voice their opinions and knowledge about topics that have already been entered into the list.
Our POLL page provides several polls which are intended to gather public opinion about various topics.
We hope you enjoy this opporunity to provide your thoughts and expertise !
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A Proposal for Soliciting & Mapping Local Knowledge
As an overarching strategy, OWARE has selected to use the so-called Participatory GIS approach, which provides the framework for capturing important information, and offers citizens a process for active participation in management and policy discussions and decisions. We plan to achieve this by following the steps, described below:
- Develop a list of scientific, market, and management questions that are driving nearshore cooperative research and GIS development by forming a community advisory board, comprised of fishermen and supported by scientific advisors from agencies and academia.
- Create basemaps
- Pilot interview and community presentation.
- Conduct "local knowledge" interviews (LKI) with community members, use snowball sampling strategy, trying to interview as more diverse population as possible.
- Transcribe and digitize individual interviews.
- Validate interviews with participants.
- Aggregate individual maps into draft inventory.
- Organize community validation workshop.
- Incorporate edits and create final inventory maps.
- Use the inventory maps to define suggested sites for locating wave devices.
- Present information to policy makers.
Spatial representation of human uses, economic importance, and species distribution can guide area-based management strategies, including local area management and the selection of less impactful areas for siting of wave energy devices or other ocean uses, like aquaculture or marine reserves.
Developing trust between local people, scientists, managers, and industry is often very difficult in community-based management approaches. Many fishermen worry that data collected will be used against them in the end. This comes from the perceptions that fisheries management and policy decisions place most stringent regulations on the sectors that have the most scientific data collected about them. Therefore, a positive experience with cooperative research, such as participatory GIS, can be the first step towards an improved relationship of mutual ocean stewardship.